The Hipster PDA (2004)
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The Hipster PDA (2004)
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Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)
#2Haha this was a great idea. It demonstrated that many of the hard problems of mobile productivity are "soft" problems in our heads and concepts, not hardware or software problems.
I wish the "note taking app" crowd would think harder about that.
There is a great book about the early age of hype and how it failed, called "The Myth of the Paperless Office" [1]. Would be great to re-read it and see how it holds up.
By the way, there still is a market for hipster PDA gear and some companies seem to make quite a bit of profit with it - here are beautiful note taking index cards with additional gear (dividers, archival boxes and so on) [2]
Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)
#3I'm a simple man, I see the work of Merlin Mann, I upvote.
Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)
#4That was awesome. I'm still not sure what part of it was satire and what part was a real countermovement, but the hipster PDA made me read up on nice pens and paper. For a while I had an old-school Filofax. I even made my own template for calendar pages, and had a little foldable public transport map in the back. Every now and then I try to get back to a paper organizer, but things like online calendar sync are too comfortable.
Also, remember that this was before smartphones, social media and the attention stealing craze. I can imagine nowadays there would be a lot of people wanting to try out something low tech like that.
Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)
#5Haha this was a great idea. It demonstrated that many of the hard problems of mobile productivity are "soft" problems in our heads and concepts, not hardware or software problems. I wish the "note taking app" crowd would think harder about that. There is a great book about the early age of hype and how it failed, called "The Myth of the Paperless Office" [1]. Would be great to re-read it and see how it holds up. By t…
> By the way, there still is a market for hipster PDA gear and some companies seem to make quite a bit of profit with it - here are beautiful note taking index cards with additional gear (dividers, archival boxes and so on) [2]
This can become the same kind of trap that the Hipster PDA was trying to save people from — focusing too much on buying tools and not enough on using them.
Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)
#6Haha this was a great idea. It demonstrated that many of the hard problems of mobile productivity are "soft" problems in our heads and concepts, not hardware or software problems. I wish the "note taking app" crowd would think harder about that. There is a great book about the early age of hype and how it failed, called "The Myth of the Paperless Office" [1]. Would be great to re-read it and see how it holds up. By t…
> By the way, there still is a market for hipster PDA gear and some companies seem to make quite a bit of profit with it - here are beautiful note taking index cards with additional gear (dividers, archival boxes and so on) [2] This can become the same kind of trap that the Hipster PDA was trying to save people from — focusing too much on buying tools and not enough on using them.
Oh yes, it's pure indulgence.
Which is not always wrong, I mean, people spend lots of money on nice pens and paper, and that is perfectly fine.
It's just that nice pens and paper don't guarantee nice thoughts.
Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)
#7Blast from the past! I remember reading about this a long while before life was greatly enhanced and simplified and also terribly blighted by the hand-computers.
I was into paper notes for about a year, just at the very beginning before phones came and I lost interest in pretty much all analog tech.
One thing that was cool about that era was the amount of variety. Now that multi device sync exists, notetaking is a very hard technical problem, but before that expectations were lower and people could invent all sorts of systems that were totally practical by the standards of the day.
Of course I greatly prefer the modern system, but the aesthetics were pretty cool.
Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)
#8I used one of these for a while, more or less. It was great. People didn't understand how I had no phone but never missed an appointment nor lost notes.
Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)
#9Big fan of this site back in the early 2000s. Now I'm Bullet Journaling.
Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)
#10That was awesome. I'm still not sure what part of it was satire and what part was a real countermovement, but the hipster PDA made me read up on nice pens and paper. For a while I had an old-school Filofax. I even made my own template for calendar pages, and had a little foldable public transport map in the back. Every now and then I try to get back to a paper organizer, but things like online calendar sync are too c…
> remember that this was before smartphones
This was pre-phone, but solidly in the Blackberry era of smartphones