(from 2024-07-21 )

I do not have long-term memory loss like the character in the movie memento but I feel like I in a very similar way loose track of my overall goals. Every time I go to sleep. So in the movie memento, the main character wakes up every morning, looking at the tattoos on his body and every day , remembering what tattoos mean that they are keys to his mission in life and working backwards ultimately, he remembers all ultimately he works his way backwards and figures out his own clues that he has left for himself with the tattoos on his body. So very similar I think overall if I were to sit down and ask myself, what I am trying to do with my circle open loops I can figure it out and I can more or less remember however it is a continuous process of re-accessing and re-processing my given state. If you were, if you will, this is sort of like we know that context switching is a difficult thing to do, when you are interrupted in the middle of your day and very similarly when you go to sleep, it’s different kind of context switch altogether. So although for small scale things like the project that I am working on at work or the two or three projects I’m working on at work. I like the Hemingway style of  let me finish a sentence only halfway and then put my pen in my notebook so that way the next day I am in the middle of a thought and I can sort of more specific way figure out where I’ve left off so if I’m in the middle of a sentence, I know that the next thing to do is to finish that sentence and similar for work I like the idea of finishing my day with maybe a stack trace or a bug on my screen and I know that the very next thing I have to do is to fix the bug or troubleshoot the error.

But in the grand scheme of things, this is not so straightforward because many of my open loops or preoccupations in my life are not simple bugs or stack traces, but they are more complicated design problems, and the more difficult question is how to even maintain the state of the different open loop and preoccupations .

I have done the TODO list thing while back. David, Alan and the book getting things done, suggests to clear your mind and put it into your inbox, This is problematic, because you , you can end up essentially with an infinite to do lists if you do not have the time to refine everything that is in your inbox. so I feel like most of the time I just stare at this infinite to do list . And today, I have sort of this compromise where I use Logseq as the place where you can read to do list on a journal page and that way it’s not part of a mandatory to do list but instead you can find all of the small to do if you just run, you can always run on the to in the last month and so it is less overbearing because the ones that you do not need to look at them. 

but ultimately, we still have the same problem because what if you don’t have the time or you don’t put in the time to actually look at all of your notes and todos that you make. 

so I don’t have a solution to this problem but lately I’ve been test driving Trello, so if something is important enough that it seems to stick to the wall when you throw it at the wall, then I will put it into a open oops on my Trello, and I have at least some reducing the number of tattoos, I have to put on my metaphysical Memento  body. 😅.