I talked before about the idea that key team members for an event could each have apprentices, and the pros and cons of that.

In comments, Martin raised the question of whether the people volunteering to be key team members would be (a) willing and (b) able to work effectively with an apprentice. This got me thinking more about the purpose of the idea.

Part of my attraction to the idea of apprentices is that it brings future organisers up to speed, kind of “in real time and ready to go”.

But as I thought about the whole thing some more, I realised there was another issue I hadn’t consciously articulated at the time, perhaps actually more important. What’s behind the “apprentices” idea for me is at least partly the desire not to lose hard-won experience and information.

(This line of thought is actually what prompted me to write my earlier post about the art of remembering, but I thought I’d keep my general ponderings separate from this more activism-specific one.)

The written word

As I pondered Martin’s comment, I found myself thinking: connecting people “in real time” is only one way of transmitting skills and history (albeit sometimes a very effective one). What about the role of writing stuff down? I’m a fan of that too.

In a sense, writing things down is even more reliable than the apprentice idea. It means that even if the chain of handing-on is broken from person to person, someone can still retrieve an earlier “link” of the chain, from a written account.

On the other hand, it’s very easy to accidentally leave something out from a written account, or to describe something in such a way that it’s later misunderstood. So both methods have advantages, and perhaps ideally we’d always have elements of both.

BiCon-specific resources

In terms of “How to run a BiCon”, there’s a useful list of guides on bi.org. Tip of the hat to everyone who’s put work into that documentation, and I’d like to encourage people to add to it. (One v cool thing to add, if anyone can be bothered, would be an “index by role” - so that someone taking on a particular role could go straight to the bits relevant to them.)

I’m pretty sure that there’s some older UK bi-activist history which is not well known by most people. As far as BiCon’s concerned, there’s hardly anyone still around from the earliest days, and even ten years ago I don’t think people always wrote post-event reports. (Or at least, if they did, then some of those haven’t made it onto the web.)

There’s also the biconorganisers group. That’s a great example of “people as a resource”, although it’s only a minority of all people who’ve ever worked on a BiCon.

Passing it on

One possible theoretical scenario is that someone’s already documented everything you need to know to do some particular role, and the latest person just copies that method, learns nothing and adds nothing. In that case, there’s nothing new to pass on.

But where someone does learn something from experience or develop something not done before, then ideally that would be transmitted. Otherwise it’s a bit like a software branch where a cool new feature gets developed but then the branch never gets merged back into the main trunk.

Most people could probably think of something they learnt while doing some task or craft, which if a friend said “Any tips?”, they’d immediately want to pass on. Blogs are full of that kind of conversation! And yet in many situations, by the time the new person’s asking the question, the person who could give the best tips from experience isn’t there to give their answers. (I’m thinking of e.g. DIY-ing in a new house, and you have to make a hole in the plasterwork just to see what kind of beam was put in.)

I imagine many people could also think of their own example of some innovation that’s only happened once so far, but would be just as useful/good (or better) on a subsequent outing.

Why do people reinvent the wheel?

I should acknowledge somewhere here that “reinventing the wheel” has more than one cause.

Sometimes it’s a pragmatic solution to re-start more-or-less from scratch, despite having some degree of access to the “previous wheel”. And sometimes people feel a compelling desire to be creative, and little or no desire to learn from what’s already known, in which case they’ll ignore the “previous wheel” on principle.

But sometimes it is some kind of break or weakness in the chain of passing-on.

Maybe someone doesn’t realise that the wheel has been invented before. Or they know (or assume vaguely) that it probably was - but they don’t have enough details to make the information of practical use.

Or sometimes, the information is all there - but written down in such a way that it would take hours to trawl through for the few nuggets of relevance, rather than offering a “This is what you‘ll want to know” in relatively accessible form.

Transmission skills and habits

Handing things on is partly a matter of skill - e.g. how good someone is at explaining, &/or how good someone else is at eliciting information. (I.m.e. the biconorganisers list shows its value most when someone asks a specific question of the group.)

It’s also a matter of attitude, habits and preferences.

Some people are much more prone than others to hang on to the job that they’re doing and not delegate and not tell anyone else what’s going on. Then, even after the event is all over, no-one else really knows how they did it. It’s a kind of “black box effect”. No-one else knows what went on inside the black box to produce the result!

