Idoru.us

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.

Been thinking a lot lately about the stuff I used to do for fun. And what a wide variety of things its been over the years, from playing pool to euchre, to video games, to programming, to reading, to photography, the list continues.

I suspect this is tied in with being somewhat seasonally depressed along with possibly confronting some of the reality of getting older. Another decade looming is a thing and while its not a bad thing it does make one think about the previous decade. With all the caveats of how the last few years should be treated as an exception rather than the norm of my life, I have to admit my 30’s were pretty good.

But with the reality of COVID having disrupted every bodies life, I realized that I have lost a lot of hobbies over time and unfortunately haven’t taken any new ones up. So while I might miss playing pool I have no idea if there are places that charge by the hour anymore. And while I don’t mind programming in theory, I don’t feel like taking work home. Video games.. I don’t seem to have the attention span to play for extended periods. Etc etc etc

Instead I am trying to think about new hobbies. And I really am not sure where I am going to end up but I could see learning an instrument, photography, and reading all making a return. All I know is its time to reignite some of the parts of life that make it worth living.

I wonder how many blogs there are out there in various states of disrepair as well as how many sites have become more active as social media becomes anti-social. I strongly suspect this isn’t the only blog out there that has gotten a little of buff and shine (not that anybody reads it anymore).

Idle thoughts later at night when I should be going to bed.

I should also figure out a way to integrate mastodon into this the same way that twitter is now since that seems to be my likely migration point. Its the not the same thing by any means but that’s not actually all bad. There is room for me to try something different. There is also room for me to abandon it completely which doesn’t bother me much.

And this entire thing, as minimal as it is, could really use a spitshine in terms of looking/being what I want it to be and what I am actually doing with it. Which, truthly, is still TBD in more regards but there is nothing wrong with that either.