I was glancing through Boing Boing tonight and noticed an article about an iPhone Application which is yet another “this is how to organize your life”.
There was a point in my life where every time I had an idea I would open up a window, put in a little bit of code, save, and move on. Despite the small amount of effort that this took I found it stressful.
I had all of these directories scattered around that had ideas in them.
Sometimes, if I had a window already open, I would just go work out the idea if it was small enough in the current code I had opened. Most of the time this was ok, but only ok. I’m not religious about code when it comes to a patch being only one thing (I rollup patches when they are related so there isn’t a lot of difference). It is not the best practice but it isn’t the worst either.
The problem was, sometimes this would go wrong. The idea I had required more work then what I thought, or the idea was a distraction from what I was working on.
So how did I solve this?
I just keep a simple note in my email where I tack on new ideas as I have them. There is no organization, no tags, and I just simply delete a line once I have completed it (and I doubt I will ever complete all of it). I scan it from time to time to see if I can remove anything from it, but for the most part I just leave it alone.
Once I have added an idea to the note I find that all of my stress goes away. I’ve recorded the thought, it will be there later to look at.
I find that most of the stress I have is not about completing what I need to complete, but it is about losing the knowledge of what I might like to complete.
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