About

The Smart Disorganized Individual was a concept I was developing around the same time as a personal productivity program called SdiDesk. It stands for the idea that technologies should empower us to be smart (as opposed to aim to de-skill us), should operate at the individual level (be adopted by us as personal tools, not be imposed on us by hierarchies), and that one of the greatest productivity benefits that technology can give us is to improve asynchronous, ad-hoc co-ordination. That it can take the pain of having to co-ordinate and conform to rigid time-tabling and institutional practices away from us, allowing us to be more disorganized, spontaneous and creative.

This ideal, of course, allies with those of the agile and lean development movements; with people in various wiki communities; those in the “tools-for-thought” and “future of code” communities; with those who admire Unix or powerful functional programming languages; with Mark Bernstein’s “Neo-Victorian Computing“; and with the thoughts and writings of some of my latest heroes : John Ruskin and William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts movement)

Smart Disorganized is my blog to talk about such things. It’s also my general programming blog (because my programming life is largely about scripting and small-scale, personally empowering projects and programming languages). And it’s my blog for cheer-leading examples of SDI-ness such as wiki, blogs, outliners and spreadsheets etc.

My own main note-taking, digital gardening and scripting “tool for thought” today is Cardigan Bay, a wiki-like notebook written in Clojure / ClojureScript. Which allows embedded ClojureScript in pages and has some other nice tricks.

The new tagline : “Mind Traffic Geometry” refers to two things. Mind Traffic Control is the name of an experimental task management service I wrote several years ago, as an exercise in getting to use the Google App. Engine.  “Geometry” is a metaphor that I’m constantly reaching for when thinking of the kinds of software I like : wikis are networks, outlines are trees, spreadsheets are grids, blogs are sequences, as are the queues of Mind Traffic Control. What are the geometries that work best for organizing the traffic of the mind?

I’m Phil Jones and this is one of my online personae. You can get a broader view about me from my homepage, my wiki : ThoughtStorms, my GitHub or StackExchange accounts.