# 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McKXW-bP2HQ&t=728s). ## 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