I heard that use of multiple parentheticals (in a blog post) indicates impaired short term memory (can't remember where I heard that).
So if I go to the kitchen meaning to go through and down the hall to the bathroom, more than half the time I will get something to eat or drink and forget about going to the bathroom? So everything should be in the same room?
Oh hey great, the hidden advantage to living in a studio. I shall remember EVERYTHING.
In my one room shack, I remember everything and forgive nothing.
So if I go to the kitchen meaning to go through and down the hall to the bathroom
There was a Benny Hill joke where the old man was so happy that the bathroom door was now hooked to a automatic light.
My manifestation is to open up email to look for something old, note I have no new emails, and close it out immediately.
8. Or open a browser to look something up for work, check unfogged, procrastinate for a while, then decide you really need to get back to work, close your browser, open your work file, and realize you need to look something up.
Both Molly and I have noted that this is the bane of our existence.
Yes, I do 8 all the time.
Now, back to... whatever I'm supposed to be doing right now.
solving shit with SCIENCE essear, remember?
Blasting mistletoe out of trees with a shotgun. In a shopping mall. Comments suggest this is Southern. Alameida, is there anything you want to tell us?
Back on the veldt, everything was essentially one big room.
From the comments in 13:
3″ 5 shot revolvers are just too damn perfect and sexy to ever regret buying!
Back on the veldt, everything was essentially one big room.
Nah. You crawled half a mile to the back of the cave to paint a bison, and when you got there you just sat and admired the mammoths somebody had done the previous season until the flame on your stick burned up and you had to come out.
I read this and wondered if it's why web-surfing is so disorienting
Yes? No? If I try to work backwards from personal experience in forgetting what I'd just been thinking about, it's that when I go to another room, I get all this new data, have sudden new thoughts flitting around (if I'm at home, it's on the order of, "Right, don't forget to clean up those magazines at some point; and that plant needed watering, like, yesterday; and there's that same cobweb again"), and the new thoughts crowd out whatever I went in the room to do.
I didn't click through to the full article from the OP's link, so maybe this is accounted for: but wouldn't the amount of new information in (or the familiarity of) the new room be a factor? Is that what "assess[ing] whether this effect reflects the influence of the experienced context, in terms of the degree of immersion of a person in an environment" in the abstract means?
Did they do these experiments in empty rooms? I guess I should read the full article.
when you got there you just sat and admired the mammoths somebody had done the previous season until the flame on your stick burned up and you had to come out
And that's not a euphemism.
There's been lots of work on "state-dependent memory". It applies to internal states and external states so I'm not surprised about the door findings.
IMX, lots of fast surfing means almost none of it registers.
lots of fast surfing
a.k.a. spastic clicking. It drives me nuts to watch people doing that.
I'm not sure I've ever thought that my losing track of time on the internet had something to do with memory. I've always thought it had to do with wasting time.
Sure, I've done the "meant to search e-mail, forgot" thing before, but I've also gone to the kitchen to pick up my regular mail on the counter and gotten a snack and then had to go back to get the mail. I guess that's kind of the point of the original post, but it seems different than remembering facts differently in different rooms.
My work email system deletes emails from outlook inboxes after 60 days. That doesn't work for lawyers, who need records of things. So people either develop systems for filing all their important emails into organized subfolders, or (and I think most people are in this latter category) they do what I do, which is at the end of every month they take all their emails from the month prior to the current month and dump them unsorted into a subfolder. Mine is labeled "Unsorted Archives".
Keep reading--soon this will be on-topic.
So, my "Unsorted Archives" outlook folder has something like 16,000 emails in it now.* Given the size, it's starting to take FOREVER to sort through and find anything. (And, by the way, why is the search function in Outlook so pathetic? It's really astonishingly bad.) So, if I run a search for some key word or client name or whatever, it will usually take 5 minutes or so** to finish the search and give me the complete results. Which is, obviously, just about forever when you're sitting and staring at search results coming back. So I'll inevitably swing over to my browser for a few minutes while waiting for the results. NINE TIMES OUT OF TEN, here is the result: I get caught up reading something online, roughly 20 minutes passes, I get a new email, and--unthinkingly--I click back over to outlook to read it. ARGH. Since those search results don't pop out in a new window, and aren't saved anywhere, by clicking back to my inbox I just lost them and have to run the search again. Rinse and repeat.
