Unquiet

In my last post I mentioned organization techniques, and I realized just a few minutes ago while taking a break from the computer that I function much more effectively when my tools maintain themselves in a _stateful_ way; that is, when I put my computer to sleep, I can resume whatever I was doing when I come back. I don’t have to go through the interruption of rebooting and opening all of the applications again.

I spend a lot of time in a web browser. I have my little “research projects” as J calls them. But I used to either leave my browser running all the time or restart the browser lose track of whatever I was looking at before it died. Since moving to [Firefox][1] I’ve fixed that problem with [Session Saver][2], which keeps track of my open browser windows and opens them back up the next time I launch Firefox. Again, it helps me keep track of what I’m doing without having to rely on my mind, which is notoriously bad at such things.

And there’s the problem with to-do lists unless I can keep them with me at all times… if something is out of sight, it _is_ out of mind for me. (Well, that’s not entirely true. I have an uncanny knack for remembering pointless details, like how full the container of nuts was the last time I looked and where J put her car keys, or her phone, or her social security card; it’s only the important stuff that I forget).

Even my pie-in-the-sky programming project has to do with statefulness. Maintaining order in my tools - the computer, pads of paper, etc, and organizing them in such a way so that I don’t need to leave my tasks to the lottery that is my memory — so that I can focus on the details of the task and not the higher-level abstractions — may be the key to successfully dealing with my ADD.

I’ll keep you posted as I look deeper into this!

[1]: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
[2]: http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic=166