Post B4X6hbbY28MscuL1MG by neauoire@merveilles.town
 (DIR) More posts by neauoire@merveilles.town
 (DIR) Post #B4X6hbN0uAk3tpXPhg by aartaka@merveilles.town
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       So if I move to #Gregg #shorthand for my writing, #Kaktovik numbers for calculations, start using a Commonplace book and physical #Zettelkasten notes, will I have any chance against digitized workflows’ speed? I actually want to try that life to see how far computerless life can get one.Spreadsheets on paper anyone? Abstracting numeric operations by remembering the graphics of them (reminds me of the #APL #ACM paper by Iverson?)#theWorkshop
       
 (DIR) Post #B4X6hbbY28MscuL1MG by neauoire@merveilles.town
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       @aartaka yeah! I think you just might!
       
 (DIR) Post #B4ZNGZbJSjce87qNJw by rozenglass@fedi.dreamscape.link
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       @aartaka@merveilles.town I haven't dabbled in the math and shorthand stuff, but did switch to analogue for a while, doing a Zettelkasten-like system of my own, using folded A4 paper, with IDs, thread chaining, indexes, linking, etc.  A pencil and a ruler plus the paper were all the tools I used.  I used it for journaling, writing, keeping lists of books, writing reviews and notes, task management, indexing my collections of psychical objects, and other assorted uses.  My verdict is: analogue has definitely been more productive than digital for me.  It is slower in every way, so /speed/ is not how it did it.  It was more through /focus/, friction making switching away from things more expensive, more accurate estimation and prioritization of tasks, and some kind of psychological effect from the meditative effect of preparing the documents, lining the paper manually, and drawing some flourish and some attempts at calligraphy in the titles; having beauty and care imbued into the work; craftsmanship of sorts.  I tried it even on other people, for example helping my wife with a long-term project by dedicating a paper to record her achievements, writing them down very carefully and slowly, with some ornaments around the paper, etc.  It had a very visible effect on her excitement and dedication to get to her goals, and she was always coming back to ask me to write down the next thing she's proud of.  I don't think this effect would be achieved by writing a bullet list in a plain text file.The negatives of analogue are overblown usually.  Most governments ran on paper machines, but too many salesmen wanted to sell us the "Digital Transformation" the past few decades.  Search is not a big issue, because you can have an index, and write keywords in it, backups are not a big issue, because you can scan your documents, copy them, and even OCR them if your writing is acceptably readable, or even manually copy them by hand if the writings are important (every time you manually copy, you have a chance to improve what you wrote; an article re-written from scratch three times is usually of way higher quality than one written once).  Hyper-linking does not require a digital tool; you can have IDs and use them as links, and finding the right document can be fast if you have a good ID schema to sort your documents by.  Even copy-paste works in analogue if you really want, by...  you know, copying with a printer, and then pasting with some glue.  Or just link using IDs.  I use simple nylon plastic sleeves as folders, give folders IDs too, and link to them from an index page that explains what things are in that folder.  Usually the index paper is kept as the first paper in the folder itself, then a link to that index paper is made from a more central index (e.g.  index of personal government documents, index of sentimental letters, gifts, and trinkets, etc.).  Moving paper around is also easy.  Throw it on a scanner, make a copy, put it in your clipboard, and take it with you on a bus ride.  If you want to move an original document from your main data store to some other place (e.g.  from home to office), you can write that down in a special "move index" file, in which such moves are tracked.Another thing I noticed with analogue, is that my brain became better at things, making it faster than using a computer.  For example, it takes me a few minutes to search online maps to make a trip plan to where I wanted to go, but since I'm using analogue instead of digital (I got rid of my phone completely too, by the way) I had to write the directions down on a paper and take it with me, as I couldn't access them on demand whenever I needed them otherwise.  Well, not for long, because my brain suddenly started remembering the roads for next time, whereas I went places dozens of times using digital maps before, and never memorized the roads.  Same for phone numbers, I used family members' numbers hundreds of times using a mobile phone, never memorizing them, but without using a digital contacts manager, I had to write them down, and then I find the paper and read it when I needed to call them using landline, and less than half a dozen times later I was just remembering the phone number off the top of my head.  Much faster than searching any digital tool :DAfter a year or so, I went back to my digital systems to see if the lessons I learned can be helpful there.  I ventured forth implementing my (8th, over the past decade) home-grown digital organization system, in Emacs Lisp, focused on a chunked single plain-text log, with internal linking, tag-based indexing, very fast leader-key-based shortcuts to do everything, etc.  The results so far, around 3 months in, are not very good.  It is much better than any of the seven digital systems that I built before it, and any of the dozen 3rd party digital tools I've tried, but it just doesn't "hit it".  There's something really missing in the digital world.  The faster the tools are, the easier the shortcuts, the lower the friction, the worse it becomes.  The results are measurable reductions in total productivity, even though /it feels/ like I'm faster, and I spend less time organizing and planning, and everything just "emerges" from the system.  Yet, I'm measurably less productive.  I see I lose a lot more time on distractions, small side tracked tiny tasks that hairball into massive time wastes, more likely to not be productive due to not "feeling it"; i.e.  low-energy, lack of excitement about things I want to do, etc.Now, of course, there are like a million confounding factors in those experiments, so I can't really make any absolute judgments.  But I'm starting to build a model that has two distinct approaches to productivity, one focused on improving the tools and workflows, modifying the outside world, and the other on sharpening the mind and mental state, modifying the world within.  Doing analogue things in the real world, because it's slow as heck, because it has friction, because it allows your brain many many free cycles to generate random associations in the background, because you see many things at the same time (try spreading 20 related cards / documents on a big desk or the floor, very hard to simulate what happens there on a computer), because it costs so much time and effort, it all pulls your mind together, gives a fine point to your attention, and a sharp edge to your priorities.Or that's my hypothesis about what happened with me at least.  To learn more, lots of information around Zettelkasten is good food for thought, and I recommend the book Paper Machines by Jacques Derrida, which I found very interesting (though I haven't finished the entire book yet).