* Yes, I should create one subfolder for each year of archives, so the folder doesn't just grow endlessly longer. I know. I'll do that some day.
** Really, I have no idea how long it take, since I always end up in my browser having lost track of time. But I've tried to sit through it a few times before, and we're definitely talking multiple minutes, at least.
20: I do that when I'm looking for something specific. Fast skimming -> clicking works well for me.
However, what drives me nuts and then to anger is having someone do it while showing me something they understand quite well but I still don't. The urge to strangle surfaces very easily then. Some techies are prone to doing that with their pet package of tricks.
urple, can you avoid using Outlook? Apparently not, since it's a work email system. (Erm, I will say that if it takes a lawyer that much time and effort to find an email from a client, and the lawyer is billing the client for that time spent, this seems a problem, at least from the client's perspective.)
I used to sort all emails into client specific folders when I did my timesheets -- helps me avoid missing time for this or that -- and only stopped when I switched computers this summer and Outlook got all messed up. I should get back to that.
On a rather different note, I propose that IF the OP's hypothesis holds, then we might all pay more attention to some of the basic principles of feng shui.
Not necessarily the more detailed notions having to do with pyramids of rocks here and there, and whatnot (though those are cool in my opinion), but general ideas about opening up space, providing breathing room, minimizing doorways where possible. I have never liked small warren-like abodes, or cell-like living (cf. New York City), and now I have science to back me up.
|| http://www.infowars.com/city-council-of-montana-city-illegally-enforces-un-agenda-21-on-taxpayers
We're going communist!
Now I'll go tease my city councilman, Jason Weiner, about this fine publication getting his name wrong.
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urple, a just-in-time/organize-on-demand system work might work for you:
Don't bother with creating a bunch of folders that you then intend to someday sort all those unsorted archives into. Instead, the next you successfully complete a search, immediately create a folder labelled with that search term (or something other useful word) and drop all the e-mails you just found into it. Continue to do this whenever you successfully complete a search.
The result is that your folder system grows organically based on things that you've actually looked for, plus it isn't some huge chore to tackle, it's just one little extra step you do whenever you have to search for something.
and the lawyer is billing the client for that time spent
I don't. (I mean, I might, in theory, if I actually sat and stared at the search results coming back, but not if I'm flipping over to the NYT homepage.) Which means, yes, this is lost time for me, but on net it's vastly less lost time than individually sorting and filing all my emails would be. (Which I also wouldn't think was appropriately billable.)
(And no, I can't use something other than outlook.)
28 seems like an excellent solution.
29: it's vastly less lost time than individually sorting and filing all my emails would be
Why would have to individually sort and file each email? Can't you set up a filter whenever a case becomes yours? So whenever you receive an email regarding that client/case, the email is automatically sent to that subfolder?
28 is something I've thought about, and do from time to time, and which would work well if outlook has an even semi-intelligent search function, but its search function is so primitive that there are relatively few times that I search for something and get back only relevant results. Which means the "just in time" sort process would usually still involve too much hand-sorting.
There's other software already on most PCs that can be used as a client for connecting to an outlook server. Firefox has an email client. Before migrating over your live archives, I'd want to experiment with a nonvital email account though.
So whenever you receive an email regarding that client/case, the email is automatically sent to that subfolder?
That sounds like an easy way for me to miss emails. Although, more fundamentally, does outlook have this capability?
How many cases do you work on? How hard can it be to receive your new emails in the morning and drag and drop them (or however Outlook works in that regard) to the relevant folder?
I don't get why this is so impossible. Really, I'm not trying to be an ass here, but this seems like standard record-keeping to me.
27: In a move that would have made Joseph Stalin jealous, the City Council of Missoula, Montana on Monday approved the use of local tax dollars to an organization out of state known as ICLEI (International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives).
So not jealous.
34: obviously it's not impossible--what you describe, or some variation on it, is what's done by the the first class of people I mentioned in 22.1. It just requires very different skills than I have.
Although, more fundamentally, does outlook have this capability?
Sure, you can set up all sorts of rules in Outlook, both on the client side and (more importantly) on the server. You want to look for the "Rules" menu.
