teacrastinus

[teacrastinus]

Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.

[teacrastinus]

"Vertical organizers find it natural to use filing cabinets to store materials that they intend to use just an hour or a day or a week later. When they need that stuff again, they reach into the filing cabinet, pull out the folder and resume working on it. They don't understand how foreign this whole idea is to a horizontal organizer...

I am a horizontal organizer. I like all the things I am working on speed out on a surface in front of me, where they can beckon me to continue working on them. When I put something in a file, I never see it again. The problem isn't that i can't find it (although that has happened) but that I don't look. I am constitutionally incapable of opening a filing cabinet and fishing out a half-finished project to resume working on it. You might think that computers would take of this, but they don't... The horizontal organizer leaves everything on her computer desktop, which can end up as messy as a real one... she is only capable of dealing with what is in her in-box. If she makes a file and labels it "Urgent Stuff," it won't work. She'll never get around to opening the file.

... [Vertical organizers] tend to think that a desk spread thick with paper is a sign of a disorganized person. But this isn't so. It's like looking at a left-handed student all squashed up taking notes on one of those [right-handed] desks and thinking that he is uncoordinated. The problem is that he is at a situational disadvantage. And that is the problem for horizontal organizers, tool. The whole world is set up to help keep vertically organized people on top of things, through the use of filing cabinets. The only things horizontally organized people have are desks, the tops of filing cabinets, nearby chairs, and the floor. If some thought were put into a good document storage and retrieval system for horizontally organized people, we could be as organized and neat as anyone else."

-- John Perry. "A Please for the Horizontally Organized," from The Art of Procrastination.

[teacrastinus]

So I was writing a small paper in Microsoft Word and the program suddenly crashed (I saved a couple minutes before, thank god) and I get this message in the corner of my screen two seconds afterward

what the fuck