And when a project’s over, some people enjoy writing up how it went and what they learned, whereas others (once they’ve had a rest) are much keener just to get on with the next thing.

Thinking ahead

Aside from those factors, there’s also a kind of possible thinking-ahead at the design stage to the constraints of future transmission, which may influence even what you choose to develop in the first place.

I’m thinking of my attempt to set down the format of the Fitting & Misfitting workshops for other people to use. Handing it over was much harder than I thought at first it might be. I ended up concluding that perhaps I needed to actually invent simpler things if I wanted them ever to be used later by other people.

Investment, payback, time and energy

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for glorious one-offs. Even ephemeral phenomena do lay foundations for the future if they nurture people. Food is an obvious example!

But I’m also interested in what you might call the payback-timescale spectrum. To what degree does our work have a longer life and longer value than the one event coming up next, and whatever people take away from that?

E.g. on the one hand I’m thinking of various one-off workshop sessions I’ve run at BiCon. I’m not saying they weren’t valuable at the time, and most likely there are still echoes of those experiences for some people into today.

On the other hand I’m thinking of the BiCon 2005 info booklet, another thing I worked on. That’s had a much more tangible afterlife (so far), in that other subsequent BiCons have reused parts of the text.

It reminds me a bit of planting a tree. You do the work once and the tree persists over time (well, if it’s a tree, it doesn’t just persist, it usually grows).

In the long run, everything is interim and we’re all dead. But some things hang around a lot more than other things.

Given that activism energy isn’t unlimited, I wonder if it might sometimes even be a luxury or a mistake to bother developing stuff which can’t be passed on, because the long-term payback is so much less.

Of course not every kind of work is amenable to becoming a metaphorical tree. Some is more like food or cleaning. But I feel protective of people’s energy - everyone’s, not just mine - and very averse to wasting it. So I don’t want to miss the opportunities to conserve and concentrate value, where they do exist.

Criteria for matching people to jobs

Returning briefly to Martin’s comment, and what I think about that now:

If there’s only one person who wants to do a job, and they don’t want to help anyone else learn it for the future, then so be it. It’s better to have that than to not have anyone who wants to do the job.

But if there’s a choice, then one valid criterion for “best person for the job” is what investment they’d be willing and able to make “as they go”, towards building for the long term. And helping to hand on a legacy of skills and memories is one aspect of that.

Team archivist

Writing this, it occurs to me that event teams might consider offering a role of “team archivist”. That person could take the lead on writing the event report, encourage other people to write up their experiences of different roles, and maybe even interview team members who didn’t like (or didn’t have time for) writing things up themselves.

I don’t mean like they should document everything - but even a short “What did you learn that you’d want to tell the next person?” could be incredibly useful sometimes.

That would be one simple way of “fixing” more of the recently-acquired value so that it doesn’t melt away again (like the ratchet metaphor).

It reminds me a bit of what Jen often does already in editing Bi Community News - “Any chance of a write-up?” (of an interesting-sounding event that someone’s going to or involved with.) It would differ in that BCN isn’t embedded within a particular team, and isn’t especially focused on eliciting the “how to do this specific cool &/or useful thing again” genre of information.

I don’t suppose that’s such a new idea that it’s never been done before, but I’ve not seen it made an official team role on any team I’ve been part of. Anyone done anything else similar? and if so, how did it work out?

Here, have an index…
Information as activist resource
The written word
BiCon-specific resources
Passing it on
Why do people reinvent the wheel?
Transmission skills and habits
Thinking ahead
Investment, payback, time and energy
Criteria for matching people to jobs
Team archivist

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

I have to say that if you’ve got no need or inclination to run some nice reminder-popup software, you can safely skip this post :-)

Note: I’m running Linux, and if I understand correctly, Remind is also available for Macs but not Windows.

I thought this little adventure was worth a write-up, because I’ve done a couple of things which I didn’t discover already-spelt-out on the web - things which took some trial and error to work out, but were surprisingly straightforward in the end. So maybe this’ll give someone else a shortcut to some nice results with their new toy :-)

Some back-story

I like software that helps me keep track of what I’m doing. I have a diary on a Psion 3mx, which travels with me, and a home-made PHP/MySQL things-to-do list program which runs in a browser window on my PC. And for the last year or two I’ve been using MyChores to send myself emails for date-specific stuff like putting the bins out. But there was a missing ingredient: I wanted something to give me a popup window on the computer at certain days and times.

