mattbell

While traveling, I had relatively few things to worry about, and a very tight system for organizing my interactions with the world. Everything I needed was organized into a small backpack, some pictures on my camera, and a few computer files. The system was fast, nimble, and flexible enough to meet the needs of everything from the Sahara desert to a big European city.

The Sci-fi author Greg Egan refers to this sort of system as an exoself in his far-future stories. (In the stories, the exoself consists of hardware/software modules that plug directly into the brain. We're not there yet. For now I envision the exoself as the physical, software, and procedural tools that we have chosen to use to interact with the world. Quite literally, I imagine these things floating in a kind of orbit around each person.

Now that I'm back, I'm realizing that I need to resurrect my system for making things happen as a person with lots of ambitious goals and project ideas as well as an ongoing social life. The transition is harder than I realize, though I'm taking advantage of the opportunity to basically re-think a lot of how I used to do things. I was starting to think about reshaping my exoself back before I left for the trip, but now is the chance to do it right.

It does seem like the full exoself I need is dauntingly huge. Most people have big exoselves -- houses full of stuff and computers full of files. I think the key to successfully handling a large exoself is to figure out an information flow that will work well to keep top priority tasks easy and clear while letting me think long term about what projects are important. The ideas from Getting Things Done are really good for this.

I'll be reporting more about what is/isn't working well as things progress.