Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Hipster PDA (2004)

43folders.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 65 posts

Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)

#51

Post by joelesler »

captainmuon wrote: post #4

That 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…

Merlin himself actually used the system, so, at least he bought into his own hype.

Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)

#52

Post by dang »

Related:

The Hipster PDA (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28245408 - Aug 2021 (1 comment)

The Hipster PDA (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929462 - July 2021 (1 comment)

The Hipster PDA (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21743224 - Dec 2019 (1 comment)

Introducing the Hipster PDA (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14429300 - May 2017 (1 comment)

Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)

#53

Post by SllX »

tomjen3 wrote: post #46
akavi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Myth of the Paperless Office seems less like a myth and more like a premature prediction. As someone whose career started in 2011, I don't think I've ever used a company printer for anything but a convenient way to print out personal files. In fact, I don't think I've ever interacted with paper in a professional capacity except: * to sign employment contracts (and even that's gone 100% digital in the past 5 years…

Interesting. I was handed a stack of CVs to review by my boss today. They were all printed. So was my employment contract. On my desk is a stack of paper for note taking, drawing and problem solving. I am sure there are places that have gone entirely digital, but the best replacement for notepaper seems to be things like the remarkable, and it is a poor replacement. Paper is never going to need an update at an inconv…

My accountant’s office is entirely paperless and has been for about 10 years now. They actually went on a crusade against paper around that time and bringing up the idea of dropping some paper off instead of emailing documents in is enough to visibly stress my accountant out.

It’s viable, even in the “paper” pushing businesses and at this point is a matter of whether an office has made the choice or not. Personally I still have a pad of paper for structuring some free form thoughts out before committing them to digital form, but I definitely deal a lot more with PDFs and web forms than paper because no one I deal with wants to deal with paper if they can avoid it (including me).

Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)

#54

Post by SllX »

captainmuon wrote: post #4

That 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…

Not satire at all actually, and to be a counter movement would suggest that there was more movement behind PDAs than there actually was. The name maybe a little bit of a joke, but this was a legitimate system that Merlin Mann came up with and used in his job at the time that served functionally the same role as a PDA at a fraction of the cost. About the only things it wouldn’t do is synchronize with your computer or tell you the time; but it also didn’t run on batteries or depend on an idiosyncratic pen input method or tiny keyboard.

Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)

#55

Post by goofist »

I still do this. I keep a pocket sized card folio and a pen on me at all times. I go on daily walks and take my cards with me. Ideas pop up and I write them down on a card. Once a note is recorded, I insert its card into the back of my folio. Once per week (at least, on a schedule) I empty the folio of ideas and enter them into a my digital notes system (bespoke, made with emacs). From there I can label, associate, file-away, and prioritize different ideas.

I find the main benefit to doing all of this is the ritual itself. By revisiting ideas a couple of times throughout the "card lifecycle", I form associations between disparate thoughts.

For maybe 20% (idk) of the ideas I jot down a smartphone wouldn't have been as easy or as useful. Besides, I like to go on walks without a phone - when I go to record a idea I am guaranteed not to be distracted by some notification or prompt from the rest of life.

If you can stand to look like a throwback or hipster or wackadoodle, I recommend keeping a small note pad or set of cards on you all the time.

another use, less relevant in today's world than in the world of a few years ago: When meeting people at a coffee shop or restaurant, it was nice to hand everybody a card and a pen and ask them to doodle something. This was a nice icebreaker.

Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)

#56

Post by mwattsun »

Larry David did an episode on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" in which he lost his small pocket notepad. In it he had written that he offered a $500 reward if lost and found. His next door neighbor found it in the yard and demanded the money, which Larry's character thought was outrageous.

From that I realized I needed to start writing down my ideas because I was losing most of them. If it works for Larry David, maybe it could work for me.

Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)

#57

Post by prmoustache »

tomjen3 wrote: post #46
akavi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Myth of the Paperless Office seems less like a myth and more like a premature prediction. As someone whose career started in 2011, I don't think I've ever used a company printer for anything but a convenient way to print out personal files. In fact, I don't think I've ever interacted with paper in a professional capacity except: * to sign employment contracts (and even that's gone 100% digital in the past 5 years…

Interesting. I was handed a stack of CVs to review by my boss today. They were all printed. So was my employment contract. On my desk is a stack of paper for note taking, drawing and problem solving. I am sure there are places that have gone entirely digital, but the best replacement for notepaper seems to be things like the remarkable, and it is a poor replacement. Paper is never going to need an update at an inconv…

With more and more "office" workers working remotely there is less reliance on paper. I signed my contract digitally, never printed anything.

But I sometime write on my desk to take quick notes (but don't bother using paper).

Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)

#59

Post by vlark »

sidpatil wrote: post #5
uniqueuid wrote: post #2

Haha 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.

Yup. I drool over JetPens.com, Field Notes, and Doane Paper.

Re: The Hipster PDA (2004)

#60

Post by drpixie »

Love it. Back when I was managing development at a large corporate, I kept a box of pencils prominently on my desk.

For about 1/2 the small project requests that came to the department, the best for the task was not a database, not a new app screen, not some expensive workflow system, nothing on the cloud ... it was a pencil and a brain.

Sometimes a computer is a great tool. But many times it is overkill, expensive, and not appropriate.

Post reply on HN