Thoughts. They are a rude bunch. They come without saying hi. They go without saying bye. They come as the please and go as they fancy. They have no regard to where you are, or what you are doing. They come at the strangest time. They come at breakfast, they come when you’re in the shower, they come when you’re busy at work.
The worst thing about them is when they don’t come during the times when you actually need them. When you need to remember someone’s name, thoughts escape you. When you need to remember where and when to meet someone, thoughts bury themselves so deeply that you find it hard to dig fast enough, or find a large enough shovel.
The way I deal with thoughts, is simply to jot them down.
I jot them down in my journal. I jot them down on a piece of paper so that I remember to jot them down later in my journal. I jot them down in a voice memo. I jot them down in an email. I jot them down in my calendar. I jot them down in a blog, like this.
When there are so many places to jot them down, I find it tough to maintain all these places. The job of “paper maintainence” has been replaced with a job of “file maintainence”, who then employed another person to oversee the “environment maintainence”.
When I am an EMO, an Environmental Management Officer (or Emotional if that describes my state of mind better), I will be on a hunt for the better software. I will be searching frantically for a better platform that I can jot down thoughts. A platform which has only the things that I use most of the time, and none of the things that I don’t use.
As I grow older, I find that I relish in softwares/applications/tools that are simple. Simple tools are normally not simple to build. But once out there, you can recognise them. It is easy to use. Easy to maintain. Easy to update. It allows you to focus on doing the thing that you need to do, e.g. writing, while not getting distracted with the things that you don’t need to do, like fiddling with fonts, pictures or colours.
Learn to recognise the simple tools, and your Journey Within will be made much easier. You will find out more about yourself without getting distracted about “how” to find out more about yourself.
p/s: This was initially a post about changing the way I blog. I am debating whether to move this blog to a hosted solution, i.e. to somewhere that I don’t need to spend time maintaining whether there’s sufficient bandwidth for people to come in (which was never a problem until recently…). I am also considering changing blogging platforms, the engine that powers a blog like this.
I have to say that Tumblr is currently a strong contender for WordPress.com. I might even forgo the domain name so that I focus totally on writing.
I thought I post this to see if you have thoughts on this as well. I’ve been debating this with wujimon, who has been my technology adviser/mentor for a long time ever since I’ve started blogging. Do visit his website The Way of Wujimon, as he writes about Tai Ji, among other things.
If you think this is worth sharing, do share it with your friends. Thank you for reading.
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7 Comments
If you setup an account with Posterous, you can then send posts to both wordpress.com AND tumblr. This way, you don’t have to chose
Thanks for the mention in the post 
Oh … regarding your topic, it’s all about the ubiquitous capture tool (GTD speak). For me, I use a retro 51 elite traveler wallet in conjunction with the voice memo feature on my phone. Simple and effective for the capture process.
Hi, I second Wujimon’s recommendation re posterous. If you do want to look around more too – things like Evernote have been recommended – but its not available for all mobile devices. There’s some lists and recommendations at C4lpt http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/Directory/Tools/personal.html.
I have also tried experimenting with a Zpen – there are some digital pens which capture audio too but they are mac only so limited. Still new pens and capture devices seem to appear all the time.
Nicola
Thanks wujimon and Nicola. Just taking that logic a bit further, if everything is being pushed out, it seems like the importance of a website is slowly becoming obsolete? The news in there would just be passed on to whichever reader that readers are using. This is making me think if the domain name is actually important now… your thoughts?
as a side wujimon, i keep forgetting to buy the shampoo, and only remember it when i am taking a shower, when neither writing or dictating works…
Nicola, zPen looks really cool! let me know your experience with it.
For me, the main reason of having a website is to act as the hub of information. Also, it’s a place where one can control the content. If you were to just say “google me”, then you are letting search engines dictate what people find about you. If you say, “go here” and you control the “here”, then you dictate the content. Ultimately, it’s all about choice and control.
Regarding thoughts during shower, have you seen the Erasable Shower Tablet?
Hiya, this is from my learning technology background but some great people there have looked at the idea of web presence as a personal learning environment: http://brains.parslow.net/node/1559 (a guy called Stephen Downes http://www.downes.ca, has expertise in this area), so from what I understand a website could be a personal area of expression with chosen tools which form the learning and the environment which it sits in.
I have had a couple of attempts with Zpen – one worked well, the other wrote words that would not make it through a filter (and I definitely wasn’t using them in that meeting !) unfortunately I don’t have a copy or could send. I haven’t used it for a while but it didn’t seem to pick up shapes that well but I should give it another go. I am also doing some personal re-organising at the moment in the light of an imminent career change, so I will pick this up again and let you know.
Cheers
NIcola
@wujimon – those tablets look great, we have something similar in the UK. What I would really like is a shower wall which you can write on and record what you have written
I guess thinking in the shower isn’t all that uncommon after all! I really like the aquanotes that was mentioned in the comment section.
Nicola, the article by Pat was a really interesting read. Thanks for the link.
I’ll let my mind debate about this domain and hosting thing for a while. I haven’t come to a comfortable solution yet. My mind might know something I don’t.
Thanks again for all your inputs.