The proximal motivation for this was when I realised that I’d missed my favourite swimming session through being absorbed in writing something on the computer. Bother!

Before that, I’d already been thinking it would be v cool if at about 8pm on certain days of the week, my computer suggested that I go and put a wash in the washing machine. You see, i.m.o. the greenest/cheapest/best time to run a wash is in the last few hours of cheap overnight electricity. (Or, second choice, the earlier hours of the cheap electricity - but the earlier in the night it runs, the longer the wash is sitting damp in the machine before it gets hung up to dry.) So ideally you want it to start about 4am. And we have an old but good washing machine which has a timer you can set to 4, 8 or 12 hours’ delay. So if you put in a wash at about 8pm or 8.30, you can use the 8 hour timer and it works out just nicely.

Now I could have set alarms for either of those things in my Psion diary. But then the Psion might be in another room and just run its battery down bing-bonging to itself. (In fact I very rarely use it for alarms at all.) Or I might be out somewhere else, in which case I’m not likely to go swimming or put in a wash. And besides, I don’t want “Put a wash in” cluttering up my Psion diary page. No, a popup on my PC screen was what I wanted.

That’s not to say I would always see the popup. I wouldn’t rely on this method for anything which absolutely had to happen at a certain time. The computer might not even be switched on.

But on the whole, that’s probably more a feature than a bug, for the kinds of things I’m using it for - because if I’m at the computer (rather than, say, on the phone, or indeed not even in my house at all), it’s also fairly likely that I can interrupt what I’m doing long enough to do the suggested activity. And if not, of course I can just ignore the suggestion.

I do spend quite a lot of time reading or writing at my lovely quiet PC, though. And, perhaps more important, writing on the computer is my most likely way to lose track of time. If I were doing almost anything else, I’d be quite likely just to remember to go swimming :-)

So I had a look around online and Remind did seem like just the job.

Here’s a nice intro from David F Skoll, the writer of Remind, which gives an overview of the kind of things it can do. (Incidentally, that includes some things I’ve not talked about here at all, because I currently have no plans to use them - e.g. making calendar printouts. Apparently it can even draw moons onto your calendars!)

I’m running Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and it turned out that Synaptic Package Manager had Remind in it, so I didn’t have to do anything tricky to install it. I think I did have to create an empty .reminders file myself (as a text file in the Home directory). That’s the default file for your reminders - but you can have others, as we shall see.

Setting reminders

Using the instruction “remind” at a terminal worked first time. It told me I didn’t have any reminders :-)

There’s a front end called tkremind. I put a couple of things in there to try it out.

Instead of using tkremind, though, I quickly found myself wanting to do things with Remind’s text syntax. Tkremind is pretty, but there seem to be some fairly simple things it can’t do, as well as lots more ingenious power which it doesn’t reveal.

I used gedit to get into the .reminders file. I found the basic syntax pretty sensible and easy to figure out. Here for example is my “put a wash in” reminder:

REM Mon Tue Fri Sat AT 20:00 MSG Good time to put in a wash.

I shan’t give you a detailed run-down of the reminder syntax, because there are plenty of other articles already talking about that aspect. For instance, here’s one, including some Mac tips. Here’s a Remind Cookbook page, full of snippets. And here’s the very comprehensive manual page for Remind, with lots of options and clever bits.

I also put in my favourite swimming sessions, and some day-specific ones like “check current account has enough in it to cover credit card bill”. And just to play with the thing, I added a couple of countdowns to particular dates. (More below on the “countdown” bit.) So far so good!

Making it pop up

Then came the more tricky part. How could I make it do popups?

Remind doesn’t generate the popup windows itself - it calls on another program to make them. So the first question was what program I’d call on to do that.

The Remind FAQ suggested gxmessage, and somewhere else I saw a mention of xmessage.

Xmessage was already installed, so I tried that first. And it worked - but I didn’t like how the windows came out. There seemed to be no way to set the font size, and the default on my system was uncomfortably tiny to read.

