DigitalThomWeblog

Have you ever discovered something so horrific that you nearly threw up on the spot? That happened to me today. Every once in a while I take public transit to my office away from home. Today was one of those days. I hastily put everything in my backpack and ran out the door to catch the bus. Somewhere between my office door and the bus, all of the Moleskine’s I was using were gone. I must have forgotten to zip up the pocket they were in. All of my notes. All of my design drawings. Some personal information. Receipts. Names. Numbers. All gone.

This is the risk of a paper based lifestream. I have a PDA, a T-Mobile MDA, but I only use it to make phone calls, store documents, email, Twitter, and keep my lists. I never kept lists in my Moleskine. Typically I scan the notebooks for relevant tasks, notes and list additions, and type them into a note file I keep on my PDA. I felt good about it. I had a digital copy of some notes and lists and everything else just stayed in the book.

Remember the IT guy always telling you to backup? Well, it had been months since I’d backed up my Moleskine. There is no recovering months of work. There are things in those books I can’t remember, and I planned it that way. My poor execution in backing up my trusted system came back to bite me in the ass.

So now the question; do I go out and buy new Moleskine’s or do I abandon this type of collection system all together? At the moment I’m just sick and pissed all at the same time. I went back later to trace my steps and no luck finding them. Hopefully someone will find my business cards in the back and call me, but nothing yet. My instinct is to go get the books and quit whining, get over it, move on. So I’ll wait until tomorrow. Maybe I will have a clear head and make the right decision.

Cammeron Reilly pointed me to a blog post of his when he first made the leap to a paper lifestream, and the concern he had about losing it. I never really had that problem. Maybe naively I assumed nothing would ever happen because I was always careful. But this one day when I rushed instead of took my time, really messed me up. I guess now I have a reason to write more blog posts on the subject.