TMI

This will be part of a larger post somewhere, probably on LinkedIn, but I want to organize my thoughts some… and you get to help.

Think about all the information you juggle on a daily basis. If you’re like me it’s a constant assault from a variety of sources, from the moment you wake up and check your phone, to the moment your brain finally stops crunching and you fall asleep. You try your best to process what you can at that moment, put some of it in “short term storage”, and perhaps discard the rest. Articles abound on how human memory and decision-making works; it’s not that kind of post. What this post is about is how to handle this information firehose, saving the bits we need (and we might not know what we need when we get it) and tossing the rest.

Where you do receive information? For me, it comes from my wife, my kids, Outlook, and Gmail, my calendar, Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, Alexa, my watch, iMessage, Slack and Discord, traffic lights and street signs, push notifications. It’s things I need to address immediately — there’s a technical problem at work, there’s someone at the door, the oven timer has 2 minutes left — and things that can wait.

Usually this is where someone would suggest the task or notes program that comes with the phone, or something like Evernote. That doesn’t scale, though. It’s fine for tasks, but not everything is a task. I visited a new primary care physician here in NC and he asked me when my last Tdap (tetanus) shot was. I couldn’t even take a wild guess. I needed to see who to make our first mortgage payment to, but I couldn’t find that one piece of paper out of dozens from our closing that might have it. What was the name of that one database engineer who helped me out last time, I think in April or so? Which airline was it again where we had the $250 voucher? What’s my son’s SSN? And so on.

There’s all this information flying about but no “glue” to tie it to one place, to make connections between pieces of it (e.g. here’s all the travel-related info), or to search it. It’s scattered amongst multiple devices, dozens of systems, hundreds of pieces of paper, and committed to memory (which doesn’t always stick).

So I need a way to organize and search all of this information flying by me every day, and short of personally submitting to some sort of D.A.R.Y.L.-like procedure, it’ll have to be organized by a computer application. This product needs to be able to accept widely differing classes of data, from tidbits like room measurements and cholesterol results, to tax documents and photos and written notes. It then needs to be able to index it and offer it for search; the search engine needs to understand what kind of information it is. Some of it will be highly personal and potentially damaging if shared, so I wouldn’t trust this system to live anywhere outside of my home server. Since not everyone runs a home server, the product needs to be made accessible for the lay-person: simple to install, back up, maintain, and prune.

Maybe this exists already and I’m not aware of it. Otherwise, I’d like to help build it.