Getting stuff down
Getting my ideas out of my head and down in some external form is my latest productive improvement. This goes beyond the “getting things done” ideas where not just the things you need to do get written, but most every idea or concept get’s written or typed. This blog is just one of the forms.
I used to keep everything in my head. I didn’t carry a notebook at work. In meetings I never wrote stuff down. When doing work, I never kept notes. In class I would often simply absorb what was said.
I recently started carrying a spiral notebook at work where I take notes on what I’m doing. It’s amazing how often I refer back to that notebook. Simple things like IP address can be looked up in the configuration files, but if I write them in the notebook with context I can find the answers much more quickly. Ideas or things I should do get written down too. Perhaps it’s my old (cough, cough) age, but this really helps out.
I think what I like is, like the “getting things done” condept, it lets my brain let go of needing to remember that bit of information and allows it to focus on other things.
This blog is another. I thing of things I’d like to tell people and I often don’t blog about it. My ideas roll around over and over in my mind as I’m forming my thoughts. Here, I can put my thoughts down in a form that hopefully is useful to someone else.
I also have a new information database system I’m calling buckets. The idea of this database system is to have a flexible and permenant storage of structured data. Rather than being relational, records have a fixed structure and are associated with other records to create contextual relationships. These relations are informal, providing links between records that make sense in their context. Records can be put into “buckets” to group things together and everything can be tagged and searched.
Buckets will be my new information repository once it is created. I am hoping to work on this on my vacation, but we’ll see how that happens. I’ve created one version of this already and it worked quite well, but I have a new strategy this time. One that has been churning through my brain for quite some time and in the “getting stuff down” strategy, I need to get this written so my brain can think about other things.
