my mind is not absent: it's busy!

[gusl]

Today, I've been quite absent-minded. This is correlated with me being happy and full of ideas. Maybe this makes my left brain hyperactive. A few hours ago, I lost a glove inside my living room within a span of 2 minutes. I *knew* I had put it down somewhere moments before, but couldn't figure out where, which really pissed me off. My brain is running several threads, my hands are switching tasks often, and my attention, being overloaded with other thoughts, can't keep up with what I'm doing. So I lose track of what I did. My brain does tons of things at once, and my consciousness can only attend to (i.e. control, record, etc) a tiny part of it.

The other day, just after I woke up and went to the computer, shaktool materialized in front of me. It turns out he'd been right in front of me for longer than a minute, and I didn't see him.

I think "absent-minded" just means busy-minded. Which is why people like me rely on a stable environment: that way, tasks can be performed on auto-pilot mode, freeing up my consciousness to focus on ideas.

I just got back from D's. That place was so friggin' noisy, that I got a sort of tunnel vision of perception. I didn't recognize people until I was right next to them. I couldn't understand conversations unless I directly next to the speaker. Multi-person conversations were more effort than they're worth.

So I felt uncomfortable. Apparently, the only person who understands that is cozmic1 (ironically, the day that he came, I was ok with the noise). Even jcreed, who is normally sensitive to such environments, is ok with the noise at D's.

On my way in, saw two people at a table, speaking Spanish. The girl had a cute asymmetrical smile. I was very amused when she said "mano de vaca", apparently describing a frugal person. Googling for it, I see there aren't many hits, so it must not be an expression in Spanish. This must mean that either she is a Portuguese-speaker, or she was talking about actual cow-hands.

Comments

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Good question! Maintaining organization constantly would require my attention too, and would get in the way of doing other things efficiently. It's not clear what strategy is more efficient on average: lazy/greedy vs organized. It would probably be optimal to acquire the habit of cleaning my desk once a day, right after washing my dishes... but until it becomes a habit, it would be a burden on my mind.

But as a whole, I don't think my current level of physical organization is so bad, since my piles of paper:
* almost never affect my ability to retrieve things. The long-term trend is for this effect to become stronger, as paper becomes increasingly digitized.
* don't get in the way of me automating tasks. The tasks that I tend to automate don't involve paper.

[ekorber.livejournal.com]

I think I just realized a difference in our definitions of organization that is contributing to this. To me, part of "organized" means containing items in a small controlled space in an efficient way, and I think this is not part of the definition for you. For example, I would not consider a table covered with items exactly one layer deep to be 'organized', but you probably would, since it would be easy to find things in this arrangement by a quick visual scan. Essentially I think your definition is more functional than mine.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I agree with this comment, pragmatically.

Literally, however, "small controlled space in an efficient way" is a part of my definition of "organized". But it's not the aspect of organization that I care about, on most days.... very occasionally, when I'm not busy, I make an effort to clear the clutter, and feel a bit better about it afterwards, because (1) I feel more in control of my stuff (2) it's visually more pleasing. The hard part is the maintenance.