By Wooga Yoo - Existential pacifist and aesthete…with bad knees
Our VP of Operations has a wild imagination and has great joy for the little things in life. Enjoy “Monthly Musings” where you can get an inside look on Wooga’s thoughts, ramblings, and perspectives. Check back on the first Monday of each month to see what Wooga’s been thinking about. Thoughts are his own.
Wispy remnants of memories slowly floating away…
What would you like, sir?
I’ll have the Shrimp Fra Diavolo, extra spicy with extra….um….um…um…what are those green, round, salty things again?
Capers, daddy.
A word I’ve used a thousand times somehow eludes me at the point of need. My kid, having never used it, could recall the word on cue. I feel stupid.
With age comes the inevitable petrification of a mind once fluid. However, I’ve noticed other mnemonic capabilities continue to evolve. They tend to be relational in nature, less granular, more connective.
My Work Library – more than a work library.
My approach to email is unorthodox. My personal email address and my work email address are one and the same, always have been. Granted, my particular situation has allowed this but it’s still contrary to many schools of thought.
It has served me well. Rather than silos of information, everything is interconnected. I tend to live a definition of life-work balance that recognizes that the two are completely intertwined but ebbs and flows in different relative proportion over time.
Hundreds of Gigabytes of personal and professional email are melded together and organized through thousands of folders. My historical recall is built on organizational schema vs. mnemonic dependence or search. The file structure is a matrix of interconnections between content, client and chronology. Any single conversation can be accessed through various entry points, making the organizational structure smarter than search…at least in my mind.
Analog Retrieval - pen and paper.
Notes are key. They are living memories in outline form. In business, notes are a survival skill often overlooked. I tend to construct my notes as single words, triggers that tap a memory or point me in a direction.
Good note taking is often understood to be comprehensive note taking. They are different altogether. Good note taking effectively and efficiently facilitates recall. Comprehensive note taking aspires to stenography. Both are necessary.
Thanking My Lucky Stars – it’s all ok.
Pen and paper, keyboards and digital, hard drives and storage…I’ll be OK. Without these, I’m in the Paleolithic era, scratching pictographs with a stone, trying to remind myself what happened the day before. That. Would. Suck.