Digital Organization Quotes

As technology has improved, our digital lives have only grown more tangled and cluttered.

I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

I'm an e-mail junkie though I'm trying to read my in-box only twice a day and to answer all at once.

I had so many songs that were actually sort of finished. And I deleted them. I wrote on my website that I'd put them on the shelf, but that wasn't true. I actually deleted them from my computer. I got sort of trigger-happy and I think I deleted about 200 songs from my computer.

Over the eons I've been a fan of, and sucker for, each latest automated system to 'simplify' and 'bring order to' my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS computers, and Actioneer for the early Palm.

Technology has enabled an environment where information is constantly fed to us on a real-time basis. You can't slow the feed of information, nor would you want to, but you can control and organize your consumption.

The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier.

I suppose we all share this pipe-dream of being able to reach out a hand and find anything at will; what is amazing is that we think that good filing could somehow make it comes true. On the contrary: putting a letter into a filing system is like releasing your ferret in the Hampton Court maze.

If it wasn't for technology and the Internet, I wouldn't have been able to plan a wedding because I'm never home.

I am thankful the most important key in history was invented. It's not the key to your house, your car, your boat, your safety deposit box, your bike lock or your private community. It's the key to order, sanity, and peace of mind. The key is 'Delete.'

Here you have a new technology, and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It's just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads.

I begin my day online and end my day online. I like to prepare myself for the next day and have a sense of closure before I go to bed.

I don't keep anything on paper (except within an actual novel in progress, at which point I need a file to keep track of plot threads, characters, and so on).

Scrivener can be a tricky beast to get your head around. When you do, a bell rings, and suddenly it all seems perfectly clear. But to reach that stage you have to understand what it can do, and try it out for yourself. Which can be daunting.

I think we are definitely suffering from an information overload, but I believe that there is going to be better and better ways of organizing that information and processing it so that it will enhance your daily life.

Maybe I am a bit unusual here, but I am less stressed if I have my phone with me. Because I can spend like an hour in the morning taking care of everything instead of I sit there and wonder what I missed or wonder what's happening. So it's way less stressful for me to just answer my phone.

Curation comes up when search stops working.

I have a very bad memory. So I would like a chat bot to just remind me of everything I forget. I spend my entire life on Google trying to remember stuff.

It sounds so nerdy and pathetic, but what I always do on Sunday afternoon is bring my inbox down to zero, which is so sad. But e-mail has become like homework for adults. I'll have 141 messages from people who will be offended if I don't write back.

I used Evernote almost exclusively for researching 'The 4-Hour Body.' I was able to eliminate all of the perpetually open tabs and multiple bookmarking services. It's also all automatically backed up to Evernote, which gives me peace of mind.

Basically, when I get home I just do emails for around three hours, which stinks. I have a thing about getting into your inbox every night before going to bed. I'm usually working from my laptop or my phone, desperately trying to get my inbox to zero before I fall asleep.

For many of us, our smartphones have become extensions of our brains - we outsource essential cognitive functions, like memory, to them, which means they soak up much more information than we realize.

The Blackberry is really essential for keeping up on my emails when I'm out of the office, which is a lot.

I'm pretty quick to delete something off of my phone if it's become obsolete. And things like RSS readers have made life easier - all of the headlines are going to be related to a topic I'm interested in.

So, the point was to be able to have a medium that would record all the connections and all the structures and all the thoughts that paper could not. Since the computer could hold any structure in any form, this was the way to go.