Life 2.0: Let’s make a date to get organized

I‘m onto my third column this week and, gang, I’ve got to admit I’m kind of disappointed. I wasn’t expecting a deluge of mail; nevertheless, a trickle might be nice.

Give me anything, people.

This week I was going to talk about leap years — those magical annuals that swing around every four years and leave us with a random extra day. I actually have a cousin somewhere in Arizona born on Feb. 29 who is technically only reaching his seventh birthday or something like that, although he’s a few years older than me.

Given the freakiness of this event I decided that this column would be about calendars. At first I was moving in the direction of a recent New York Times story about NBC abandoning a traditional TV calendar, but just as a few minutes spent surfing the Web can mutate into hours looking at something totally different, so too has this column morphed.

I started thinking about this great blog 43 Folders (43folders.com). The name comes from a theory about organizing your life low-tech style by putting every scrap of paper, all your notes and scraps into 12 monthly and 31 daily folders. Author Merlin Mann does a really good job introducing people to the basic experiences of Getting Things Done. To geeks, these kinds of tips are known as “lifehacking” and that got me thinking about “lifelogging.”

And you thought it sounded crazy keeping your life in manila folders? Try recording every second of your life with digital technology. Lifeloggers like Gordon Bell (http://research. microsoft.com/~GBell) wear cameras and digital recorders in an attempt to create a comprehensive digital memory. I did some digging and found that WNYC’s “On the Media” (onthemedia.org) did a pretty good job talking with Bell and journalist Clive Thompson (collisiondetection.net/) about this amazing lifestyle last month. See that interview at onthemedia.org/ transcripts/2008/01/04/07.

In two weeks I’ll be back discussing whatever you want. The first person to send me a column idea will set the topic. Because this column is an interactive experience made, in part, by its readers, I want you to send in your ideas and stories. Heard a great podcast, found a useful tool or read a smart blog? Got a tip for the next column? E-mail me at stevenrneuman@gmail.com