Pile of Index Cards

This is a statistics of cards in March 2007, in dock@life. Number of Four cards are,

- Record : 27 (9.2%)
- Discovery : 238 (81.2%)
- GTD : 4 (1.4%)
- Reference : 24 (8.2%)

Total : 293

This statistics shows,
1. My PoIC system functions as a capturer and storage of “Discovery” now. Everything else seems secondary to enhance discovery. According to tag, this change is remarkable since February 2007. These Discovery cards are reserved for long-term tasks (Ref. : @manual, What is Pile of Index Cards?).

2. Number of Record cards is close to days in a month. This simply reflects a number of diary. I start from diary to trigger writing of a day (Ref. : @manual, How to keep writing).

3. For GTD cards, I usually don’t have so many in a dock (Ref. : @manual, PoIC Four cards). Plus, GTD tasks are processed on the Fieldnote, a temporal memory, without copying to cards. I think Fieldnote functions well for GTD stuff.

4. Number of Reference cards depends on how many books I read, and also how many sentences move my heart.

5. Simple average is 9.5 cards/day. But I usually write cards on week day. So I think realistic average (only for weekday) is about 20 cards/day. This is the best record since last year. March records highest number of cards in a year in 2006, too. Perhaps, March is anomalous for me.

3月に書いたカードのうち、8割が発見カードでした。

# Mod. 2007.04.05 10:20 : Add links to the PoIC manual.

Reading technical book is good to enhance one’s skill. Same time, it is difficult to keep reading through entire book. It’s thickness enough to make hesitate reading. It is double/triple punch for me if it is written in English..

Here is a small tip to read such kind of technical book. Basic idea is borrowed from the GTD : A big project is divided into small achievable tasks.

0. Buy a book to read
1. Copy 20 - 30 pages in one time
2. Put time tag when start reading
3. Put line and note as you like
4. Put time tag when finish reading
5. Pile the copy
6. Go to 1

Buying book is important to manifest “I read this book!” for oneself. Process 1 corresponds to dividing project into small tasks. Copying book makes goal explicit and visible while reading. It is also good to put line and note without any hesitation. This kind of freedom is important as the PoIC.

Extremely speaking, the copy can be trashed after reading. However, I keep it to see accomplishments as do for index cards.

難しい本は小分けにして読む。

A day in a library saves a half year in a laboratory.

I got an email by John, one of reader, last week. I think this information is useful for all people in U.S. Thanks, John! :)

I am in the US and want to try and make the Oxford Cards work. I think by using a simple trick we can get the index cards to work reasonably well. Here is the trick:

a) Eventhrough the Oxford Cards are randomly cut, they are ideally a regular grid. This means that if we always write our cards with the smallest gap between the edge and the first line to the left then the grids will at most be 1/2 a grid spacing off. Statistically, they will be much less.

b) Instead of tagging every column like you can do with the your cards, I will use 2 columns for the tag. If I “eyeball” a correction (or even if I don’t), then the card to card jitter in the column marking should be small to distinguish the columns.