(Font size bother seems to have been a recurring theme for me with Hardy Heron - by default it’s been giving me some odd mixes of little and large, clearly not the same settings as Feisty which I had before. Various preference-tinkering was required on other apps to compensate. So I imagine other people might find the xmessage default was perfectly fine for them.)

On the other hand, in gxmessage you can set not only the font size, but the font and background colours. So immediately I was thinking oh, I could have my swimming reminders coming up in blue, and the household ones in dark red, and so on…

Gxmessage turned out to be in Synaptic Package Manager as well, albeit under its pseudonym of gmessage. So, like Remind, it was a matter of a few clicks to install.

What pops up when

Next there was the question of what popups to have when. I didn’t just want all of them blobbing on top of each other in separate windows as soon as the program ran - which is one result you can get ;-)

What I wanted was

I realised that one way to elicit these different behaviours was to have more than one reminder file, and instruct Remind differently when it works with each of them.

(You can use a RUN command in Remind to call another program at a certain time. So that may be another way to do what I’m about to describe - I’m not sure. But I was wary of getting into a tangle with gmessage’s options if I tried it that way.)

I’ll spare you a step by step account of my experiments. Instead I’ll skip ahead to describing what it’s doing now and how it’s doing it.

Multiple reminders in one popup window

To get today’s non-timed messages all into one window which appears at startup, what I did was:

That instruction takes everything from the .reminders-today file which would have been written to the terminal that day, and pipes it to gmessage instead.

The options before the “pipe” belong to remind, and the options after the “pipe” belong to gmessage.

It’s the “-file -” option which tells gmessage to use incoming input rather than a pre-determined message. You can also see various options I chose from the gmessage manual page, just to get my popups looking how I want them.

-buttons "OK:1" -default "OK" does a nice thing: it means the OK button already “has focus”, so you can just hit the Return key to make the popup go away.

Strictly speaking, Remind’s -q option is redundant here. It tells remind not to queue timed messages, but in fact it’s fundamental to my setup that I haven’t put any timed messages into this file in the first place. Instead they’re in separate ones.

Different colours and different times

Now, what about my time-specific swimming reminders popping up in blue writing, later on in the day? Here’s what I did:

Note the different shape of the remind instruction. Instead of piping the whole batch of reminders into gmessage in one go (as they would have appeared in the terminal), it uses the -k flag of Remind to send each reminder individually to gmessage. The %s is where Remind hands the text over to gmessage. (If I’d used this command to process the “today” reminders, each reminder would have been a separate popup, regardless of any timing instruction.)

-a belongs to Remind, and tells it not to display the day’s timed reminders when it first boots, only to queue them for their set times.

-fg belongs to gmessage, and sets the foreground colour, i.e. font colour. So yes - I’ve selected a lovely sky-blue font for this batch of popups :-)

Making it run automatically

My next challenge was to launch Remind automatically, rather than by opening a terminal and putting in something at the command line.

I wanted it to launch on startup. Some of the information I’d found had me poking around looking at .xinitrc and other arcane places. But then I discovered that was unnecessary in Ubuntu. Instead, I needed to go to System > Preferences > Sessions. It has an “Add” button whereby you can add something to the Startup Programs list.

The first thing I tried was to put the command line instruction directly into the “Command” field of the “Add” dialogue. But it turned out the startup process didn’t like that.

What worked instead was to enclose it in a shell script, and call the filename of the script.

(In this context, a shell script is a command or series of commands which you might have written to the command line in a terminal window, but put in a text file instead.)

Using a shell script made sense to me anyway, as I wanted to launch Remind several times, and this way, I could have all the several commands batched together in one file.

A possible script:

#!/bin/bash

remind -q ~/.reminders-today | gxmessage -buttons "OK:1" -default "OK" -center -font "serif 16" -fg "#579" -bg white -wrap -title "Today's reminders" -file -

remind -a '-kgmessage -buttons "OK:1" -default "OK" -center -font "serif 16" -fg "#46f" -bg white -wrap -title "Swimming" %s &' ~/.reminders-swimming

remind -a '-kgmessage -buttons "OK:1" -default "OK" -center -font "serif 16" -fg "#a33" -bg white -wrap -title "Household" %s &' ~/.reminders-household

I saved one similar to that as reminders.sh, then put “/home/jennifer/reminders.sh” into the “command” field for adding a startup program. (I can’t remember now if it definitely needed the full path or if I was just being on the safe side.)

