Squash again

I just got back from playing squash with Martin. We were very closely matched today, but sadly not closely enough. I am now very tired, and would like to eat a lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken or perhaps a curry. I'm not going to do either of these things.

At the library

At the Customs House Library in Sydney, you might find a...

• Repeating video installations as art
• Creepy old guy watching videos of under-clothed young men
• Hacker
• Massive green art installation that might have been designed by Dr Suess
• Concierge
• Girl who's gone to sleep reading her book and will wake up with a sore neck
• To-scale replica of the Sydney CBD
• Book

The Vital Key

My organizational system lacked vitality last year. It was rarely consulted, tedious to look at and on the whole not very fun. Now that I'm somewhat back on top of things, I think I've identified the fundamental thing that I missed, the thing I needed to breathe life into the system, much like the Creation Matrix.

Collect
Every time you think of something to do, something you're unsure about or something overflowing with bodacity, write it down. It's important to have a very small number of places where these written notes go, but it's more important to make the notes in the first place.

I carry around a small spiral notebook and write in that. When I'm at my desk, I write on index cards, or in an emacs buffer called 'inbox'.

Without this, I kept forgetting stuff, felt busier than I was and made poor decisions about what to do with my free time. I also missed lots of opportunities. Carrying around a little notebook has actually made me feel better.

Another bug

My "anywhere", "errands" and "phone" contexts are on my laptop, as well as my "someday/maybe" lists. That means if I don't have my laptop with me, I can't easily churn through my list of phone calls to make. If I do have my laptop with me, which is more likely, it's still a pain to pull it out, open it up and type in my password just to remind myself of whether I need to buy more Vegemite.

Possible solutions: paper-based system (yuck!) or some sort of portable electronic device.

Bug in my organizational system

I'm back in Sydney and well and truly into a working mindset. I might talk about some of the stuff that happened over the holidays, but first I have a bug to report in my own organizational system.

At the moment, all of my projects and next actions live together, I make no distinction between work actions and non-work actions. I'm starting to find this a pain, because it means that when I'm "at work" there are all of these next actions on my lists that I can't do in good conscience, which slows down decision making as I mentally filter the list.

I also wonder whether working from home makes this bug more of a pain.

The fix might be as simple as adding a "work" context to my system. I'd love to know what you think.