(2024-01-21) Obenauer Ollos

alexanderobenauer on OLLOS. An itemized personal computing timeline.

OLLOS is an experiment that organizes everything in my personal computing environment on one unified timeline. It’s a personal interface I worked on and in from 2021 to 2023. This essay is mostly comprised of notes taken in 2022 during development, since polished for publication.

That our mainstream digital environments don’t operate with a fundamental understanding of time is quite unfortunate. As discussed in LN 039: Notes on time:..

OLLOS experiments with an itemized OS’ user environment consisting solely of one unified timeline of all your items. You have everything in it: things you append to it, like notes, tasks, and reminders; and things you receive, like emails or PDFs. Everything appears together, listed chronologically, in one long log.⊕

OLLOS is reminiscent of Bucky Fuller’s Chronofile. But its timeline hosts other things in addition to a log of the past, such as future plans, and mechanisms for reviewing items.

When you navigate to a past item (by clicking a reference, via search, etc.), it takes you to where that item exists within the timeline

It gives you this new dimension of context for free, as these things are related to one another, but you didn’t have to set up an association between them. When time is your organizing principle, your things organize themselves.

LN 036: Free and easy organizations and associations (associative) covered these kinds of relationships which OLLOS helps create within a personal graph of items

LN 014: The Graph OS discusses the benefits of such a system.In addition to this dimension of context that comes “for free” in the timeline interface, any item in OLLOS can also be replied to with any another, creating a direct link between the two. In fact, when creating a new item, you can make it a reply to multiple other items by simply scrolling around the timeline and picking them up with the reply button. (cf ObjectBrowser)

Consider how many software applications eventually include the ability to add notes and reminders to the things they contain (notes on calendar events, reminders or delays on emails, tasks in notes, and so forth). In OLLOS, since I can reply to any item with a note, task, or reminder, this same functionality exists on every item in my system, without having to build any particular integration.

Most items appear in the timeline at the time they were created.

If an item attribute can be updated, such as by completing a to-do, a small update line appears at that time in the timeline. Last-update or all updates?

If an item is scheduled for a future date or time, it appears there instead, and a simple update line appears at the time it was created and / or scheduled.

Providers exist to bring in items from the exterior world: one for events on my Google and iCloud calendars, one for emails, one for weather forecasts, and so on. Other providers could be built to bring in other items, such as highlights in ebooks, transcripts of calls, photos, etc.

Items are stored in the same “item store” (an append-only list of facts, like a triple store / tuple space) I use for all of my itemized experiments, which maintains a chronological list of facts (each fact is an item id, attribute, value tuple — with some other data; most notably, a timestamp). There’s a very convenient property of this arrangement for OLLOS: its timeline interface is an ordered list of the facts, with an appropriate interface chosen for each row.

an item review section is shown below the day’s usual items.

The review section includes items which aren’t scheduled for a particular date in the future, but are still considered “active” (such as to-dos that aren’t marked complete). Items can be set to appear in this review section on a regularly scheduled interval, such as once every week, but by default, active items are on a “spaced review” schedule.

It follows thinking that Andy Matuschak has published around using spaced repetition (SRS) to help maintain inboxes (email inbox, reading list, etc.).

The system works with items considered “active”: tasks that haven’t been completed, saved emails that haven’t been replied to, and all notes. Beyond this default, the user can set spaced review on or off for any item.

If you’re done with something, you can complete the task, reply to the email, or turn review off for the item. If you aren’t done with something, but you don’t have the time or interest for it right now, you can hit “review later”. The more you hit “review later”, the longer it takes for the item to return

I’ve been living in OLLOS for a month. I’ve found this spaced review system to be helpful with:

• Surfacing past todos...created tasks that were never completed and scheduled tasks are now past due become part of the spaced review system,
• Reviewing notes. I mainly add notes to OLLOS of little thoughts that don’t have a home yet, or which are still percolating. Trusting that these will come up in my review list has removed more tedious notes review tasks I’ve had in the past,
• Recommending things to read. Whenever I find an article I might be interested in, I drop it into OLLOS’ prompt input, which adds it to my timeline

This system worked well for things that I might want to dig into when more time allowed (such as links to read later, and review of past notes), but it often got clogged with things that I needed to do, but which I hadn’t scheduled or completed yet

replaced it with a new concept.

a different “sort order” of active items, and indeed, it’s a particularly useful extension on the OLLOS concept. It still uses this “spaced review” mechanism, but in an interface dedicated to reviewing active items.

Another area for future work lies in note taking: OLLOS is an append-only log of items, so you can’t edit an existing note. Instead, you build on past notes using replies

It works well for emerging thoughts, fleeting thoughts, and connecting early ideas. But once a line of thinking in some notes starts to accumulate into something bigger, I take the notes into other programs, where I can edit larger documents.

If I had a document I was composing in the itemized world, it would be interesting to consider having items that represent the changes made to it enter my timeline

, I found myself wanting to ask OLLOS to provide some info before repeated calls I have with people: the last time we spoke, the notes I took during that call

Finally, there are some interesting items which would make nice additions to the timeline that deserve independent exploration: played music, workouts and health checkins, changing weather forecasts for current locations and those of upcoming calendar events, etc. What are our needs for seeing how different domains relate to time?

Seeing little bits of recent thought going up the timeline helped me notice interesting connections between what seemed like entirely unrelated things; the “messiness” of the chronological order had a way of highlighting relations between seemingly unrelated things considered around the same time.

While building and living in OLLOS, I learned a few things about personal software:

First, personal interfaces are illuminating. Having my digital interfaces match my mental models more closely simply made my days easier

Compounding this effect, once the core system was built, it was easy and acceptable to add simple capabilities that I might need for a week or so.

However, it was much more difficult to approach more complex capabilities

We will enter into co-evolutionary loops with digital environments of our own creation, needing to iterate on envisioned interfaces given what we learn once we use them...