Playing with Sticky Notes
Months ago, I talked about low-tech solutions for everyday life. It turned out having an old school alarm clock served me better than the fancy ringtones on my phone or tablet.
This year, I've found myself checking out the more basic things in my life. I'm not sure if it's because I'm getting old or I'm bored from being inside for so long this year due to the pandemic.
Today, I want to highlight the Sticky Notes app that comes with your standard Windows system. You might be thinking, "that's a thing?" or even "dang, you must be out of stuff to talk about". Truth being, I actually started using it in recent months to keep track what I'm doing when I'm at my computer.
It's nothing fancy as I put the stickies on one of my dual monitors. As you can see, I'm not out of stuff to talk about. It's definitely better than this image I found on DuckDuckGo.
I had similar setup like the image above at work at one point. Let me tell ya, it became messy real quick. Sometimes, I lose the physical stickies. That got problematic when they were about very important issues in a busy workflow.
What happens if the power goes out?
From the image of stickies I shared on this post, it wouldn't matter. Most, if not all, the items there require me to use the internet to complete. At work, we have backup generators that keep the hospital powered. The laboratory is an essential unit like the ICUs, NICUs, etc.
Physical notes can be useful under certain circumstances. But, they can get expensive over time. And to be honest, I have little to no use of them outside of work. So, for my personal computer, I'm fine leaving some digital sticky notes to myself. A quick price search netted me these results:
Since I'm not using a Mac, syncing notes to my phone is not that straight forward. At the very least, I could take a picture of the notes should I need to do those digital errands on my device. Like I mentioned before, the tasks I put on there need me to be online anyhow. So, I'll stick to the more ergonomic option.
https://twitter.com/spam2hive/status/1314499806950088704
Check out Remember The Milk, it is a really powerful todo system that will sync with all your devices. It's a huge time saver and I actually have a "Hive Posts" list that I use to keep track of ideas for future posts.
I wrote a post about it a while ago in my Workflow Series
https://peakd.com/workflowseries/@themarkymark/workflow-series-remember-the-milk
Oh yeah, I remember that.
I'm sure some of us here could use that.
If you have a Google account you should check out Google Keep. They have an iOS app for it as well. I use it pretty much every day. It isn't the low tech solution you are talking about, but it is pretty handy. My wife and I even have shared lists so we can be on the same page about the grocery list etc.
Check out Remember the Milk.
Hmm makes sense.
But yeah, it doesn't quite fit with my lifestyle.
I mostly use Simplenote as my everything bucket for notes. In fact, I even write my Hive posts in it.
It’s super lightweight and, most of all,
freecross-platform. There’s few tracking issues since it’s owned by Automattic (from WordPress fame) but Itrust Mullenweg more than Google or any other corporate entity.Very nice.
Oh btw Tick Tick is a super awesome freemium todo manager. One of the very few which are actually useful without spending and want multiple cross-platform device support.
I have never heard of that one.
I've often wondered if all these electronic conveniences are what's leading to an increase in dementia and Alzheimer's disease. We use to carry to memory dozens of telephone numbers and to remember something it was taken to task in written notes....which led to our brains constantly communicating demands to our hands, mental motor demands. We literally are getting to where we don't even have to expect ourselves to remember anything much less any physical aspect to it. It's all Siri remind me to get up in the morning, pick up toilet paper on the way home, if we could find a way for Siri to wipe our asses it wouldn't be to long before the masses would be into that. Before long all human kind will be capable of is holding a phone in our hands. It's no wonder people go stark raving mad when they lose their phones.
Not the first time I’ve heard the theory.