Even thought I am suspicious of fictions, I nevertheless can point to a couple of short stories that, through the years, have been foundational touchstones to the development of my thinking.
Some of these are predictable—I mean, what adolescent has dipped their nose into Salinger’s Franny and Zooey and not come away a bit more spiritually curious? And I still feel the cold in my fingers and my toes when I recall Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.”
But I believe the short story I think of the most, and that has had the most impact upon my thinking, is a bit more off the beaten path. I first read it in a collection of Isaac Asimov’s novellas called The Martian Way and Other Stories.
The name of the piece in question is “Sucker Bait.”
The important part—the part that stuck with me all these years—is a character in the story named Mark Annuncio. He is a young man, almost a child really, who is part of the “Mnemonic Corps.”
In the world of the world of the story, it is the job of the Mnemonics to learn about everything, remember everything, and make connections.
As the story explains it:
Computers are limited, they have to be asked questions. Sometimes it never occurs to people to ask them the right questions. Therefore mankind needs a computer that is non-mechanical, that has some imagination. There is such a computer… inside the human brain. A slight association can bring it back to us without knowing where it came from or why. Now that is called “a hunch” or “a feeling”… Now some people are better at it than others. Others are almost perfect, like Mark Annuncio.
So Mark’s power is not just recollection, but synthesis. His job is to see the patterns, and build them to unorthodox, out-of-the-box conclusions.
The plot of the story shows the readers one situation where Mark’s odd abilities end up saving the entire crew of a ship from death. They also show all the ways in which the institutions and social pressures on board the ship work to devalue, undermine, and thwart Mark’s work to learn, remember, and synthesize.
From the very first time I read that story, I’ve kinda wanted to be Mark Annuncio.
One of the frustrations of my intellectual life is that I am a good collector of notions, and I am a good synthetic thinker, but the mechanism between these two facts is obscure and often out of service.
My wife will tell you that my daily life is a stack of boxes and roughly-organized piles. I have notebook upon notebook of quotes, paragraphs, and ideas for projects I am writing, or building, or that I want to write, or want to build.
The raw stuff of thought is there, but it gets trapped under the weight of time and other notions.
Maybe you can relate to this one example: At the moment I have over five dozen windows open on my browser, and each of these windows has—on average—around five tabs open within them.
This is all part of as feeble attempt on my part to keep a lot of disconnected ideas “top of mind,” and present enough that when I see them, I will be prompted to work on something.
I need to write and I need to build, after all.
But, as you can imagine, what actually ends up happening is that I get mired in analysis paralysis. More than this, the simple task of navigating to the thing I need next—like, say, my email—can end up taking a minute or two of my time, simply because I have to find it (again) among the dross and weeds of my open browser tabs.
So, given the pandemic and all, I have been using some of my down time here at home to see if I could suss out a better system… or, indeed, any system.
I am about a week into the search, and here is what I have discovered so far:
There are a lot of options—programs, systems, life hacks—all claiming to be the bees’ knees for solving this age-old problem
No one system does everything that I need, the way I would like it to
Sorting out how to find and implement a system can re-create the exact same set of problems (information overload and analysis paralysis) that I am trying to fix
The other, and perhaps most important lesson that I am learning is that inconsistent application is the enemy.
A large part of my present headache is the fact that I have started—and abandoned—a handful of these guru-driven organization schemes over the years. I still twitch a bit when I see the letters g, t, and d in any uppercase combination.
But I am a bit older (ahem) and wiser (I hope) than when I went down those rabbit holes in years past. What I hope will be different this time is a sense of how to stick with it.
To that end, whatever I end up doing (and I will talk more of this search in future posts), I’m pretty clear that it needs to incorporate the following guiding rules:
It has to be simple. If I have to think about where to put the thing in front of me, I will most likely drop the thing where it is in a pile and move on
It has to be clear when to keep something, and when to discard it. I am so bad about “rainy day” piles, and I need to admit that the rain will likely never come
I need to remember that no one is grading me. For too long, I have esteemed systems that are aesthetic and inefficient over systems that are ugly and work.
So that’s my quest moving into the fall. I am on the hunt for a “second brain”—a place to put things so I can find them again, to connect information to other information, and to move those connections forward into finished projects.
No small task, this.
But the alternative is to die with so many good ideas trapped in the rubble, and I can no longer stand that as a possibility.
Dear Readers: As I move forward with thinking about all this, I would love it if you would share with me (and others who follow me) your wisdom and discoveries.
What systems are you currently using? What works for you? What would you still change?
What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were setting things up?
I thank you kindly for your thoughts and attention.