SmartDisorganizedIndividuals

ThoughtStorms Wiki

(ReadWith) : SmartDisorganizedPhilosophy, SmartDisorganized, DigitalGardeners

The Smart Disorganized Individual was a concept I was developing around the same time as a personal productivity program called SdiDesk. It stands for the idea that technologies should empower us to be smart (as opposed to aim to de-skill us), should operate at the individual level (be adopted by us as personal tools, not be imposed on us by hierarchies), and that one of the greatest productivity benefits that technology can give us is to improve asynchronous, ad-hoc co-ordination. That it can take the pain of having to co-ordinate and conform to rigid time-tabling and institutional practices away from us, allowing us to be more disorganized, spontaneous and creative.

This ideal, of course, allies with those of the agile and lean development movements; with people in various wiki communities; with those who admire Unix or powerful functional programming languages; with Mark Bernstein's NeoVictorianComputing and with the thoughts and writings of some of my latest heroes JohnRuskin and WilliamMorris (and the ArtsAndCraftsMovement)

Smart Disorganized is my blog to talk about such things. It’s also my general programming blog (because my programming life is largely about scripting and small-scale, personally empowering projects and programming languages). And it’s my blog for cheer-leading examples of SDI-ness such as wiki, blogs, outliners and spreadsheets etc.

Now a blog : http://sdi.thoughtstorms.info/

Originally one of the StupidTribeHacks, ie. a Tribe I created around an idea.

I was trying to push this (oh, all right, I'll use the word), meme at the end of last year :

PersonalHyperText is for Smart, Disorganized Individuals ...

It stands for the idea that technologies should empower people to be smart (as opposed to aim to deskill them), should operate at the individual level (be adopted by them as personal tools, not be imposed on them as systems), and that one of the greatest productivity benefits technology could give them is to improve asynchronous, ad-hoc co-ordination, basically taking the pain of having to co-ordinate and conform to rigid time-tabling and institutional practices away from them.

Asynchronous communications technologies also allow co-ordination through spontaneous gift-giving, potentially allowing chronic procrastinators to work well. (ProcrastinationAndGiftGiving)

That's a philosophy I still believe in profoundly.

The tribe was fun because it encouraged crazy rants against personal organizers and discussions on using paper notebooks. But, of course, it's long gone.

SdiDesk (and now CardiganBay) is written for SmartDisorganizedIndividuals