When Reality Knocks

Greetings, welcome to another edition of the When Reality Knocks Lifestyle and Technology Guide: Today, Part II of my Guide to Being Organised. It seems to me that the major problem with any organizational system, including mine, is that of data overload and how to prevent it. There comes a point in any data system when there is simply too much input, too much data, too much stuff and you have to find someway to deal with the problem. In my case, I work on the Category Pile System, which is where you have different piles on the floor, on your desk, on any flat surface, for different categories of data. I like to keep the Category Pile System loose and undifferentiated, with fairly open categories, such as:

-Deal with immediately,
-Deal with sometime,
-Deal with eventually,
-Leads for historical research you will never do,
-Correspondence you will never deal with,
-School projects you did in elementary school,
-An empty California Raisins binder, from grade 8,
-Bags of stuff it is important to deal with, but which don’t fit into any other category,
-Information for teaching yourself Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphics,
-Crap.

Now, you may think that I just made all of this up. Sadly, in fact, I just looked around my room. So, clearly, there is some kind of procedure badly needed here to deal with all this data input. Your personal solution, of course, depends on whether your data processing system is digital, paper-based, painted on stone, or what have you. Mine is primarily paper-based, and so my solution, which I am sharing free of charge with you good people today, is fitted to that system. Don’t thank me. It’s my way of giving back.

The problem with the Category Pile System is familiar to all those who work in the canal-building industry and it is what hydrological engineers refer to as mass wasting. As any canal builder will tell you, the dirt sides of your canal must be at a 45 degree angle, because if the angle becomes steeper than this, the weight of the wall will start to collapse the entire thing, causing a landslide. This is roughly the same problem you can encounter with the Category Pile System, as the piles become so high and steep that they begin to implode under their own weight, although I do not refer to it as mass wasting, but as Catastrophic Data Collapse. If you are using this system, for your own safety, you must find a way to deal with this problem.

My solution is roughly similar to the concept of a flying buttress, which were used on medieval cathedrals to enhance the structure of the buildings and generally keep the thing from falling apart. A flying buttress is a sort of brace which juts out from the side of the building, supporting the overwhelming weight of the wall. I use a similar device of my own invention, which is a cross between a flying buttress on one end and a shovel on the other. I call it the Data Containment Strut (patent pending) and it can be used to control Catastrophic Data Collapse first by shoveling the collapsing pile back to a shallower angle and then by turning it over and propping up the pile to prevent a recurrence. I consider this invention to be essentially open source and people are more than welcome to improve upon the basic design with innovations of their own, as that is the real power of the Internet. Detailed schematics available upon request.

Well, that’s the solution I’ve come up with. Be sure to come back tomorrow when I’ll investigate whether the Internet is making us less productive and Dad will talk about Internet porn.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 22nd, 2005 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Personal Growth, Lifestyle and Technology, How To Be Organized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.