Note the two separate calls for “household” and “swimming”, and their different titles and font colours used by gmessage. You can see from this that the way I’m making my popups have different colours is simply by having a separate invocation of Remind to process each file, with a different colour-setting flag for gmessage in each invocation.

Edited to add: Aimee suggested I add a screenshot of one of my popups, so here it is:

Thoughts so far

In one way, this method might seem a bit clunky. There may well have been more elegant ways of doing something similar, which I just don’t know about.

On the other hand, one nice effect of it is to keep the .reminder files nicely uncluttered - and they’re the ones I’m most likely to be altering over time. As it is, I can easily add more swimming reminders or household reminders, or change them, without needing to touch (or even look at) the shell script with the gmessage options. And I find it reasonably intuitive to have reminders batched by theme, so I don’t mind the tiny overhead of potentially needing to open different files when I’m updating them.

If I wanted yet another colour for timed popups - for a different reminder-theme - then I’d just have to make one more file and add one more very similar line to the shell script.

So overall I’m pretty happy with the setup so far, and I think Remind has certainly lived up to its reputation for flexibility.

Thanks and tip of the hat to David Skoll for writing such a cool thing, and likewise to Timothy Musson for gmessage! And thanks to everyone else who’s gone before and written theirs up.

Bonus bit: Weeks and days countdown

I said I wouldn’t repeat the details of how to set up your clever Remind syntax, which has been well documented elsewhere. But here’s one bit which I hadn’t seen elsewhere on the web.

A couple of places gave snippets for doing a countdown to a particular date, either in days or rounded to the nearest week. I decided I wanted a variation on that - a countdown in the format “X weeks Y days”.

Remind has various functions built in, and also lets you set your own using the fset command. (I could have made my snippet a lot shorter, following the example of the existing countdown ones, but I spread it out for clarity of variable-names, so I could see what I was doing.)

Here’s what I came up with:

# weeks/days countdown

# (note integers only, no decimal points, so no need to round the /7)

fset _all_days() trigdate()-today()

fset _whole_weeks() (_all_days()/7)

fset _odd_days() (_all_days()-(_whole_weeks()*7))

fset _weekplural() plural(_whole_weeks())

fset _dayplural() plural(_odd_days())

REM 1 January +30 MSG [_whole_weeks()] week[_weekplural()] [_odd_days()] day[_dayplural()] to New Year’s Day

The +30 is the number of days in advance of your “special date” that the reminder will run.

Note that some of the brackets may be redundant, but are there to be “on the safe side”.

Hope some of that proves useful to someone.

Here, have an index…
Remind + Ubuntu + Gmessage
Some back-story
Setting reminders
Making it pop up
What pops up when
Multiple reminders in one popup window
Different colours and different times
Making it run automatically
Thoughts so far
Bonus bit: Weeks and days countdown

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

I was thinking about the ways that information gets lost. Sometimes it gets handed on and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it gets written down and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes people forget, and sometimes they remember till they die, but then they die.

Histories and skills

There’s a story that because so many builders died in the second world war, some of the previously-common knowledge about how traditional UK brick houses are “supposed to work” was lost with them. So some of the houses built in the 50s and 60s had problems, and lots of the houses built pre-war aren’t being maintained optimally.

[E.g. my house has some damp at the back, which is probably because (a) someone's put down a concrete back yard and it doesn't slope away from the house sufficiently, and (b) it's now got rendering over some of the brick, so the brick can't "breathe" as well as it would have originally. 100 years ago when it was new, it would have had blue brick paving sloping away from the walls, taking the water quickly away from the house, and it wouldn't have had the rendering. Whoever made those changes probably had no idea that they were interfering with the house's functional integrity. Some practical info on this subject, for anyone who's interested.]

I’ve heard it said that queer activists are particularly prone to not knowing their own history, sometimes attributed to the fact that each new generation of queer people is mostly born to non-queer parents.

Or take the example of NHS midwives and breech birth (where the baby comes out bottom-first or feet-first rather than headfirst). As more and more breech babies are born by Caesarian surgery, so midwives get less and less opportunity to learn from the older midwives who know how to manage a natural breech birth safely.

