http://www.lawsofsimplicity.com/slip1B/

Best,
John

Your suggestions, restraint in acquiring, giving away surplus, and saving money would, I think, fall under Law #1, Reduce… reduce the acquisition of stuff, reduce the amount of existing stuff, and reduce spending.

But what about exercising restraint in acquiring? Giving away surplus? Rethinking the thingyness of modern life? Not living beyond our means (= saving rather than borrowing)?

If someone from 200 hundred years back were to appear here today, he would be astonished at the convenience we now live in and the laziness we have developed. Personally, I would prefer to have an organized desk/house and get up to do anything, than have everything at arm’s length but a messy place.

I am a great fan of Google’s technologies and use it as much as I can. I’ve noticed, though, that it has made me completely lazy about organizing of digital media. As long as the file has a name, subject line or some other descriptive meta data (and sometimes not even that is necessary), my Google Desktop or Google search can find it quickly. So now I *could* just fling files about willy nilly – just dump everything into “Documents”… but old habits die hard and I just *feel better* stuffing common project files into a folder.

On a number of Web2.0ish sites, I have a similar experience. For example, my tasks don’t need to be stored in coherent lists around topic; i.e., “Operations” or “Marketing”. I can keep them in a single list and just TAG them with keywords. Then to see my Marketing items, I simply filter by that Tag. I’ve come to realize that tags are actually more useful than folders: I can categorize a single item with multiple tags so that different filters and searches can find the same item. For you GTD fans, this means tagging a single item with a context (”@home”) and a topic (”repairs”).

I originally worked this out for myself on email clients. I was a fanatic filer of email into folders. I came to realize that it was a big waste of time. Better was to tag the email with tags (”Categories” in MS Outlook, for example). Then I can search on a category and presto find all the relevant messages. So now all my email is in my Inbox.

One regret is that I can’t make this work for the physical world. My attempts to tag socks to make matching easier has not worked!

However, for things you treat as identical (5mm ball bearings, pairs of black socks, blank Post-It notes) you can have more items in a given category because any one will suffice: you’ll never be looking for a particular 5mm ball bearing.

now, i realized that the most complex thing in organizing is to actively realize the moment in time when you have gathered enough stuff of mutual content to have it collectively labeled in your head, to then move it to some kind of folder.

i always find this process very interesting: you stumble into a topic and just browse around, then some documents start lying around on your drive/ floor/ desktop for a few days, sometimes weeks, and then, at some point, (for instance while cleaning up your room) you realize, wow, some of this stuff fits together: it all deals with xyz: let’s make a new folder for it!

at that very moment the topic often becomes tangible to me for the first time and i feel like suddenly being offered the opportunity to decide what to do with it, because the whole thing has a name now and thus has become accessible at will (i.e. google, conversations, books..)

sometimes i don’t even know the name of the topic and instead enter all its instances i have lying around into google to find a topic name to group them by, or even to be able to do better searches by adding the genre/topic name to my queries.

i’ve actually just gotten aware of the existence of this whole process a few months ago and i was impressed (and a bit self ashamed) about how complex all that organizational meta-thinking about one’s life has gotten over the past years. sites like lifehacker etc. deal with all that stuff a lot and i think it’s all due to some sort of fascination with being on the meta-level, looking from a distance at others as well as yourself.

in a technological context however, i have for long been wondering how long it will take until operating systems really will start helping you with all that organizational stuff via metadata, sql-ish query filesystems, priorization of data, expiry dates, version tracking and ideas like that. currently it seems to me that all the offline-thinking done in those fields (from GTD to simplify, lifehacker to ikea ) is far ahead of everything that’s happening in the digital domain. maybe because inefficiency in square meters is more costly than it is in megabytes..

funny, innit?

i’m really interested in all this stuff (topic name still missing here). if someone has any good hints on what to read about it, or just wants to drop me a line, don’t hesitate to do so!