I've seen a lot of blogs posting people' home screens to highlight apps they use/like/wrote/endorse. After one too many of those I realized something. Anyone can make their iPhone's home screen fit a profile: "look at how productively I use my phone…" or "see how clean the edges are between my apps and my responsibilities?" Who cares? Let me poke around in your recently used apps and scoff at the order they're all in. Is that Farmville I see, even though it's buried on page 5 amongst all your other apps? Anyway, here's mine.

I read the article My Head is in the Cloud via Tweetage Wasteland the other day with a
sense of amusement that quickly gave way to self-reflection and
concern. After thinking about it for a bit, though, there was no real
reason to fear; just step back and reassess.

The part that got me thinking was pretty much the premise of the whole post:

My phone tells me numbers, Facebook reminds me of birthdays, my nav
system gives me directions, Google tells me how to spell, my bookmarks
remind me of what I’ve read, my inbox tells me who I’m having a
conversation with – my mind has been distributed across several
devices and services.

My head is in the cloud.

I've been a believer for years that my memory was eroding the more I
used technology. First it was math I could do in my head (hello,
calculators) and then it was phone numbers and finally just about
every joke I have ever been told in my life.

That was fine because I realized that my brain was offloading all that
need to recall that information quickly to something even more
dependable: the calculator, the phone, the computer with ubiquitous
internet-provided search, etc.

With the brain freed up of having to remember stuff (which it kind of
really sucks at, if you don't mind me saying) it can
do stuff with the information provided to it by these little
tools we use everywhere!

I'm not dumb because I can't remember stuff, I'm free!

Then I read the following and suddenly became concerned:

Now, after a few years of this, I realize that when I look up from the
screen I know almost nothing. And maybe that would be fine if the
absent phone numbers and upcoming dates were freeing space for deeper
and more introspective thought. But I sense that my addiction to the
realtime stream is only making room for the consumption of a faster
stream.

Whoa. Hold on. Let me think a minute on that one - when is the last
time I really felt that I was glad I didn't have to remember some
trivial little bit of knowledge and my super-sized brain actually got
to work on some serious problem that only I was able to solve? Yeah.
Thought so. When was the last time I chucked some bit of information
in the cloud an went right back to reading my news feeds and twitter
updates?

Crap.

Despair.

Wait a minute, slow down. Relax.

I don't know that I know nothing, as my basic ability to
construct things from my knowledge still exists, but what I
do know is that I just can't recall much at a
moment's notice. And my math is now embarrassingly slow and methodical
when I don't have a calculator somewhere at hand. But that's bad only
when it has a negative impact on living.

Remember back in the day when everybody used rotary phones and pay
phones and no one had answering machines or voicemail? No? God, you're
young. Ok, well, believe it or not that was the situation back in the
day, and no one remembered every single phone number ever, just a
valuable few. And you kept a calendar for people's birthdays, then and
now.

My point is that it's great that our collective minds feel the ability
to let some of these things go, and as long as we understand the
mechanics of how things work things will be ok. Mechanics of how
things work? Try calling information for people's phone numbers - give
it a try, it works... unless they're not listed - but hey, I got you
this far, try thinking outside of the box for yourself for a bit for a
solution to that one.

Now excuse me, I've got some feeds to read...

I have recently (as in over the last 3 months or so) begun to do away with all forms of 'You have mail...' type indicators. 

The “q” trick

Download MP3 of “MPU 023: Workflows with Merlin Mann”

I mentioned this on the Mac Power Users’ podcast where I recently talked about my workflow. It’s really simple, but very powerful.

Since both Simplenote (on my iPhone) and Notational Velocity (on the Mac) excel at incremental searching, it pays to create many very small text files rather than a handful of big ones—as I’ve mentioned, many of my 600+ txt files are one line long.

This makes the incremental search functionality doubly powerful since you can quickly narrow down to exactly the file you want just by typing just a few unique characters or words.

My trick is to end the file name of all my most frequently used or referenced files with a certain number of “q”s. Why?

If I type “qq,” I whittle down to 15 or so greatest hits. If I type “qqq,” I narrow down to an even more rarefied handful of really important files. And, so on, until “qqqqq” takes me to exactly one “agenda” file where I throw anything I need to capture or do today, but only have a second to grab.

Why “q?”

1. It’s right under my left thumb on the iPhone.

2. No English word I use contains more than one “q”

Dumb little trick. Giant time and finger saver.