Effective Organizing: Physical and Digital Objects
The Challenge of Physical Objects
In the physical world, there are physical constraints that make our life hard.
Sometimes a physical object is required at two different places. If you are doing some reading in your room, for example, you might want that same cookbook you keep in your kitchen on your personal bookshelf to browse ideas for tomorrow’s dinner.
Other times, a physical object simply can’t be where it needs to be. For example, you may define your bedroom as the place where you perform the activity of relaxing, so having both a massage chair may be appropriate. But with a king-sized bed, your room just might not have space for a massage chair.
Finally, a physical object may have a different “usage category” in different situations. A book may have a primary purpose of serving knowledge, but if you need to keep some papers from flying whenever the wind blows, it will serve as a tool (a paperweight).
Clearly, there are constraints created by our physical world. Thus, we will have to undertake the task of designing. Design, in the context of this guide, is the process of making tradeoffs or removing these limitations altogether.
For example, to solve the “one object, two different places it needs to be” problem, we may use duplicates (we can put lights in every room in our house). Another solution is that we may make something portable (we could carry a flashlight around). In case either of these two options is impractical, we still want to put the object where it is most optimally available, even if it isn’t enough to be always convenient.
We will elaborate more on design in a later chapter.
The Freedom of Digital Objects
At this point, you might be frustrated that you’re starting to go down a rabbit hole of information. Fear not, I promise you that the ideas I’ve outlined so far can still be useful even if you stop reading this guide after this section. In fact, there is a silver lining to this in our digital world. It is a place where we increasingly conduct our daily activities and a place where design is not necessary to think about.
Each of us who uses an electronic device keeps a digital library. Like in our physical homes, there are a lot of our things in our digital homes too. Just as we depend on physical objects, we increasingly depend on these digital objects for our livelihoods. Are you a graphic artist? You’re probably using software like Adobe Photoshop or Blender. Are you a high-flying investment banker? Your spreadsheet models represent what you need to figure out your next deal. Software engineer? Literally, the very product you create is a digital object.
Just as our physical objects are lifeless, so too are our digital things. They don’t come to us. And barring a serious artificial intelligence breakthrough, they won’t in the foreseeable future. Yes, you can ask Siri or Google Assistant to load up a particular personal document on your phone, but half the time it won’t find it. Moreover, if you don’t know the document’s exact title, but only its characteristics, you’re very likely out of luck.
So again, as with our physical things, we need to organize our digital things. Thankfully, the hard problem of design, which we had with physical objects, is no longer necessary.
This is because, in the physical world, we are limited by our bodies can reach in the designated time. In the digital world, we are only limited by what our minds can see. Accessing digital objects can, effectively, be as easy as saying their name. In a real-life library, we have to deal with inconveniences like not being tall enough to reach a shelf. Such problems don’t exist for our digital library. If you see a file or webpage you want to open, you just need to double-click. It’s like the Hogwarts Library from Harry Potter!
Yes, that was a link at the end of the last paragraph! See how useful they are? The instant nature of digital links allows what cognitive scientists call distal access. Want a file in two different places on your personal computer? You don’t even need to store two copies of it — just create a shortcut to it from one place to its actual location.
There was a time when our digital objects were still seriously constrained by our physical world. Our digital files were only as accessible to us as the hard disk it was on. And the amount of digital space was dependent on how many hard drives we had.
But that era has long passed. Due to the broad availability of the internet, cloud infrastructure technologies, and computer devices, most of our digital things are effectively free of almost all of their accessibility constraints. We can access our digital things, no matter how bulky, just as conveniently as we can get electricity from any of the outlets in our home. At the same time, we can get virtually unlimited digital space for a couple of bucks. Were you just reading a book on the kindle you left at your friend’s apartment? Fear not, if you backed it up, you can get it again in a couple of clicks right now on your laptop. Our digital world is centralized and in one place.
In the next section, I will elaborate further on digital organization.