Skip to main content

When do we get apps for our brains?

This is not a post about transhumanism or integrated tech. This is about my horrible time management. And it is horrible.

I've been doing my annual email cleanout, and found some dark neglected corners. A couple of years ago, I decided it might be a Good Thing to create some email rules to help keep my Inbox a bit tidier, and infinitely more readable. It turns out that this has worked, at least to make my Inbox workable. Unfortunately, it means that I have neglected some 350+ newsletters I actually enjoy reading.

Because the email rules put them directly into subfolders (and in some cases, subfolders of subfolders (because I like to be organised)), and also I primarily use a mobile app, I tend to glance over these in favour of the ridiculous (100+) amounts of mail that still comes through the Inbox.

I am not pleased with myself for this. I am also grateful that my current job does afford me multiple hours of time on a Monday to be able to contend with this backlog. I will be very screwed when I have to get a Proper Job that involves actual *gulp* Work.

Of those newsletters I have a backlog in, for those of you with an interest, are the following:

  • Daniel Miessler's Unsupervised Learning
  • Warren Ellis' Orbital Operations
  • Atlas Obscura and
  • Code Project
I have decided that I need an app for my brain which not only reminds these things are there, but can auto-schedule time for me to read them.

How I've managed to get this far with my scatterbrained chono-control I'll never know...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Alphabet Soup: A Quick Guide to Post-Nominals

This week, I’ll walk you through the ever-growing list of post-nominal letters you can add to your name through qualifications and certifications. Being a student myself, I’ll start with exploring the academic route, then go through the more popular, and best recognised, vendor and standards organisations’ certifications, highlighting their worth for your CV and career development. It’s not a comprehensive list, by any stretch of the imagination, and is geared towards a more general CyberSec professional, rather than focusing on any one aspect of the industry. I’ll try and shy away from too much debate by running away very quickly to avoid the one about CEH vs. OSCP, and leave it to you instead. *Disclaimer* I am a university student, and haven’t actually done any of the following certifications, at least not to completion. I have explored each in a reasonable amount of depth to see their benefits and worth and consulted with holders of a few to gain their insider opinions. I a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Ancient and Venerable Art of Google-fu

Other titles considered for this post: How Not To Piss Off Entire Forums and Facebook Groups; Avoiding the Banhammer; Stop Being Lazy and Look it Up Yourselves. Before you can embark on a career in, well, anything even vaguely IT related (or do practically anything), you must master one crucial skill: information searching. In the days of yore, and even rumoured to still exist despite budget cuts, there were in of cult of specialists in this area, who guarded their domains jealously: the librarians. These knowledge-fanatics could divine what you were looking for from the ridiculously poor and mumbled explanation you gave them, then translated that into a secretive code which led you to a shelf in a library, and then to the book you were after. Just like magic. These days, while librarians are still a vitally important part of cataloguing knowledge, we also have another, less mystical, tool at our fingertips: the Search Engine. Unfortunately, very few people have bothered to le...
Post a Comment
Read more

Logical Fallacies - Why do they matter?

I came across a wonderful poster image by a talented artist, Michele Rosenthal , which depicts a robot debate: Granted, these aren't all the logical fallacies that exist, but it covers the most obvious, and most abused ones. But why are they important? We currently live in an age where we have access to more information that at any other point in history, and yet somehow we still think that arguing from emotion, or with our cognitive dissonance blinders on, is both right and acceptable: it isn't, not by any stretch of the imagination. Postmodernism may have a place, but not here. Yes, you absolutely are allowed to feel they way you want to, but debates are places for facts and ideas that need to be scrutinised rigorously, not with playground threats and character assassinations. "I feel" is not an argument that belongs in a debate - your feelings are valid for you, yes, but you can not simply refute the evidence-based assertion of vaccinations work with the st...
Post a Comment
Read more