Show us you care, Show us you dare
I have been thinking about organization a lot lately both on large and small scales. This mostly came about because of a discussion at work regarding OneNote. Since I moved to my current position earlier this year (can’t say that for much longer) I have really gotten much more into OneNote because of a few simple reasons:
- Its the only general note taking application available at work other than pen and paper
- I am still learning my job and how it all works
- I am juggling a few different projects and need to remember what is where
- The integration is nice
Really though its that first one. For my personal life I use a variety of note taking apps, from the excellent https://joplinapp.org/ to Ruff on android, to a pen and paper. But whats really part of the chaos is that each one of these organizes things different and as I told a coworker – its all about how your head works. I need to have everything in compartments.
Whats kind of interesting to me is that there are so many different ways of putting things into boxes that work though. At home I do things by year, then categories in the year. At work I do things by broad categories. Say “Projects” then its type of projects, then the individual projects. I don’t know that any is any better than another but is genuinely interesting to me to see the differences.
But it also has me thinking about all the other ways that we put things in boxes and organize things. Some good, some bad, most indifferent. But I think that most humans are trying to find a way to organize the world in a way that makes sense to them. Problems come though when we try to follow other people’s ideas and they don’t work with how our brains naturally want to do it.
Damn the torpedoes, make your own categories.
