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I like the metaphor of gardening. It's almost so literally applicable to everything that it seems like a fundamental principle. By gardening, I mean something
by mbrock 9y ago
I like the metaphor of gardening.
It's almost so literally applicable to everything that it seems like a fundamental principle.
By gardening, I mean something like... tending lovingly to a system of interconnected complex tree-like structures.
Is personal life anything like that? Yeah, because friends and loved ones are plants with roots and offshoots, subterraneously connected to one another yet also independent life forms, dependent on light, warmth, and nutrition to stimulate their growing complexity.
Is work anything like that? Well, look at GitHub and say it isn't a garden of interdependent tree structures.
There's growth but also death and decay, and both are necessary. My little palm tree always has a couple of leaves that are dying, and for its health, I have to rip them off. Programs too need pruning—and relationships too.
- emerged 9y agoHierarchy is everywhere, for this same reason I've found hierarchical note taking tools to be the most effective by far. No matter what you're doing, no matter how complex, it can be broken down into manageable pieces and executed on bit by bit.
- mbrock 9y agoI'm a little bit disappointed with the static hierarchies that organizational tools seem to encourage. Though I use org-mode lovingly, my system isn't yet to a point where it's fully sustainable... I really wonder how to cultivate a notes ecosystem in a healthy way, and what would be the byproducts of that. I think it has to do with different temporalities: chats, threads, notes, essays, books... It should also have to do with pruning, weeding, rearranging, combining... maybe the occasional forest fire...
- nextos 9y agoHave you tried org-velocity?
- ellius 9y agoI have been thinking of a knowledge system with two linked guiding principles: 1. Every element is owned by a person. 2. Every element has a “decay rate” or automatic time to be trashed. I think this would make it a lot easier to track knowledge in organizations. When something becomes outdated, its owner can just let it die without having to go out and proactively prune every bit of old documentation. When a person leaves the company, his “knowledge items” can be flagged as “soon to not have an owner.” Ultimately I’d actually like to build code projects this way. It probably seems insane to a lot of people to think of the idea of letting little pieces of the code base die and stop functioning, but the benefit I perceive is that our systems would always be tied to some degree to a human understander.
- mbrock 9y agoRight on, I'm a huge fan of the idea of decay in information systems!
- aeto 9y agoLove the gardening/farming metaphor. I also use it in the context of investing in myself and those around me, not necessarily for immediately perceivable results. Anytime we do something like reading it's planting a seed for ourselves at some unknowable time in the future for harvesting. I actually themed a passive learning app I made (https://harvest.li https://harvest.li) around it :p