       
 (DIR) Post #B4bdymTmvcVoOfLUyO by aartaka@merveilles.town
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       @rozenglass thanks for this elaborate comment, I really value it!> I haven't dabbled in the math and shorthand stuff, but did switch to analogue for a while, doing a Zettelkasten-like system of my own, using folded A4 paper, with IDs, thread chaining, indexes, linking, etc. A pencil and a ruler plus the paper were all the tools I used. I used it for journaling, writing, keeping lists of books, writing reviews and notes, task management, indexing my collections of psychical objects, and other assorted uses.That’s a lot! Much more than I currently maintain even digitally, but I see how that might emerge.> My verdict is: analogue has definitely been more productive than digital for me. It is slower in every way, so /speed/ is not how it did it. It was more through /focus/, friction making switching away from things more expensive, more accurate estimation and prioritization of tasks, and some kind of psychological effect from the meditative effect of preparing the documents, lining the paper manually, and drawing some flourish and some attempts at calligraphy in the titles; having beauty and care imbued into the work; craftsmanship of sorts.I see. That ties into the “AI”-generated code discourse too: We don’t need to barf code out fast. We need better code applied in necessary points.> I tried it even on other people, for example helping my wife with a long-term project by dedicating a paper to record her achievements, writing them down very carefully and slowly, with some ornaments around the paper, etc. It had a very visible effect on her excitement and dedication to get to her goals, and she was always coming back to ask me to write down the next thing she's proud of. I don't think this effect would be achieved by writing a bullet list in a plain text file.Aesthetics are important indeed! I’m not the visual type of person, so I want to try paper information management because of persistence and intentionality. But beauty is there for sure, human-made and home-grown!> The negatives of analogue are overblown usually. Most governments ran on paper machines, but too many salesmen wanted to sell us the "Digital Transformation" the past few decades.Yes! I keep being surprised at Armenian government jumping on hype trains and destroying systems that worked for decades, all to digitalize and restrict the possibilities of these. We lose humanity and redundancy in that.> Search is not a big issue, because you can have an index, and write keywords in it [...] Hyper-linking does not require a digital tool; you can have IDs and use them as links, and finding the right document can be fast if you have a good ID schema to sort your documents by. Even copy-paste works in analogue if you really want, by... you know, copying with a printer, and then pasting with some glue. Or just link using IDs.This linking part feels really hard. Especially given that my thoughts are extremely unstructured and domain-permeating. Thus resistant against indexing approaches. But I think that keyword indexing might work there!> I use simple nylon plastic sleeves as folders, give folders IDs too, and link to them from an index page that explains what things are in that folder.That reminds me of https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685. I long wanted to make a Commonplace book with such kind of smart indexing, but had no use-case for it. Your analogue adventures fill me with determination to finally use one!> For example, it takes me a few minutes to search online maps to make a trip plan to where I wanted to go, but since I'm using analogue instead of digital (I got rid of my phone completely too, by the way) I had to write the directions down on a paper and take it with me, as I couldn't access them on demand whenever I needed them otherwise. Well, not for long, because my brain suddenly started remembering the roads for next timeI have the same effect, just looking at a map once and then trying to not look it up on every crossroad. Helps in exercising memory. So yeah, I get that!> I was just remembering the phone number off the top of my head. Much faster than searching any digital tool :DOh, that sounds extremely hard to achieve, ahah> After a year or so, I went back to my digital systems to see if the lessons I learned can be helpful there. [...] The results so far, around 3 months in, are not very good.That’s unfortunate. Being a digital kid, I really like optimizing my workflows. But now that I want to try out the paper life, I might come to the same conclusions 😢> I recommend the book Paper Machines by Jacques Derrida, which I found very interesting (though I haven't finished the entire book yet).Oh, will read it. Sounds exactly like my kind of Critical Science reading!
