Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [26]
E-memories will not be trapped back in cabinets and shoe boxes. They will be on our end tables and walls. They will follow us on our travels. They will keep us company, showing us friendly faces, letting us hear cherished voices. E-memory will be an intimate extension of bio-memory. And change it into something new.
RECALLING WHAT MATTERS
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’m absentminded. I forget where I put things. Sometimes, coming out of the airport terminal, I have a momentary flash of panic. Where did I park the car? Was it level one or two? I hate getting home from the grocery store, looking up at that burned-out lightbulb, and realizing that I forgot—again!—to buy a replacement.
Once I left my notebook computer containing most of my e-memory on the security table at San Francisco International Airport. I dashed back, my heart racing dangerously, wondering if someone had walked off with a digital copy of my life. Thankfully, it was still there. Then I forgot the computer again at the Dulles Airport security, and didn’t realize my mistake until I had boarded the plane and it was too late to go back. I managed to have it over nighted to me for $150, and all I could think was that I would gladly have paid many times that amount to ensure no one else had my data. More than a half million of my fellow Americans also left their computers at checkpoints in 2008.
A busy person may be plagued by absentmindedness, simply because he has a lot on his mind. You forgot to bring home the milk, because by the time you got to the grocery store you were thinking about the items needed for your pets. You forgot your lunch meeting, because you had just gotten off the phone with a colleague and were engrossed with new ideas for your next project.
Reminders must be made at the appropriate time; it is no good having a shopping list that is back at your office while you are in the grocery store. A reminder to make a phone call while you are wasting time in rush-hour traffic would be priceless. Likewise, you must be able to create reminders anytime, anyplace, or they may be lost. If you think of something that needs doing while driving, it will not suffice to have to wait a half hour to get home and write it down. Probably by then you will have thought of three other things that need doing and forgotten at least one.
This is why e-memory will be in the cloud, accessible anywhere, anytime. We want to be able to type or speak notes and to-do items whenever they occur to us. The to-do items will be associated with a time, place, or mode of activity. For example, the task “Buy milk ” is associated with the grocery store (a place). The task “E-mail Catherine” is associated with using your computer (an activity). The task “Pick up Suzy at 4:00” is associated with a time. If you are struck by the thought that a cell phone is capable of knowing time and place, and can input text, voice, and pictures, then you realize how close we are to the reality of this vision. All we need is a little more software that can understand such things as milk being available at grocery stores.
In addition to giving you all the right reminders, it will not be too long before your e-memories will fill in your other absentminded gaps. Your increasingly location-aware cell phone will remind you where you parked your car. You will track where you have left things like your glasses, either by noting where your devices last detected their RFID tag, or by taking pictures of them. When your mind is absent, your e-memory will always be there.
Having too much on my mind doesn’t just make me absentminded; it can make me feel mentally cluttered, impeding my productivity. David Allen’s popular book and seminar series Getting Things Done stands on the central premise that we are hindered by mental clutter:
First of all, if it’s on your mind, your mind isn’t clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind. . . .
Unlike your bio-memory,