Vitamin-R's Note Pads
At first, the claim that we can increase our intelligence using external objects may sound a little strange, but we all know that doing long division in our head is a lot harder than doing it on a piece of paper. Cognitive scientists such as Donald A. Norman, author of Things That Make Us Smart, talk about “external cognitive artifacts” to describe such external assistants.
The human brain, amazing as it is, is downright terrible at a number of fairly simple tasks. Our “working memory,” for instance, is limited to remembering around seven distinct “chunks” of information. When we push a new chunk into our working memory after that limit is reached, one of the other items pops right out. As for our longer-term memory, it isn’t very reliable, either.
Vitamin-R’s Note Pads are your “memory outside of your brain,” so to speak.
You can access these note pads at any moment, and from any application, by using their keyboard shortcuts (see Vitamin-R 3 ⇒ Preferences ⇒ Shortcuts). They are also accessible via the “Note Pads” menu item, by right clicking on the (R) menu bar item, etc.
The Note Pads are divided into a few rough categories you can use to place text, pictures, links, etc.
The Now Pad is for adding thoughts and data that are directly related to the task at hand, and that really should be in your working memory. Using this section is especially useful when you are interrupted or become sidetracked, and your brain dumps the content of your working memory. A few quick pointers to what should be in your head will help you “reload” your working memory much faster.
The Later section is for all the things that go through your head but aren’t relevant right now. Until you’ve written them down somewhere, you won’t be able to get them out of your head because you’ll worry about forgetting them. Write them down, allow them to escape your attention, and continue on your task.
The Scratch Pad section is a freeform section where you can add everything that doesn’t neatly fit anywhere else. If you have your own system for writing things down, you can use this section to enhance and centralize your system of information.
How is All This Supposed to Work in Practice?
Let’s say you get a phone call during a time slice. You know you’ve only got ten minutes left in your time slice and you shouldn’t get sidetracked. If you are unwilling to just let your answering machine or voicemail system take the message, pick up the phone. Tell the caller that you are in the middle of something, and will phone them back in ten minutes. Jot down the phone number in the Later Pad, and get back to your work. By that time, you may have forgotten what you were doing. Check your Objective to remind yourself of the task and, assuming you have used the Now Pad as suggested, quickly read through your notes there. With any luck, this will get you back into a “zone” of high productivity in no time.
Another example: I’m writing a help book section about the Note Pads. My objective for the next twenty minutes is to “Write the help section for the Note Pads.” On my Later Pad, there’s the note “document the shortkeys related to the Note Pads and mention them in the help book section,” while the Now Pad contains a number of things I still need to write about, e.g. “pen & paper alternative, breadcrumbs, templates, the FastType feature.”
Breadcrumbs
I have already mentioned the problem with interruptions: they cause your brain to dump your working memory, and it can be difficult and time consuming to get back into “the zone” after being interrupted.
This is generally true no matter what the interruption is. Unscheduled interruptions are difficult to deal with, and can severely reduce your productivity level. But what about the scheduled interruptions (aka “regular breaks”) that were are taking?
Taking a break will no doubt cause you to lose the contents of your working memory, and will involve some extra work to recover that content and reestablish an acceptable level of productivity. The difference with other interruptions is that we know when they will happen and can thus properly prepare for them.
One way of doing this is by leaving some breadcrumbs, like in the Hänsel and Gretel fairy tale. We can use the Scratch Pad to leave ourselves some reminders as to what we were working on, which resources we will need (URLs, documents, etc). By doing this, when we come back from our break, we can get back on track with a suspended task or begin a new task much more easily.
Alternatives
Vitamin-R’s Note Pads work well for activities that are performed on your Mac, but some people may prefer using a pen-and-paper approach. There is nothing wrong with that; after all, the value of any organization or productivity system lies mostly in the practice.
FastType
Vitamin-R’s Note Pads are not intended to be a text editor. Their purpose is to serve as a place to jot things down quickly to get them out of your head and onto “paper.”
To expedite text entry, the Note Pads provide some intuitive ways of adding notes. Collectively, these features are called FastType.
It is easier to experience than to describe how FastType works, so try this:
- Hold down the ⌘ and ⌥ keys and press the N key to bring up the Now Pad
- Press the ⏎ key to start a new line.
- Type: * first point
Upon pressing the space bar, the * turns into a proper bullet point, followed by a ⇥. Pressing ⏎ at this point will continue the bulleted list on a new line, as you would expect from a word processor.