Single-stepping "continuations"
I love continuations.
You could even say, I'm obsessed with them.
...I mean, I even toyed with a programming language where everything is a continuation!
But alas, the madness doesn't stop there. No, no, no.
I also like to take the idea of continuations into the real world.
Let me explain.
Say I need to do the laundry, but it's far too early in the morning to run a noisy laundry machine.
So, I would pull out the laundry basket and put it in the middle of the living room, near the washing machine, and leave it there for the rest of the day.
That way, I've done the first step, and left the rest of it as a continuation.
Now, I will proceed to stumble over the laundry basket every time I go through the living room (a busy area), so I'm bound to get annoyed by it enough to do the rest of the laundry process later!
You seem skeptical...
Let me give another example:
In my EDC post, I shared about the triangle-folded grocery bags I carry around...
But where should grocery bags go when they are not folded?
A box of grocery bags would make sense, but in there, the unfolded grocery bags are neither on their way to being folded, nor in my way.
So they will stay unfolded and messy forever!
That's why not-yet-folded bags hang around on my bed. (And as I write, I can see two of them there).
The bed is one of the best surfaces I have for folding bag triangles, so they are on their first step to being fully folded.
And I will need to use that bed when it's time to sleep, so I am forced to deal with them at some point.
It's a beautiful system. I've called it "one-stepping", "bread-crumbing", now "continuations".
The whole point is doing a bit of the work, then leaving the rest somewhere I will notice it.
I can pick up the rest from there, and I never need to write anything down in a task list!
...I only need allot a bit of time at the end of the day to finish up any leftover tasks...
For some reason, my bed has become the place for anything that needs to be triaged.
Phone charger needs to be put away? Bed.
Craft materials for that project I started but haven't finished yet? Bed again.
Need to stash a backpack after a long day at work? On the bed it goes.
Documents that need to be shoved away into the document-box? Guess what—bed.
Clean clothes that were just picked dry off the clothes line? Bed.
Half-dirty clothes that can be used one more before laundry? Also bed.
Actually dirty clothes that haven't been moved to the laundry basket? Bed again, but hopefully a different corner of it...
Of course, I do need my bed at the end of the day. (Letting myself use a different bed when one is full of stuff just means the pile grows larger, trust me.)
Hence, anything I don't manage to sorting out has to be moved.. to my desk. And desk chair.
Then, the bed is clean, and I can look at the things that need triaging in the morning.
...Or I can move them back to the bed. To sort things out in the evening.
It's a wonderful cycle... that keeps the room in constant motion.
..Oh, huh, a misprinted sheet of paper I should have thrown away ages ago. What's that even doing on my desk, lol.
Recently, James posted a quiz on "Blogger Archetypes", which included the following question:
Suppose you have 20 open tabs that have been sitting for a few days. What do you do with them?
- Leave them open, ready to inspire me when I need them.
- Put them all in folders so I can find them all later.
- Look through them and share some links on your website.
- Declare "Tab Zero" and close them all :)
I don't get the people who would pick the last option. It throws away all the baby, baby-water, and even concept of baby-water away!!
...That is to say, it would be foolish to assume that my one-stepping antics in the real world don't follow me back into the virtual world.
For me, a tab is a process. A task I'll eventually work on. A continuation.
Leaving a tab open means "I will look at this and do the next step of the overall thing it is related to".
For example, I want to work on a side project involving portal rendering. Instead of putting it on a dead-tree TODO list or letting it sit at the back of my mind as a memory, I can instead... leave the tab open.
Yes, it's annoying. The tab takes up space on the screen, and squishes all other tabs in bold neglect of Fitts's law. It even attracts the ridicule of people without open tabs.
But, it means I will get back to the idea, and chase it to the end. Even if that means closing the tab a month later
I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me: my study is so full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon.
Naturally, there are tabs that I can't do much about, even if I looked at them again. Say for example, a music disk I want to buy, but would much rather batch into a bigger order. Or, perhaps, a nasty bug in open source software that would be great to fix some day. Or perhaps a text editor I want to try out when I have the time.
...that's when I use bookmarks.
Tab Stash is an absolutely amazing extension which lets me hide a tab away, but still leave it around in a pile of bookmarks for later. That way, I can limit open tabs to things that are immediately relevant, and avoid wallowing in regret as I see an important bucket list tab day and day again.
Though.. Tab Stash is perhaps too amazing; the lack of tight space limits on a computer makes it far too easy to add more and more tabs to the pile, never processing them.
Maybe that's a problem1... 🤔
Around the the end of last year, I was going to write an article about finally achieving "Inbox Zero".
...The very next day, a bunch of newsletters arrived, and ruined the whole zero-email moment.
But, what's worse, I subsequently destroyed any chance of a zero-email inbox by intentionally leaving emails pending.
It should surprise no reader that I use emails to keep track of future tasks too.
Every still-in-the-inbox email is a continuation.
A task. Perhaps, an upcoming event to attend. Maybe a ticket to travel with.
A promise.
A promise to.. reply? A promise to reach back to someone.
...Sometimes even someone dear.
A conversation ready to be continued...
...buried under tons of less-dear piles, of piles, queues of queues, continuations that stumble upon other continuations as they go to the living room.
A cycle of cycles, never ending, melding into each other.
Today it's a blogpost. Tomorrow, paperwork and filing away documents to their places. Then, swapping winter clothes with summer clothes from storage. Then a walk in the park.
Every day, a different excuse.
But maybe today, it could be a reply. To you? (:
...That'd be nice 😊
The main thing about continuations is that they can be continued.
But, that's not the only thing you can do with a continuation.
You can also store it away for later use.
You can also forget/drop it completely.
In programming, a proper continuation-passing-style program would usually do all three...
Ordinarily, every code unit ends by continuing into some next continuation (like the return statement continues the execution of some caller).
Sometimes, a code unit would store a continuation until it's ready to use it, (like storing a callback that's waiting on input).
And when a code unit flow has to branch (like an if statement), it would take a decision to continue down one continuation, and forget the other one.
I do a good job of storing continuations, but...
Perhaps I too.. need to take decisions to drop some continuations.
And continue the rest of them more eagerly, not letting them pile up as much.
Both time and space are limited, after all. 😅
Editor's note: disregarding the thought-absorbed end of the article, the aftermath of drafting it was predictable: First, in long-standing tradition of resolving problems after writing about them, I proceeded to clear not one, but two piles that had been piling up: about 100 tabs and everything that was cycling between the bed and the desk. Second, in another long-standing tradition, the draft joined the pile of unpublished drafts, and sat open in a tab for a whole week before I found time to look at it again. Of course, it was really effective at blocking the writing of any new drafts while it waited there...
NB: I vaguely recall a blog post about how great it would be if computers had slowly disappearing files that force you to reduce digital hoarding. If any reader remembers it, I would be thrilled to find it again (and link it here).↩︎
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