Capture Pychosis

There’s no excuse for forgetting anymore, and that’s not a good thing

You can now note, capture, photograph or otherwise record about every damn sandwich or second of your life.

The idea every device manufacturer puts in front of you is roughly the same:

“Thought of something? Get it down right away, and get it out of your head and then do all these wonderful things with it.”

“Capture, capture, capture. Share, share, share!”

Make more bits, churn more and more data, and grease the cogs of the imminent Data Apocalypse.

Turn on the phone and you go travelling at light speed into forgetting 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. With that goes any sense of paying attention to what you were doing. Your entire train of thought went as well. Also, any sense of wellbeing you could ever have while facing this neurosis.

I hate to tell you this, but noting is not doing

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. This psychosis leaves you not able to tell where it starts and stops anymore. As a recovering productivity guy, there is one crucial thing I didn’t realise soon enough. That is these things can all too quickly take over your life. They become religion, ideology and the method instead of a reason. I for one need another religion in my life like I need a new task manager or bullet in my head.

The more you think you have to do, the more you have to do. It’s that simple. 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.

Just don’t do it

So, what can you do about it? Well you have to stop. That simple, Stop. See what happens. See how you manage. See how your life won’t collapse and how all the productivity stress goes away.

You’ll see the world didn’t collapse and you aren’t buried under loads of stress. The stress caused by all these things floating around in your head. I remember a particular time that I thought “Man, I really have to remember to call that guy.” Immediately, I went for the smartphone to enter this into some sort of system. Whatever type of system or app I had at the time. Then I realised, it wasn’t that important, and it was a hell of a lot easier to not call the person. If it is important, chances are you’ll remember it, or someone will remind you of it. If not, oh well. And oh well we don’t have enough of and there for sure isn’t an app for that.

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.

The main problem isn’t recording things maybe. It’s not having to do things you rather wouldn’t.