Capture Psychosis

There’s no excuse for forgetting anymore it seems. You can now note, capture, photograph or otherwise record just about every damn sandwich or second of your life.
The idea every device manufacturer puts in front of you is “Thought of something? Write it down right away, and get it out of your head and then do all these wonderful things it it.” “Capture, capture, capture. Share, share, share!” Turn on the phone or whatever and there you go travelling at light speed into forgetting even where or who you are just to get that one flash, that one idea, or the need to remember to buy milk down and recorded. But right alongside that goes what you were doing, probably your entire train of thought and any sense of wellbeing you could ever possibly have in the face of this capture neurosis.

The thing that every productivity system and bit of software that you’re supposed to integrate into every single nook and cranny in your life do is create a low level psychosis where you start to not be able to tell where it starts and stops anymore. As a recovering organisational type guy, and one who who’s avoided calling himself a lifehacker under pain of death, one of the things I soon realised is these things can all too quickly take over your life. They become religion, ideology, the method instead of a reason, and I for one need another religion in my life like I need a new task manager or bullet in my head.

Fact is, the more you think you have to do, the more you have to do. The more you have to record every single little thing that comes to mind, the more your life revolves around recording every little single thing that comes to mind.

So what can you do about it? You can stop. That simple, just stop. See what happens. See how you manage and see how your life won’t collapse and all that stress free productivity that is in reality quite stressful goes away.

The world indeed won’t collapse and you won’t be buried under loads of stress with all these things floating around in your head. I remember one particular time that I thought “Man, I really have to remember to call that guy” and immediately went for the smartphone to enter this into some sort of system, whatever type of system I had at the time. Then I realised, it wasn’t that important, and it was a hell of a lot easier to just not call the person. The thing is, is that if it is incredibly important, chances are you’ll remember it, or someone will remind you of it.

A lot of us like to think that writing it down is doing it. And worse yet, we trick ourselves into thinking that writing it down is going to make the thing we don’t want to do go away. It doesn’t. So stop. And then remind me to stop as well.

So the main problem isn’t recording things maybe, its just not having to do things you rather wouldn’t.