       
 (DIR) Post #B4bdynITt93svt3yzI by rozenglass@fedi.dreamscape.link
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       @aartaka@merveilles.townI see. That ties into the “AI”-generated code discourse too: We don’t need to barf code out fast. We need better code applied in necessary points.Yes, indeed.  It is always a trap.  You see it everywhere, people thinking that if only they produced more, faster, that their problems will be solved, yet again and again they fail anyway and end up with problems extended or multiplied, and yet the lesson that they take most of the time is "we weren't fast and productive enough, we need more for next time".  It does happen, once in a while, that speed might actually be the source of a problem, but it is exceedingly vanishingly rare that it is.  But for some reason, it is one of the most popular thought-terminating ideas in modern culture.  I guess it is usually easy to measure, and easy to implement, at least in theory, so executives find it a good alternative to them saying "we don't really know what the hell is going on, and we have no idea how to fix it", which is the truthful, and understandable, default mode for humans in almost all our endeavors most of the time.  Hiring thousands of remote outsourcing developers for very cheap never grew any company by 100x, and neither will "hiring" thousands of AI agents.Aesthetics are important indeed! I’m not the visual type of person, so I want to try paper information management because of persistence and intentionality. But beauty is there for sure, human-made and home-grown!Yeah, I don't think it was aesthetics (I wasn't creating pieces of fine art there), but it was, like you said, the intentionally.  The aesthetics were only a tool to put in more intentionally.  Symbolic rituals, of some sorts, that put me into the right mindset.This linking part feels really hard. Especially given that my thoughts are extremely unstructured and domain-permeating. Thus resistant against indexing approaches. But I think that keyword indexing might work there!Most of my linking ends up happening where topics are very closely related, are on my mind, like a residency application linking to the previous attempt at the residency application, or some journal entry linking to some similar event that I remember from an older journal, plus, things like journal entry on birthday linking to the place I keep a gift I got on that day, etc.  Emergent associations are more likely to happen due to keyword indexing, or re-visiting long-threads of writings on a specific topic.  But all of those features are implemented as links in my system.  For example, indexes would be implemented like:Common Lisp:1C231124/21C2402031C250311/11C250311/2And an actual link inside an article would be like this:My random topic[1] to link to, is going to be linked below.[1] Ref: 1C250311/2As for threading, I write the following on the exterior of the folded paper:Previous:1C231124/2Next:1C250311/1All of those are fundamentally "links", where things like "1C250311/1" are IDs of documents.  Fast access to documents by ID is achieved by keeping the documents sorted by ID, thus making rough binary searches easy to do.That reminds me of John Locke's Method...I've seen this before, but I think it only works if all the writings are roughly around the same subject; e.g. a book on algebra, or something.  If you have a system that slurps everything in your life, then this kind of index feels really weird, as it would put completely unrelated things next to each other just because they share the same letters.  For me, I prefer indexing based on loose association of topics, and a recursive structure to the keywords.  So the index may point to other indexes.  Instead of having the word "language" in the index point to many documents, I have it instead point to "Index of Language", and similarly I have "Index of Books" and "Index of Anime".  Those indexes can be redone as they grow, to restructure them, for example, my Index of Books may get bloated with a disproportionate number of programming books, so I rewrite it instead replacing all the programming books with a link to another index; Index of Programming Books.  Of course anything can be linked to and from in a many-to-many relationship, so some programming book may also be linked to by some business-related index or document, etc.  The most important thing to me, I found, is to not try to force myself too harshly into pre-made structures, and instead let the garden grow.  The key is to not be afraid of throwing things away and rewriting them, once a better shape of the structure starts emerging.  The whole process is a bit reminiscent of a Wiki, but with the URLs of pages being forcibly a serial sequence of sortable IDs.I have the same effect, just looking at a map once and then trying to not look it up on every crossroad. Helps in exercising memory. So yeah, I get that!I've been thinking of dabbling in drawing some maps myself, or at least printing them, and slowly marking the landmarks and locations that are important to me over time.> remembering the phone number off the top of my headOh, that sounds extremely hard to achieve, ahahHappened on its own, didn't even try :DThat’s unfortunate. Being a digital kid, I really like optimizing my workflows. But now that I want to try out the paper life, I might come to the same conclusions.I know what you mean.  Having spent so many years in the digital world, building my own minimal systems, catered to my own needs, it feels a bit like I'm throwing it all away.  But then I think that I would probably never have achieved this way of thinking about analogue systems in real life had I not spent so much time thinking about them in the virtual world.  Plus, my keyboard typing speed will still be useful when I want to do programming for my work, or markup and typeset stuff I wrote by hand for publishing online or printing.  There's a good hybrid world there somewhere, with volition and thought being sourced from the offline simple analogue garden, and execution, efficiency, and reach being the domain of the digital.  But it will take tasting both worlds to find the lines and contours.P.S. You might enjoy trying the power of a handwritten letter given to someone directly.  Seems to have orders of magnitude more effect on others than digital communication.  Whether a business-related thing, or an appreciation letter to a friend or family member.  I've never seen anyone get affected by, or treasure, a digital instant message as they treasure a paper letter held in their hands.  No idea how this work, just anecdotal evidence.