Jul 7th, 2024 Sunday Cloudy
I have a bad habit of using computers – I do not close anything until I am certain that whatever document/webpage/application that is being used is one hundred percent done.
This habit stems from an offline practice of making lists. I was told, from a young age, “a worn pencil is better than the best memory”, meaning that writing things down is the most reliable way to remember them. As someone who insists that nothing important should be forgotten, I constantly create a variety of lists, for school, for work, and for daily life.
For school and work, this exhaustive approach usually pays off, because I can take care to complete all the items on the list in due time, and the satisfaction of crossing off item after item gives me a sense of accomplishment.
It also helps me to leave work at work. Once I have put down tasks of the next day/week on a list that I can see as soon as I come back to office, I can rest assured that timely progress will be made, and I will have fresh energy to tackle the list. Then my mind is at peace for the night/weekend, “out of sight, out of mind”.
For daily life, since I hate to waste precious leisure time on finding fun activities instead of actually doing fun activities, I keep a stack of lists on various topics: anime movies worth watching with my husband, interesting board games to buy/try, game night theme ideas, new restaurants to visit/fancy restaurants for special dates, books to check out from libraries, etc. Often these lists were born in two ways. Either I come across some good recommendations while browsing casually and would like to save them in my pocket for the future, or I did do some research but found more suggestions than I could use at the time, and I would rather not repeat the same research a second time. So the simple solution is to WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN, in an organized way, of course.
Honestly, this works pretty well for the most part, except that over the years, this list stack has grown to the extent that my husband joked that I need a list for lists 😛
How is this related to my computer habit? I basically use the web browser as a list manager. I open all the tabs that I use daily and keep them open at the end of the day, so that I can see them without any effort in the morning. Moreover, I keep all the relevant search results of certain projects (e.g. potential car purchase) open as well. You can see that this will slow down the computer, and for work computers, may cause system-wide performance issues.
You might ask, why don’t I use bookmarks? After all, bookmarks are designed to help the user return to the page as quickly as possible, and they take minimal space.
The problem of bookmarks is that the actual page is hidden from me, and I may not realize I need to check it once I no longer see it. In the hustling of everyday life, there are just too many distractions happening at each minute that it can be challenging to diligently track all the quests I have taken on. UNLESS they are right in front of me.
Funny enough, perhaps my working memory is not that different from that of Yuuki, who could go crazy about a toy in one minute, but move on to the next adventure in another minute as long as the first toy is no longer in view.
Perhaps that is why she is always so focused on every little chase she does and enjoys life to the fullest.