Information overload
Feb. 27th, 2006 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amanda_loddenIn my latest entry, I whined about how various journals don't have the full feature-set I want (not even if I pay them, which I am willing to do).
The reason I'm looking for a journal that does what I want is because I'm trying, without much success, to thin out a lot of the cruft in my life. I want to be able to put everything in one place. And then I want to be able to find what I'm looking for, even years later. So far, my success rate on that is zero.
And I'm not just talking about journal entries here. I'm talking about... everything, really. Over the years I've collected a whole bunch of stuff that's been set aside for "later". Since I've been on the 'net a long time, a good portion of it is digital, but not all of it-- as I was cleaning my desk at home and filing papers, I ran across a file folder labelled "Recipes". It's full of recipes I'd like to try someday, but didn't quite get around to. It is stuffed to the gills, and nothing in it is less than 5 years old. I started the file while still living with my mother, which makes it about 12 - 15 years old. Yes, that's right, I've carted around a file folder full of recipes I have never used and probably will never use for over a decade. I'm sure there's some great recipes in there, but at this point I'd have to wade through so much crap to find them, it's not worth the effort.
I pitched that folder, and every so often I am tempted to do the same to a lot of the digital "stuff" that I have lying around in various folders, on various servers, with various usernames. Except that I recently went nuts trying to find two files that I *know* I had multiple copies of... somewhere. After three days of futile searching, I gave up and spent another day and a half re-creating the files. But it's not the same, and I liked the first version better.
Work emails are even worse. Since we complete orders based on emails received from customers, we keep those emails as a policy (it solves a lot of the "I didn't ask for that, and I don't want to pay for that" problems when we can forward back their exact words). But we get a LOT of email. My "storage" contains about 15,000 emails. Finding the right one is painful, at best. And that's if I can actually find it.
Gmail helps considerably for personal email, but it has its limitations. I get the whole "labels vs folders" thing, but I want sub-labels, just like I can have sub-folders in normal systems. I want to be able to split a "conversation" into two different conversations, because a lot of my friends get sidetracked easily. And since I dumped a lot of old emails into Gmail, I have 5000 unread, unlabelled messages in my Inbox. So there's still a lot of overload there. (Plus: if you "bounce" a message to another address, most mail systems will use the timestamp of the original message-- that's the point of "bouncing" rather than "forwarding". Gmail uses the timestamp from when you bounced it, which totally screws up my dates.)
What I really want; what I lust after in my heart, is one "away" for work items, and one "away" for personal items. And then really good, really consistent backups for both.
The reason I'm looking for a journal that does what I want is because I'm trying, without much success, to thin out a lot of the cruft in my life. I want to be able to put everything in one place. And then I want to be able to find what I'm looking for, even years later. So far, my success rate on that is zero.
And I'm not just talking about journal entries here. I'm talking about... everything, really. Over the years I've collected a whole bunch of stuff that's been set aside for "later". Since I've been on the 'net a long time, a good portion of it is digital, but not all of it-- as I was cleaning my desk at home and filing papers, I ran across a file folder labelled "Recipes". It's full of recipes I'd like to try someday, but didn't quite get around to. It is stuffed to the gills, and nothing in it is less than 5 years old. I started the file while still living with my mother, which makes it about 12 - 15 years old. Yes, that's right, I've carted around a file folder full of recipes I have never used and probably will never use for over a decade. I'm sure there's some great recipes in there, but at this point I'd have to wade through so much crap to find them, it's not worth the effort.
I pitched that folder, and every so often I am tempted to do the same to a lot of the digital "stuff" that I have lying around in various folders, on various servers, with various usernames. Except that I recently went nuts trying to find two files that I *know* I had multiple copies of... somewhere. After three days of futile searching, I gave up and spent another day and a half re-creating the files. But it's not the same, and I liked the first version better.
Work emails are even worse. Since we complete orders based on emails received from customers, we keep those emails as a policy (it solves a lot of the "I didn't ask for that, and I don't want to pay for that" problems when we can forward back their exact words). But we get a LOT of email. My "storage" contains about 15,000 emails. Finding the right one is painful, at best. And that's if I can actually find it.
Gmail helps considerably for personal email, but it has its limitations. I get the whole "labels vs folders" thing, but I want sub-labels, just like I can have sub-folders in normal systems. I want to be able to split a "conversation" into two different conversations, because a lot of my friends get sidetracked easily. And since I dumped a lot of old emails into Gmail, I have 5000 unread, unlabelled messages in my Inbox. So there's still a lot of overload there. (Plus: if you "bounce" a message to another address, most mail systems will use the timestamp of the original message-- that's the point of "bouncing" rather than "forwarding". Gmail uses the timestamp from when you bounced it, which totally screws up my dates.)
What I really want; what I lust after in my heart, is one "away" for work items, and one "away" for personal items. And then really good, really consistent backups for both.
