Check out this guy‘s index card-based organizational system. He seems to write down just about everything that comes to his mind on index cards, which he analogizes to his “hard drive.” When he’s out and about he writes in his fieldnote, which he analogizes to “virtual memory.” Later he goes through the fieldnote and transcribes everything to his “hard drive” index card database.
It is pretty impressive but it must take a lot of time to keep up with and must take up a lot of space. I’ve been flipping through all of the photos, each one making me feel more and more like a lazy disorganized slob. Why, I don’t even keep my books organized using the Noguchi Filling System!
Even his About Page is meticulously-organized.
I do wish I were more organized, but my philosophy has always been that there is very little information so important that it must be logged and stored. Whenever I do bother to carefully archive data (I think I have a copy of just about everything I’ve written since 1999 on my hard drive somewhere), I find that I never consult it. It might be fun to skim through it all someday, but I’m not going back looking for anything in particular. There are exceptions to this–like the fact that I keep all of my emails and have found it useful to go back and search for specific information there–but generally speaking I think my brain just doesn’t work that way.
I’m not a very good nerd.
[~stevenf]
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