Stark Ravings

I’ve had this for a while in the back of my mind, but I’ve really awoken to it today: I’ve got a tools fetish. (If you find yourself snickering to some internal monologue along the lines of “he loves a big tool”, just keep it to a minimum.)

I’ve been reading a book on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning which spends a lot of time talking about Competence and offering suggestions/exercises on how to think and learn using more than just the linear/rational portions of your brain. (Caveat Emptor!) There’s a good deal of introspection and little exercises designed to demonstrate the oddities of our brains and illustrate your own current limitations and give you some signposts on the path to enlightenment (or whatever geek equivalent you prefer.) Try this:

1. Sit in a chair and lift your right leg off the floor an inch of two.
2. Start rotating your leg/foot in a CLOCKWISE circle.
3. Raise your right hand and start to rotate it in a COUNTERCLOCKWISE circle.
4. Notice how your leg tries to reverse direction? Hardwired brain at work!

So anyway… back to tools fetish. There are a number of little ideas, tips and things to try in the book, and one of them is to take notes/mindmaps/organizational soup de’jour for everything. Ok, that sound like safe organizational know-how. So I get to thinking about how I want to use mindmaps (for example) in my day-to-day. Then the fetish kicks in! I’ll need a TOOL to help me.

(Grab’s iPhone, searches the app store. Reviews about 15 mindmap apps.)

Nothing to great there. Nothing with rave reviews, nor anything free that strikes my fancy. Maybe I should go old school and use paper. What kind of paper? Paper is my tool! Fetish kicks in!

(Surfs to Staples.com. Looks at notebooks. What size? What style? Paper weight? Lined or graphed?)

I really liked the feel of a friends Moleskine (get out of the gutter,) but the price seemed high for a simple notebook. Let’s just surf over to the site.

(These are sexy! Colors! I must have one! Where is a store near me?)

THEN I was struck by the fact that I’ll need a writing implement. Not just a pen from the supply cabinet. I might need to erase things. A pencil! A mechanical pencil! TOOOOOOOOLLLLL!

(Googles “mechanical pencil review”…finds PigPog and starts reading. So much to learn!)

So there I was planning an excursion into Boston to find a Moleskine of the right size/type and shell out too much money for a mechanical pencil so that I might be prepared to try a technique for getting my “mind right.” Thankfully I’m getting slower as I age and I managed to catch myself before I went too far. I’ve had time to blog this, and think about what I NEED versus what I WANT. All I need is located in the supply cabinet at work. Relax…breath…deep breath.

There’s a chapter later in this book about focusing and avoiding “bad” distraction. I wonder if it will categorize my tool fetish as a distraction. I certainly lose a lot of time when I get into tool-evaluation mode.

That’s it for now. Got to find some pants and head out to Staples.

Maybe I’ll come home with nothing. Time will tell.

Tags: programming

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 11:32 am and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.