Maybe they should stop making things easier for me
[photo credit: work is rough, by slworking2]
...'cause my 'toread' list on del.icio.us is now over 200 items long (I cleaned it out in February - when it was well over 600). And the number of tabs I have open in my browser at any given time is no less than 25. And I have over 1800 unread blog posts in my Bloglines. And I've 'starred' 150 email messages to get back to (not to mention the 85 unread, because I know I should deal with these, too).
All of these bookmarking, starring and otherwise useful ways to put things off until later ("when" I have more time) is making me lazier. I've even gone to bookmark articles that I realize I've already bookmarked weeks (even months) earlier.
toread? Ha. torotinmytoreadtag is more like it.
This afternoon, my PiC says, "You should use Plum".
I looked at him lovingly and said, "Are you kidding me? All I need is another way to put off till tomorrow what I could be doing today. No...what I need is something to make me read it/deal with it/do it/complete it/etc. TODAY. Something that will kick my ass into gear. Something that freezes all other functions on my computer until I take that 2 minutes to do it now."
I think of the recent idea (hatched at MashpitSF II, right before we left for India) by Scott McMullan and refined by my team: The Lovendar, the calendar for the stuff you don't normally put into calendars...but should. This calendar was designed to actually STOP you from scheduling anything else until you: a. take time for yourself, b. take time for your relationship and c. take time for your family. Sound annoying? Good. It's exactly what we all need.
Will this be the next generation? A suite of products that undo all of the conveniences that have turned us into lazy beings (or, in the case of the Lovendar, sentient beings)? LOL.
Well...for now, I'll make more of an effort to actually read articles before I bookmark them - then store them in del.icio.us for future reference. ;)
[tags: lazy, bookmarking, del.icio.us, sloth]
4 Comments:
The addictive personality races along gathering the building blocks to the future? No. The bookmarks and saved endless articles are testiment to our advancement in wisdom. As others gather and say, you think ahah, I am there, or, hmmm, but the reading is too lugobgobrious, sliding on old dry oil spilll, you stick not slick. The FAST AND FURIOUS (Future Shock) is here. The New York Times is seem as best fiction reading, replacing the New Yorker, and Tom Cruise becomes a Presidential candidate. Ali Gore and Warren Beatty will hold hands, win the popular vote and lose in a hail of machine gun bullets (Bonnie got shoved aside by mean Al).
I'm getting a dog. My grandkids will love me. Everybody should have kids in SF, then learn to focus and love, and go shopping with an open mind because the supply of market is completely beyond understanding, it is God, a piffel of trust in all things. Talk to people, they're more real that stats. But kids, have kids, and learn how shallow life is without. Actually, instead of the news or wired sensational e-rot, I watch videos of anonymous things..., the web has had kids, video kids, real stuff, concerns.
i've adopted filters where a long essay better be from someone i already know and care about or else they have about 2-15 seconds to convince me their burning internet missive (which i was linked to without any useful metadata by reddit or some site like that) is worth my energy. steve yegge regularly fails to convince me that his writing is worth my time, though i'm really glad he turned me on to ocaml. i've stopped using my river-of-news aggregator, fuck the blogosphere.
cause there are blogs to be read, youtube ultimate fighting championship videos to watch, and lines of code to half-heartedly debug and scoff at...
I think Merlin Mann at 43 Folders had some tips on dealing with this problem, however reading this comment isn't one of them...
I think one thing that could help most folks would be to sort their incoming mail into folders - 1) most important, 2) second-most important, 3) everything else. For most folks 1 should be family and close friends, 2) would be colleagues from work. However, in your position of marketing you can't afford to "blow off" unknown people because contact with outsiders IS your job.
The next best thing would be some sort of semantic filtering technology: something which is even 50% decent at extracting the meaning from incoming e-mail and new blog posts in your aggregator. Isn't it possible by now? I'd love to see a filter which can take that information and categorize it into:
A) I don't know you and I want your money
B) I don't know you and I want your knowledge or other help
C) I'm dithering along talking about inconsequential things to keep in touch, because I'm your friend and friends do that.
D) I'm your co-worker and damnit we have to get this done!
etcetera. I believe work has been done on this somewhere - but why isn't it in my inbox-filtering technology??!
It just goes to show that, as ever, just because something is technologically possible it doesn't mean it is desirable or life-enhancing.
P.S. I'd love to chat to you about the wine label issue.
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