(1) What motivated the start of such behavior for others?
I was letting things slip and forgetting things I needed to remember; so it was more of a "hey, I need to be more organized" kind of thing, but it also came with the benefit of capturing EVERYTHING.
(2) How do you react to your idea log with respect to balancing focus between current projects / work, and speculative projects?
It's sad but true, you can do anything, but not everything. Most of what I capture are todos, maybe the occasional project or "big idea", but two things have forced me to realize I can't do everything. First, I was forgetting things again, because I'd capture them and never see them again (reviewing wouldn't help; there are simply too many to review them all). Second, to fix the first, I added a default deadline of "today" to my capture template. Then once I started going down my todo list, I would reschedule, only to come across some things again and reschedule again. After a while, I finally started forcing myself to either cancel or indefinitely defer things. I have a core set of "must dos", habits, chores and such, plus short term goals, but haven't quite gotten to the long term planning stage yet. For now, it's all logged, version controlled and archived in git, so I never truly "lose" anything, I just give up on doing everything and prioritize.
(3) How do others account for visuals such as sketches or interface ideas which are often easier to create with analog tools?
I experienced similar "panic scheduling" with (2) myself. I'm trying to forego due dates and deadlines except when completely necessary (often because of procrastination).
I'm trying to take a low-tech approach to my system as opposed to having more tech. It's easier for me to ignore the list of "random things to research someday" when it's on an index card at home than on my laptop and phone everywhere. At the same time, I rarely find myself missing lists like these.
My own sketches tend to pile up physically with the eventual goal of being scanned in and named with the date drawn.
As to the easy to ignore, I can always defer or just remove the deadline (then it won't show up in the agenda); I'd rather capture and ignore than lose data. I don't get a lot of "big ideas", but I'm constantly thinking of little things that need looking after, and I will forget them if I don't record them somewhere. This even gets so bad that now I want something voice activated for when I am driving and think of something!
I've also tried scanning, to the tune of 10s of thousands of scans; then you have to manage the scans, and they aren't indexable by default (unless you have some fancy OCR type software like the Neat). It's one of the reasons I really prefer plain text: perfectly greppable, easy to slice and dice with Perl (or Python, Ruby, R, etc).
Comments
(1) What motivated the start of such behavior for others?
I was letting things slip and forgetting things I needed to remember; so it was more of a "hey, I need to be more organized" kind of thing, but it also came with the benefit of capturing EVERYTHING.
(2) How do you react to your idea log with respect to balancing focus between current projects / work, and speculative projects?
It's sad but true, you can do anything, but not everything. Most of what I capture are todos, maybe the occasional project or "big idea", but two things have forced me to realize I can't do everything. First, I was forgetting things again, because I'd capture them and never see them again (reviewing wouldn't help; there are simply too many to review them all). Second, to fix the first, I added a default deadline of "today" to my capture template. Then once I started going down my todo list, I would reschedule, only to come across some things again and reschedule again. After a while, I finally started forcing myself to either cancel or indefinitely defer things. I have a core set of "must dos", habits, chores and such, plus short term goals, but haven't quite gotten to the long term planning stage yet. For now, it's all logged, version controlled and archived in git, so I never truly "lose" anything, I just give up on doing everything and prioritize.
(3) How do others account for visuals such as sketches or interface ideas which are often easier to create with analog tools?
I'm mostly an auditory/textual person (code monkey by day), so I don't miss that too much. You could do ASCII art, I suppose (http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/01/drawing-pictures.html ;) Although, I would like to have some nice charts (or at least cumulative stats) for a bigger picture; this is actually yet another project idea of mine, which is very feasible with org-mode: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html
I experienced similar "panic scheduling" with (2) myself. I'm trying to forego due dates and deadlines except when completely necessary (often because of procrastination).
I'm trying to take a low-tech approach to my system as opposed to having more tech. It's easier for me to ignore the list of "random things to research someday" when it's on an index card at home than on my laptop and phone everywhere. At the same time, I rarely find myself missing lists like these.
My own sketches tend to pile up physically with the eventual goal of being scanned in and named with the date drawn.
Thanks for sharing.
As to the easy to ignore, I can always defer or just remove the deadline (then it won't show up in the agenda); I'd rather capture and ignore than lose data. I don't get a lot of "big ideas", but I'm constantly thinking of little things that need looking after, and I will forget them if I don't record them somewhere. This even gets so bad that now I want something voice activated for when I am driving and think of something!
I've also tried scanning, to the tune of 10s of thousands of scans; then you have to manage the scans, and they aren't indexable by default (unless you have some fancy OCR type software like the Neat). It's one of the reasons I really prefer plain text: perfectly greppable, easy to slice and dice with Perl (or Python, Ruby, R, etc).