Being organised

[sufi]

Are you organised and tidy on your computer/phone/devices? or slovenly and messy like me?

Do you keep folders and files arranged and labelled - or do you like me have a couple of folders with hundreds of random named files and subfolders and rely on search functions - i used to have some sort of a system, but remembering how i set it up was more difficult than just letting everything sprawl - i wonder if others have been on a similar journey since we are all growing up in tech together



I guess if you are in the hands of google or apple a lot of this maybe taken care of but

Do you do backups, do you manage your passwords effectively?
Do you accrue technical debt,
do you manage your work stuff different from personal?
Do you tag your photos?
Do you keep you email inbox clear? Have you filled up your 15GB of gmail yet? i tbh never delete emails and have 10's of thousands in my inbox


I'm really curious about whether we all do this the same (how far are we railroaded and controlled by the tech) or is there space for diversity of approaches

 

[Murphy]

Spooky, attempting a gmail clear up

Devices are a travesty. 2 laptops in palliative care, should caddy the drives and consolidate. Same thing with external drives, one will have a library of pillaged films, another music, another old study works

You’d think centralising data would be an afternoon job but the laptops could be saved and and and and I can’t be fucked

 

[sufi]

I reckon @shiels and @shakahislop are tidy &/or apple users

 

[shiels]

No no what makes you think that? I am very disorganised and spontaneous, never delete emails and rely entirely on word search, can’t follow a recipe without adding my own tangents, hate routine, hate other people’s plans and deadlines, can’t remember when anything happened or map or manage time, a mess basically

 

[sufi]

No no what makes you think that? I am very disorganised and spontaneous, never delete emails and rely entirely on word search, can’t follow a recipe without adding my own tangents, hate routine, hate other people’s plans and deadlines, can’t remember when anything happened or map or manage time, a mess basically

i dunno but i can completely relate to that methodology

 

[sufi]

So who has good some tips on how to manage all this virtual bumph?

I sometimes put the date in the file name which is useless but makes the document look a bit official, never name it "final" or it will need to be revised

 

[shakahislop]

my digital life is absolute carnage. but i did a couple of years ago spend some time gather old dat tapes, hard disks, memory cards, old phones, all of that, and get it all transferred into one place. it was a very boring task but did allow me to chuck a load of digital detritus.

the best thing was finding a few hours old video camera recordings from when i was 17. the closest thing to seeing ghosts that i've experienced.

 

[sufi]

my digital life is absolute carnage. but i did a couple of years ago spend some time gather old dat tapes, hard disks, memory cards, old phones, all of that, and get it all transferred into one place. it was a very boring task but did allow me to chuck a load of digital detritus.

the best thing was finding a few hours old video camera recordings from when i was 17. the closest thing to seeing ghosts that i've experienced.

i just re-discovered about 1000 photos i put online in 2008, then the software broke so they have been inaccessible since then, a treasure trove from the early 00's

 

[sufi]

i just re-discovered about 1000 photos i put online in 2008, then the software broke so they have been inaccessible since then, a treasure trove from the early 00's

I'm feeling the need to consolidate all the scattered utterances of 20 years of frittering away time on the compooter

 

[Leo]

half and half, probably. being self-employed, I need to have a pretty clear folder system for work stuff, otherwise I'd be fired after a month. personal docs and music is less organized, but good enough so I don't feel guilty about it.

it's all personality related, right? my wife keeps a Google spreadsheet on everything she's cooked, going back to when she first got into it 10+ years ago. she can search it to find recipes that include a certain ingredient, and then see notes with tips from when she cooked in the past, etc. I can't conceive of doing something like that, but it comes naturally to her. she enjoys doing it, and having this archive of knowledge.

 

[shakahislop]

i just re-discovered about 1000 photos i put online in 2008, then the software broke so they have been inaccessible since then, a treasure trove from the early 00's

i also found the insides of an mp3 player i had when i was working on a factory production line, which included in the memory a series of 24 lectures on the modern history of the middle east, and one simiar on evolutionary biology. i used to find them on soulseek in the days before podcasts. all this stuff is evocative of course. but digging into the past can be ugly sometimes. other times very beautiful. its a powerful door to open.

 

[Clinamenic]

Very organized, personally. I keep my desktop almost completely clean and the dock hidden, on mac.

Keep all six of my email inboxes read. On Discord, I'm in over a hundred servers, and I manually go through and manage the push notifications on each one so I don't get notifications unless someone tags me specifically, thus allowing me to keep all discord messages read. I do the same for large Telegram groups.

Keep a big spreadsheet for income, tax-deductible expenses, and capital gains. Keep my room clean and sparse.

I think the clean/sparse thing (in terms of one's desktop and in terms of one's room) is largely some feng shui thing, IE curating an environment to encourage a meditative mindset.

I also still have my whole bookmark taxonomy left from the autodidactic program I did:

 

[sufi]

i also found the insides of an mp3 player i had when i was working on a factory production line, which included in the memory a series of 24 lectures on the modern history of the middle east, and one simiar on evolutionary biology. i used to find them on soulseek in the days before podcasts. all this stuff is evocative of course. but digging into the past can be ugly sometimes. other times very beautiful. its a powerful door to open.

It is a powerful door to open, but the nature of the internet now is fragmentation and muddle so it can be hard to be sure of where the handle is.
i think it's probably the same for our personal/offline tech histories

 

[shakahislop]

It is a powerful door to open, but the nature of the internet now is fragmentation and muddle so it can be hard to be sure of where the handle is.
i think it's probably the same for our personal/offline tech histories

the whole of last summer time was collapsing on itself and i kept being in places and with people from all kinds of different periods of my life. at one point in kabul my old dog from years ago just walked around the corner next to where i was sitting. it happened for months. nothing else like that has ever happened to me. it was the best summer i can remember. actually the first incident was being on the plane home and watching through those old tape recordings i was on about

 

[shakahislop]

it felt great to let go to that poetic, almost supernatual sense of the world. i knew it wasn't true, of course time was not doing anything different to normal. but it was so obviously better to have a break from the rational, ordered, logical, cold ways of thinking that i'm used to using

 

[shakahislop]

eg, here is the sentence that i just wrote for work, with a few words taken out to anon it - it's cold and rational, the opposite of poetry, you have to denude it of flourishes:

Prior to conducting the analysis, units were matched using variables hypothesized to be correlated with outcomes of interest. The unit of analysis for the outcome variables is children under five. The unit of analysis for social attitudes is the caregiver. In both cases, PSM was used to match the treated unit of analysis with the most comparable non-treated units using propensity scores i.e., probability of selection into the treatment.

 

[Murphy]

my wife keeps a Google spreadsheet of every indiscretion I may’ve made going back to when we first got together.

you too eh

 

[versh]

Tidy.

The only stuff I have on my computer are a couple of text documents with lists of books and blu-rays I want, some PDFs of essays, books and articles in folders according to author and an mp3 of that Randy C set on Raw Mission.

I don't have any photos or a music library or any videos and I delete any email or message once it's unnecessary. I used to have back ups, but nowadays I don't really have anything to back up.

 

[Leo]

Tidy or anal?

 

[versh]

Tidy or anal?

I'll stick with tidy, but thanks for the offer.