34 before seeing 33.
I don't know how Outlook works. It can't be that stupid a program that you can't set up filters. Uh, do you have an IT person on staff or something? Can you ask other people? This just seems like a silly problem to keep having, and it concerns your hypothetical clients that you have trouble keeping records tidy, as it were.
Well, I don't actually have a problem except insofar as outlook's current search function is worse than yahoo's was in 1995, and is slower than seems possible for a program that is simply scanning the text of a few thousand emails. Other than that, the system works fine.
There's a whole literature on what people do with their e-mails. Generally there seem to be at least about three classes (people's behaviors are, not surprisingly, not all that precisely classifiable): the people urple talks about who sort everything, the people who sort nothing and search, the people who kind of sort and end up doing "spring cleaning" kinds of organization that are never complete or not complete for long.
39: for a program that is simply scanning the text of a few thousand emails
16,000 emails, according to 22.
I think you do have a problem. What if you forget to 'archive' your unsorted emails before 60 days elapse? I just find this really confusing, since it sounds to me as though you're making things up as you go along, but you're a lawyer who's professionally charged with keeping track of things.
Well, okay. I take this kind of thing under advisement.
27, 35: Because all know what a stellar environmental record Stalin had.
You know, at least the inference "Nazis cared about the environment, therefore environmentalists are Nazis" has a true premise.
40: So some people always sort things, some people sometimes sort things, and some people never sort things? The world of management studies is full of such interesting findings!
So I googled a common word that is also the name of a piece of software I'm trying to understand how to use. Got, of course, zillions of hits related to the common word and not the software. Got distracted by something popping up in another window. Clicked back the web browser and started looking at news stories related to the common word. Got confused about how I got there. Fifteen minutes later, decided to return to the software issue and googled the common word again. A bunch of news stories popped up. Clicked one, got distracted again. Now I'm commenting here about it. Maybe an hour from now I'll get around to the thing I was trying to do.
I sort everything, but unless it's for work, it's into fairly loose categories that then often require further searching. The nice thing about Gmail is that I can easily set up filters and folders, and archive everything without even thinking about it.
||
WTF is the matter with Virginia Tech?
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The world of management studies is full of such interesting findings!
This made me laugh.
It's so easy to write rules for incoming Outlook mail that even I could do it.
43, 47: It's pretty exciting stuff. And sometimes people wonder why I'm hoping to get into the comparatively not as well-paid cultural heritage side of things rather than records management.
Anyway, I think those studies may actually serve a useful purpose in countering the prescriptivists who are convinced that making everyone classify everything is going to be the best solution, who end up scratching their hands wondering why people are resisting the complicated system they're supposed to be using.
Even if you don't trust the rules function (there are always a few mails that don't fit), it's a 2 click job to create an archive folder for each case, and a simple discipline to drag each new email to the right one after you've read it. You really don't need a degree in CS.
At least half my emails first get read on my phone, where sorting them into folders quite a bit trickier. Also at least half my emails first get read at a time when I can't stop whatever I'm doing to make notes on a to-do list about whatever follow up I need to do with respect to the email. If I read it and then filed it away I'd forget about it.
I also still don't understand why I'd do any of this to solve the non-problem of disorganized email archives. The only thing about that which is a problem is the fact that it sometimes takes time (wasted) to retrieve old emails from the unsorted batch, but even if I got into the habit, absolutely every one of these "solutions" would definitely take even more time, in the aggregate. And more time is the opposite of a solution.
a simple discipline
Some of us have problems with this sort of thing. And the problem is that almost any sort of half-ass organizational scheme is worse than none -- if you don't get all the emails in the topic folder, you're worse off than searching an unsorted archive.
The cultural heritage side of things is far, far more interesting, fa, not that you need confirmation.
Yeah, it is true that in our newish age of needing evidence! for everything! before we can decide what to do at all, management/information studies findings can move things along. If they're intelligent and well-done. I find the whole thing creepy, though, since it seems inevitably to wind up being about efficiency.
You brought it up as if it's a problem. Maybe the solution is to sit at the computer in a state of cat-like readiness watching Outlook every time you run a search instead of reading stuff on the web.
You brought it up as if it's a problem.
