Queues and personal infrastructure
A useful generalization of some elements of my Personal Learning System, My Reading & Writing Workflow is the concept of Queues.
Learned this from Rosano during a Tools for Thought Rocks (formerly, Interchange) talk. Here's the section of the video.
Queues for ingestion
Queues can be used for ingestion. I effectively already have several:
- Twitter bookmarks for interesting things I need to look into
- Pocket for things to read
- YouTube "watch later" for things to watch
- Crabhands playlist for music to listen to
- Podcasts (this queue is rather broken)
- reMarkable "To Read" folder for things (mostly papers) to read
- Stacks of books around my office for things to read
These ingestion queues are effectively inboxes that need processing. They enable the Getting Things Done behavior of filing things away in a place such that I know where things are in order to keep moving and batch process later.
Queues for action
Queues can also be used to trigger actions, effectively acting as a prioritized queue of things to do next. This makes it easier to get things done when I have low energy for prioritization: just pull the next thing off the top of the list.
- SRS prompts
- Writing prompts
- Trello boards, todo columns
- "This Week" in my note-taking system
- Books and papers to read - it occurs to me that Fred Brooks system for Sort papers by importance and relevance is a process of converting an ingestion queue into an action queue.
Queues as a unifying data structure
I've been using many of these things