[NetBehaviour] Are you on Pinterest?

[Edward Picot]

I'm with Dave - I've got stuff all over the place - some handwritten, 
some in plain text files, some on old databases. At one point I started 
keeping a private blog on a database, and the idea was that every entry 
would have a list of keywords appended to it, so that I'd be able to 
find things again; but it was too much like hard work.

I've got a filing system for my day job, which seems to be fairly 
efficient. If I want to know where the maintenance contracts are, 
they're in the maintenance folder. If I want to know where health and 
safety documents are, they're in the health and safety folder. Every now 
and then, however, something crops up where I need to find a particular 
document, and I can't remember how I've filed it, and end up doing 
massive searches to locate it.

My feeling is that a filing system doesn't actually help you to remember 
things. It helps you to retrieve things, which is different. If it's 
fairly well organised it actually allows you the luxury of forgetting 
things. For example there are certain tasks which have to be completed 
by certain dates. I put a reminder in my diary a few days in advance of 
the deadline, file away the relevant documents in the filing system, and 
forget all about them until the reminder jogs my memory.

At home, in my creative work, things are less structured. I've got an 
old notebook full of handwritten ideas for projects. Every now and then 
I look at it and think to myself 'Yes, that's a really good idea' - I 
rediscover ideas that I've forgotten all about - but I usually don't go 
ahead with them. The ideas I pursue are the ones that I find myself 
carrying around in my head all the time. I don't have to write them 
down, because they're living with me. So in a way I kind of trust my 
defective memory to select the things that are essential and let slip 
the ones that aren't. It isn't much of a system, but it has the virtue 
of being sort of organic.

- Edward