Comments on: Keeping track of stuff

By: Michael Mouse

Michael Mouse — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 17:00:01 +0000

I can’t believe nobody has mentioned the “Heaps of Stuff” filing method yet. Papers – whether articles or administrative guff – are assigned to one of a number of heaps. Rough heuristics about which goes where are applied very loosly. Retrieval is often a matter of applying one’s spatial memory – which I certainly find to be more reliable than conceptual memory. This has lots of benefits. Recently-used stuff tends to float to the top, related stuff naturally groups itself. One real big win is that the filing overhead is negligible: day to day you just put stuff on the heaps, and once every year or three (or when heaps become serious structural hazards) you go through the heaps and throw everything you’re not actively working on away. Oh – and for the citations in articles, you do what everyone else does in the papers I review: cut and paste from your other articles and worry about checking them thoroughly and putting them in to the right format when you’ve had the paper accepted somewhere. This is a real timesaver too unless you have an absurdly high strike rate with publication.

By: smallerdemon

smallerdemon — Sun, 07 Nov 2004 19:09:30 +0000

Well, if you are using a Mac, you actually have included with the OS a great number of organizational tools. Mail, iCal and Address Book can all work together with some great results. iCal in particular is a source of untapped organizational power, able to email to any address as the alert for for the event. Address Book is certainly one of the best Address Books I have used. Mail, although I use it, I believe could use some work. I use it for checking my IMAP accounts, but for the storage of all of my email I continue to use Entourage (up to 2004) which I am fairly happy with. From what I can tell, Entourage 2004 itself is a pretty well thought out piece of software, although I have not tapped the depth of the project manager as of yet. As my own personal projects get more and more behind, and more and more piled up, I certainly find myself asking the same questions that everyone else does about keeping up, keeping organized, and keeping on top of it all.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Sun, 07 Nov 2004 01:27:40 +0000

I’ve been meaning to play with Tinderbox but haven’t yet had time. Maybe I should look for some time management tips :-).

By: Rich

Rich — Sun, 07 Nov 2004 01:01:34 +0000

I’ve been looking for a free-form database that allows me to pull together various thoughts, notes, etc. Being stuck in the windows world, I’ve been wistfully staring at Tinderbox for Mac, hoping that their windows version comes soon. In addition to being a database, Tinderbox also appears to be a nice brainstorming utility. I just can’t find anything like it outside of the Mac environment. In the meantime, any suggestions for something like Tinderbox?

By: Shai

Shai — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 20:03:17 +0000

some cable/dsl providers aren’t friendly to users with servers, especially smtp, and if they aren’t already blocking, their terms of service probably doesn’t rule it out for the future. and if you’re new it will take a couple weeks to get up to speed. waste of time in my opinion.

By: Dubious

Dubious — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 16:51:04 +0000

Yes, I did mean WinEdt… weird. I always subconsciously mentally added in the ‘i’ there. The brain is a curious thing.

By: novalis

novalis — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 08:06:11 +0000

Being the captain of your own ship may not be worth the pain and suffering, but once you try it, it gets pretty addictive. I’ve found that for desktop setup and software development, it is worthwhile, while for web servers and email it’s not (although I do keep a local copy of all of my email, searchable via my mail client). Disclaimer: my sysadmin gives me (at present) 3.4GB of free space for mail and webspace; if yours doesn’t, your milage may vary.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 06:19:45 +0000

shareware program called WinEdit Do you mean WinEdt href=”http://www.winedt.com?” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.winedt.com? I used to use that when I used Windows. Being the captain of your own ship is worth immesuarable pain and suffering. I have found this not to be true.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 06:15:20 +0000

What benefits do you see from running your own server, Jet? I’ve generally preferred to have a host who can help me with SQL problems and similar, but I may well be missing something. I certainly agree wrt broadband vs dialup.

By: jet

jet — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 05:06:12 +0000

At $40/month it is ridiculous not to have a cable/dsl connection and run your own server. Being the captain of your own ship is worth immesuarable pain and suffering.

By: Ravi

Ravi — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 04:55:37 +0000

Try Zoe instead of Gmail ( http://zoe.nu ). It’s a local personal server for email, so you’ll need a bit of technical savvy to set up, but it can be quite handy.

By: Dubious

Dubious — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 04:32:28 +0000

LaTeX is also pretty handy. A shareware program called WinEdit is a comparatively painless way to interface with it.