I just went out for a haircut, and in the chair leafed through a recent issue of Fortune magazine. The intellectual content of that magazine has dropped substantially over the years, and this one was mostly ads, including some that did their damnedest to look like articles. One was given away by the title, which said something about the Excellent Management Tools Used by Sony. Something about the title just didn't ring true.
But the interesting article was about the state of the US economy's competitive ability, which, as Tom Lehrer said in his Lobachevsky piece, stinks. Solutions were offered, ponderous thoughts pondered, despair averted. I kept looking for the comment I expected, to wit, We'd all be better off if the American workers would just give up those damn pensions, but I didn't see it. Driving home, I was mulling it over, and, as has occurred to me in the past, I wondered how often people have those Aha! moments that they lose before they get anywhere that they can do something with them. Not that I think most people do, but still, there's that possibility. How do they remember the thoughts for later, and, once its later, how do they do something with them? Because I think that good ideas come along pretty often, and frequently start with the phrase Wouldn't it be nice if.... like this one - Wouldn't it be nice if you could record thoughts on the way home and then feed them into some kind of filing system to remember them, so that once in a while you could call them up and mine them for usefulness at a time when you had time to do it?
How would this work? Well, the initial remembering part would be audio -- say, a record feature in your cell phone. Optionally, you categorize it (record, press the CAT button, give it a title). You then dump the accumulated recordings to the PC. The PC organizes by category, or, failing that, generates one based on the words found. The audio is then transcribed so far as possible into text; both are saved.
I think even just jotting down that much can help. So, this was my contribution.
2 comments:
Funny--your comment comes just as I finished listening to a voicemail I left myself last night reminding me of the results of my brainstorming while driving that I most certainly would not have remembered this morning without the reminder. It would be great to have a filing system so I could save the reminder rather than transcribing it and saving it on my computer and hoping to find it there later.
I am often guilty of assuming that an infrastructure can be constructed with just a few movements of a languid hand. I know it would take much more than that to make that kind of temporal connectivity possible, and probably it would include advertising -- Hey, we'll be right back to the message you marked urgent, but first, are you getting all you can from your hemmorhoidal balm? Try new scented ButtBeFresh with aloe! I can see it now.
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