(2022-04-22) Obenauer Ln036 Free And Easy Organizations And Associations

Alexander Obenauer on LN 036: Free and easy organizations and associations (associative). The itemized environment is home to all of your items — notes, tasks, emails, podcasts, projects, websites, articles, and so on. They can be gathered and used together, regardless of type or source. Breaking down the boundaries we experience today between our various apps (and the data they hold) is an intentional and core aspect to the itemized OS.

Though our systems should be capable of meticulous, well-modeled organizations — the graph of items certainly is (LN 014) — most of the time, they should do much of the work for us.

Organizations that are implicit or byproducts of our natural behavior are one ideal; these we get “for free”. Close to that are those which are easy: clear, quick, and straightforward

Fluid workspaces, explored in LN 031 and LN 033, let us use any arbitrary item as a non-volatile workspace.

Say you’re looking at your day’s to-do list, and you choose a task you’ll work on next. You could open the task, which makes it your fullscreen workspace with any items you saved in it loaded and ready (as seen in screenshots of LN 033). As you open other items in the course of working on the task, they are naturally stored as references within the task item.

As you use these fluid workspaces, you get lots of connections as a result: the containing item has a direct reference to all the contained items, and all the contained items now have second-degree connections to one another.

In digital spaces, people engage in “orienteering” when looking for desired items: generally, they will search for a known, related thing or use an imprecise query to get close, then browse from there to their desired result.

in my more recent experiments with the itemized OS, only direct references are saved, and this “adder” view surfaces second-degree connections as it traverses the graph

The new experiment, OLLOS, organizes your items on the dimension of time. You get this organization “for free” since it’s simply a log of when you’ve engaged with different items, which naturally gives meaningful context to the things in your system. A note you recorded during a meeting appears sequentially with that meeting in the timeline; an email you sent after working on some to-do appears alongside the completed item.

OLLOS, the experiment also tinkers with “easy” organizations. You can reply to any item with any other item you’re creating. You can even reply to multiple items at once. This reply button, next to every item, lets you quickly associate items with one another

Rather than composing a hierarchy of various items meticulously organized, I have a single button to grow threads of things evolving over time — something I’ll explore more in future experiments.

Earlier this year, I started publishing an ongoing project WonderOS, and with it, a guide to the itemized environment, Hello, Operator!. The guide touches on this idea of being capable of meticulous organization, while also doing lots of the work for you:

I should note that the opportunity to make a mess is good. How do your tools and environments limit or support you? If you can’t make “bad” music with your tools, then you can’t make new music either. (generative)