Where Should I Keep My Stuff? - DBR 054
Episode 54
I talk about the tool set for the kind of information and attention management that Attention Compass provides. I get a lot of questions about: I use tool X. What about tool Y? What tools should I use? Most of this revolves around “where should I keep my stuff?” And we'll talk about that today. When I say tool, I mean online service, system, database, to keep my stuff. Google Keep, Apple Notes, Clickup, etc. The information storage tool is a core part of the Attention Compass system. Our information is a primary consumer of our attention in two ways: comprehending it and finding it when we need it. The storage tool is primarily about ‘finding’. It is vitally important that you have a tool, a place. We'll talk about why that is. And we’ll talk about the purpose and properties of a good tool. So here we'll lay out what the purpose of a tool is, some of the properties that a tool should have. It's not exhaustive, and that way, you'll have a better picture of what's going on. In general, the tool here is the container and storehouse for our information
- We're talking about a tool for personal information management – a storehouse for information. Our storehouses have “containers”.
- A library (information storehouse) has books (information containers).
- Is having a container the ideal? I really can't envision another way to do it.
Container
- The container defines what our information can do, and more importantly, defines what we can do with our information.
- Container is not a rigorously defined term,
- Challenge: medialessness = ‘container’ as a metaphorical term it's all just electronic, and we can mimic containers – OneNote = electronic paper
- (Almost) everything about OneNote to me looked like a piece of paper.
- OneNote – an astonishing difference
- Back to the container – metaphor from the physical
- Now containers are really just metaphorical
- The app developer creates the container and creates the metaphor for how you use the container
- And that’s how information is stored in computer apps
The ‘right’container
- The ‘right’ container is pretty murky - we don't know what a fundamental unit of information is (it ain’t the bit)
- So we have to create our own containerized units of information – examples: a note, a text field in an app, a snippet of audio
- The kind of container matters in how we're able to use the tool, and what the tool is able to do.
Another example of container: a calendar appointment
- Certain kinds of information goes in there very well.
- Other kinds of information doesn't fit well
- Can I mangle the container in such a way that it supports storing a chapter of your book?
- a Google Calendar calendar event may have different fields than an Outlook calendar calendar event.
- Are they both calendar events? Or is one different enough that we need to come up with a different name for it?
Container names don’t convey much information
- Back in the day, it was easier because the medium defined the properties of the information.
- A note in evernote and a note in onenote are different critters, because they have different ways they can interact.
What kinds of containers are best?