Come to that, NHS midwives nowadays have less and less opportunity to see any birth without some kind of intervention, even if the intervention is as seemingly minor as “internally examining” the labouring woman. (An experienced old-style midwife will usually be able to tell from observing the woman roughly “how far on” she is.) The art of “not interfering unless necessary”, and the observational skills which support it, are still kept alive by some radical woman-centred midwives, but I don’t get the impression that their knowledge is highly valued within the NHS.

From me now to me later

On the other hand, the handing-on of information doesn’t have to be from one generation to another or even from one person to another. It could be from the me of now to the me of later. Sometimes I have an insight but then after a while I forget it again, and then later I have the same insight again and think “Hang on! I knew that! how did I forget?”

Either way, the question is: how do you capture that information - ideas, insights, experience, skills - and make it available for later?

Dynamic and static Quality

In Lila, the sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M Pirsig describes what he calls Dynamic and static Quality.

To give a tiny bit of context to the following quote, what he means by “static quality” is something like: traditions, rituals, rules, documentation and so on.

Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other.

Somewhere, I’m pretty sure he uses the metaphor of a ratchet to describe the working-together of static and dynamic - dynamic new development as the turning, static the holding steady so it doesn’t turn back. But can’t find that quote now. (Every now and again, I wish I could use a search engine on a paper book, and this is one of those times - I could do a search on “ratchet” and I bet that bit would come up. Unless of course he used a different word.)

(As an aside: I highly recommend both books. They are stories, but full of ideas that go beyond the stories.)

Branching

Another metaphor I’m thinking of - this one more relevant to communities or organisations evolving over time - is the one of “branching” software. Some existing software is developed in two or more initially-incompatible directions, and the code bases may or may not ever be merged again.

I was thinking at first that the “branching” analogy was meant to be with tree branches. But then the metaphorical parallel would have to include sometimes merging two tree branches back together.

I’m not sure that’d be impossible - I think it would be a bit similar to the grafting of fruit tree branches onto root stock - but at any rate it’s hardly a common sight.

Closer might be a canal splitting into two different channels, or a railway with different branch lines, which may or may not rejoin further along.

Or, in the case of merging software, perhaps a yet better metaphor would be a piece of weaving - since an important part of rejoining the weave would be to decide which pieces of yarn to weave where, which is a bit like the art of deciding which code to keep.

Anyway, the point is that sometimes different people continue a chain of ideas in two or more different directions, and they don’t reconnect further down. Then, sometimes you get one side continuing to develop and be handed on, whereas the other channel peters out into a dead end (like some kind of silted-up backwater). So for example with software, a version which is no longer maintained might contain a cool feature, which the main trunk had never developed.

There are parallels to this in activism, I think. A project ends, a group stops meeting, people move away, and sometimes the experience and knowledge along that branch is lost.

Retrieval of insights

For myself, I do write things down. I’ve usually got things stuck on my wall, and a few key files on my Psion which I re-read every now and again. But writing has limitations.

One is that retrieving an insight from something I’ve written down relies on re-reading it at the appropriate time. And I’ve written a lot of stuff down :-)

Another is that it seems to be easier to document practical stuff than emotional findings.

The ideas I lose tend to be not so much the kind like “Oooh! Wouldn’t it be cool to do this!” but more the kind similar to “If you are feeling mopey, here are some probable reasons why, and here are some ways which may work for getting unmopified”.

One of the things which works best for me is having thinking sessions, as invented by Nancy Kline and described in her extremely marvellous book Time to Think.

Thinking sessions seem to provide an environment where I’m better than usual at retrieving useful stuff from memory. It’s not quite just remembering it, though, either. Accessing a thought during a thinking session is more like recreating it. Re-finding it on a bit of paper doesn’t necessarily have the same emotional resonance.

Writing for remembering

A lot of my ideas for future blog posts (and a few of the existing ones) are in the category of “I want to remember this - maybe if I write it down here I’ll make it a bit bigger in my landscape!”

Some of the more recent posts haven’t been that kind. There’s always some thinking involved in writing them, but at heart they’ve been more motivated by “I have some thoughts that I want to tell to other people”.

But I like the idea that over time this blog could become a sort of documentation of “what works for me”, that I could consult for my own benefit in future.

Here, have an index…
The art of remembering
Histories and skills
From me now to me later
Dynamic and static Quality
Branching
Retrieval of insights
Writing for remembering

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.