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How to organize your personal stuff, plus Jerry Michalski on TheBrain and other things worth your attention.
INFORMA(C)TION — April 30, 2023
How to organize your personal stuff, plus Jerry Michalski on TheBrain and other things worth your attention.
Hello! I'm Jorge Arango and this is INFORMA(C)TION: a biweekly dose of ideas at the intersection of information, cognition, and design. If you like this email, please forward it to a friend. And if you're not subscribed, sign up here. Thanks for reading!
Painting: Trompe-l’oeil – cabinet in the pantry with wild fowls, fish and fruit
by Jean Valette-Falgores Penot
Trompe-l’oeil – cabinet in the pantry with wild fowls, fish and fruit by Jean Valette-Falgores Penot. Image via Artvee

Book update! Duly Noted hit a major milestone this week. Soon, I’ll reach out to a limited number of beta readers for feedback. If you’d like to considered, please fill out this Google Form. Thanks!

How to keep your stuff findable

Organizing stuff so it can be found is central to information architecture. IA practitioners do this for other people, and many of the same principles apply to your personal stuff. Alas, it’s possible to overthink your personal organization categories.

Consider where you keep physical stuff at home. You strive to put things where you’re likely to find them later. E.g., if you want to avoid losing your keys, you put them in a bowl by the door. If you do this consistently, you’ll know where the keys are when needed.

The choice usually doesn’t come from an explicit categorization exercise such as a card sort. It just makes sense to have the keys at hand where you’ll be when getting ready to leave, so you use spatial associations to remind you where they are.

In The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul explains that your environment is part of your cognitive apparatus. The bowl isn’t just a physical container for the keys; it’s also a mnemonic that keeps you from going nuts on the way out of the house.

You use the keys every day, so it makes sense to keep them lying about where you can see them. But what about stuff you use less frequently? For example, I have a bin for camera gear. I don’t use these things often, but I know where they are. You may have similar containers dedicated to specific kinds of stuff in your home.

If you’re like me, you’ve developed a gut-level awareness of where such things should be stored, so when a new one of “those” comes into your life, you know where it goes. For example, if I buy a new lens, I store it with the camera stuff in a particular closet in my house.

That’s an example of a clear category. But some stuff isn’t easy to categorize upfront. It may be that the thing you’re looking to store is the first one of “those” that comes into your life. Or perhaps it’s something that straddles two or more categories. So where should you put it?

It sounds easy to say, “Put it where you’ll find it later.” But, how do you know where that is? Where will future you likely look for this thing? It’s not an easy decision. What makes logical sense to you now might not make sense in a year or two.

I’ve learned to resist my IA mind and go with my gut. Whenever I think, “Where should I store this?” some place usually pops to mind immediately. Sometimes it’s a surprising location that doesn’t make logical sense — but it feels right. My sense is that if this is where I think this should go now, future me will assume the same.

How do you listen to your gut? I love this simple and actionable advice from Kevin Kelly:

If you are looking for something in your house and you finally find it, when you are done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.

So far, this approach hasn’t let me down. Conversely, I misplace things whenever I overthink storage by creating elaborate top-town organization schemes. It’s an occupational hazard for someone who makes organizational structures for a living.

How you categorize your stuff only needs to make sense to you. That said, this principle is moot if you’re in a collaborative situation. (E.g., my wife and I jointly agreed on where to keep the car keys.) Also, remember future you might have different expectations than present you. Still, your gut will take you a long way.

By the way, storing stuff where it feels right isn’t just applicable to material things. You can also develop a gut sense for where digital files should go. Of course, the stakes are lower since search can bail you out. Still, staying attuned to your feelings about where things should go is good practice.

Also worth your attention

Subject vs. topic taxonomies
On the difference between subject and topic taxonomies, and why it matters for ML-driven categorization. “Categorizing things according to what they are is sometimes in conflict with where people will find them.”

Feelings and consciousness
According to a new theory from neuroscientists Antonio and Hanna Damasio, feelings, not thinking, are the source of consciousness.

AI as social collaboration
Jaron Lanier makes a compelling argument that we do ourselves a disservice by mythologizing artificial intelligence. People are at the core of these technologies; they ought to be acknowledged and remunerated.

The end of boring work?
Major new technologies change labor markets. AI promises a bigger impact than most — and it might be primarily about alleviating rote work. (H/t John Udell)

Why do SUVs dominate?
How did SUVs come to dominate the American auto market? You’ve been told it’s consumer preference, but the real story might be more top-down. Incentives are a powerful force and organizations will redefine language to exploit them.

Notion for personal organization
How some people use Notion to plan their personal lives. “They’re using it in a myriad of different ways, from tracking their meditation habits and weekly schedules to logging their water intake and sharing grocery lists.”

Digital serendipity
How one reader is attempting to replicate the serendipitous discovery afforded by physical used book store in digital space. 📖

Tools and processes

Clarity
“An app for layered, depth-first reading — start with summaries, tap to explore details, and gain clarity on complex topics.”

Duck
A note-taking app with a chat-based UI. I wonder about use cases for such a thing. (Plus ça change: echoes of early line editors?)

DEVONthink discount
If you’re in education, you’re eligible for a 40% discount on DEVONthink (and other DEVONtecnhnologies tools) until May 5. I don’t usually post these things, but this is a significant discount for a great tool. 👀

The Informed Life with Jerry Michalski

Episode 112 of The Informed Life podcast features a conversation with Jerry Michalski. Jerry curates Jerry’s Brain, a deep repository of interconnected thoughts. He’s worked on this system for a quarter of a century, longer than any other such experiment I’m aware of, so I wanted to find out why and how he does it.

The Informed Life episode 112: Jerry Michalski

Parting thought

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something (or so Thorin said to the young dwarves). You can certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Thanks for reading! 🙏
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