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I think that sense of relief, when you clean up a work area, is tangible and has a biological explanation. As David Allen (Getting Things Done) observed, we ma
by imglorp 7y ago
I think that sense of relief, when you clean up a work area, is tangible and has a biological explanation.
As David Allen (Getting Things Done) observed, we maintain a physical memory palace in these workspaces. Each item on the workspace is a todo, an unfinished object, a project in progress, or a reference thing in case we ever need it again. The link is works both ways: either brain-to-desk or desk-to-brain. You can probably remember where in the pile a document for some project is.
There is tangible stress having all that stuff in your head.
The beauty of filing things away where they go, off your desk, is that you get it out of your head, trusting the system, and the stress is relieved! It doesn't really matter what system you use as long as you trust it and it gets it out of your head and off your workspace.
- duderific 7y agoI wonder how this maps to the number of browser tabs a person keeps open. I'm a "less than 10" guy myself. Sometimes I see someone with like 100 tabs open, and it stresses me out. I use a Chrome extension called OneTab that at the click of a button, collects your open tabs into an internal chrome extension page, from which you can reopen them if desired. As you say, I find that this gets things "out of my head" into a system I can trust, and I can switch context more easily once I have done this.
- FillardMillmore 7y agoI'm also one of those people you're referring to with '100 tabs open' (well, technically, I currently have 83 tabs spread across 5 browser windows). It can be kind of stressful sometimes, but my fear of not being able to find what I was looking for should I need a page again always seems worse. Of course, I know there are native methods and browser extensions to mitigate the possibility of losing things, but old habits die hard.