I brought it up because at the time it seemed like a relevant anecdote in light of 8/10/21. I do get frustrated (at myself, mostly, but also at outlook) when I run a search and then forget I've run it and check my inbox and have to run it again. (This actually happens frequently when I try to work on something else while the search is running--not just when I go off to browse.) But it's not so big a problem as to make any time-intensive solution worthwhile. (PLUS, outlook is so slow with searches that I actually have the same problem in several of the larger sorted subfolders I have, so it's not clear that meticulous categorizing would actually even solve anything.)
57: it seemed like a relevant anecdote in light of 8/10/21
Ah yes, August 10, 1821, a day that will live in infamy, the birthday of robber baron Jay Cooke. At least we got a nice state park out of it though.
To the OP: Why do I always only forget what I want to buy when I go to the hardware store? Doesn't happen with other kinds of stores.
52: I think that kind of depends on the e-mail program. In gmail, at least, the labels aren't really folders and you can always search everything regardless of how you've sorted things. So even though my filters don't always catch everything, I can still search when I have to. And having stuff labeled makes it easier to browse - say, everything for a particular course, which isn't always easy to search for by keyword - so it's worth it even if they aren't perfect. But if I remember Eudora right, the folders are actually different in the file system, so you had to do extra work to set your search to everything.
Mostly I have filters to put non-urgent listserv crap out of the inbox. The inbox is kind of a mess. It's not spring yet, so I won't clean it.
My setup feels like the worst of both worlds -- Outlook with a GmailApps back end. It worked OK for about four years, using folders in Outlook to roughly sort things and keeping a web page open so anytime I needed to search I could use Gmail, to avoid the kind of slow and obnoxious search issues Urple describes.
And then I ran out of room in Gmail. And I've spent the last X months periodically frantically combing through Gmail looking for large .pdfs or .ppts to delete, and tearing my hair out trying to find some way to talk to a human being at Google.
I honestly have no idea how to solve this problem. GoogleApps lets you upgrade from 7MB-->24 MB or so of storage, and I put in an application for a free upgrade more than 6 months ago.
I can't get any response to the application, I can't get a phone number, I can't get help in the help forums, and there is no way on God's green earth that my organization can spring for a paid upgrade (I would pay for my own, but you can't just do one user, you have to do everyone).
It is beyond maddening. I feel like I'm running my fingers over a a black box, trying desperately to find a latch.
/rant
Witt: connect your gmail account to outlook or thunderbird, sort emails by attachment? imap, not pop3!
gmail's web interface is crap, no way I'd use it unless you could connect it to thunderbird for free unlike yahoo.
David is basically correct, Witt. You can hook up to Gmail with IMAP and tell Gmail to delete all the emails Thunderbird drains off and then you have an empty Gmail box.
39: Well, I don't actually have a problem except insofar as outlook's current search function is worse than yahoo's was in 1995, and is slower than seems possible for a program that is simply scanning the text of a few thousand emails.
Outlook is very well known for sucking. Period. I think M/tch is basically got it, but if you won't do it, you won't do it. I would suggest, regardless of the previous, that every month you create a new folder labeled with the month and year and 'Unsorted'. The reason is, is that The Microsoft Product [for any value of The Microsoft Product] is notorious for trashing everything when you push the limits and within that set Outlook is notorious for having too many emails in one place and deciding to toss its cookies. Just think of it as the buggy version of your office's inbox clearing system: when you reach XX,XXX files in a given folder all your emails in that folder go away.
Obviously, since your search system sucks, this would be a pain, but luckily, lots of people use The Microsoft Product because They Have To and so lots of people have created add ons and there are a lot for Outlook. In this particular case Googling suggests http://lookeen.com/ which is almost certainly bound to be better than the native search system. And I bet it will allow you to search multiple folders during the same search, making it possible to implement my suggestion above.
(I haven't tried the program, but if IIRC from previous hunts for this sort of thing going back years, search add ons have been common for Outlook since ever so it's a solved problem (I think there was a search add on for Outlook when it was still the Exchange client). It should Just Work.)
Other than that, the system works fine.
max
['For some value of fine, anyways.']
13: that's always how we get mistletoe, but on our own damn property. maybe that mall has a ton of parking and shade trees all along; I can imagine thinking that would be ok if it was late at night.