Freshenable Collections

Welcome to the next post in our Freshening Series. Before we get to that, let’s review our related posts on clearing and preventing backlogs:

• Redqueening, Inbox Zero, Backlogs, and Fluid Dynamics describes Mark Forster’s Backlog Method — “isolate and redqueen” — using lots of analogies.
• Control Systems For Backlogs lays out a particular beemindable system for whittling down a backlog.

Freshening is for the case that you have something like a backlog except you have no illusions of ever clearing it. So a collection more than a backlog. Here’s the Freshening Series so far:

1. Backlog Freshening introduces the core idea: a beemindable system for ensuring nothing in your collection ever gets too stale, focused on a GitHub use case.
2. Backlog Freshening For Humans by Beeminder Support Czar Nicky broadens the idea beyond tech nerdery, focusing on the example of keeping Beeminder’s help docs fresh. (This continues to be a smashing success.)
3. Rolodex Goals gets specific about how Bethany and I use a freshening system on our database of contacts, i.e., how we beemind being less neglectful of our friends and family.
4. This post, Freshenable Collections, in which…

…we start with a partial list of other collections we have ongoing freshening goals for on Beeminder, in case anyone’s inspired. Some of these may be worth their own future posts; just ask if you want details.

• Beeminder’s Operations Manual
• Beeminder blog post ideas and drafts
• My and Bethany’s relationship repo aka conversation stack
• Post ideas for my other blogs/newsletters
• Beeminder’s main bugtracker
• BeemiOS’s bugtracker
• Beebrain’s bugtracker
• Omnitask aka my personal tasks/notes (yes, I use a collection of gissues the way other people use Notion or Obsidian)
• Math puzzles (but actually this is currently just part of Omnitask — gissues tagged PUZ)
• Beeminder’s Tips of the Day that we auto-include in bot emails
• Bibliophilia aka books I want to read
• Household projects

I’ve been on a tear lately with freshening goals, and my protocol to bootstrap them has been like so (this parallels the “Phase 1: Migration” section of the Rolodex post):

1. I notice I have something like math puzzles or AGI Friday post ideas that I want a freshenable collection of.
2. Create the empty collection, which for me usually means creating a repo in GitHub.
3. Create the freshening goal on Beeminder.
4. To get the +1, look for an existing puzzle or post idea, wherever it currently lives, and migrate it to an item in the new collection.
5. If all the pre-existing stuff is already migrated, then make an epsilon improvement to the oldest item, i.e., freshen it. That’s where all +1’s come from in the steady state.
6. Creating new items doesn’t give you +1’s — freshening is all about the old stuff.

The short version of all those steps is that migrating pre-existing items to your collection counts as freshening.

Finally, thanks to brainstorming help from many of you, here’s a meta-collection of ways to maintain a collection that all support the critical feature for freshening: a way to sort or query for the least-recently-edited item.

(Optional additional feature: a way to mark items as snoozed, meaning they’re immune from freshening. Which means your query/sort-by-stalest needs to be able to exclude snoozed items. For example, if you’re using a kanban tool like Trello, you can manually drag items to the bottom of their column when you freshen them, and move them to another column to snooze them.)

Without further ado, the meta-collection:

1. GitHub Issues (I use this for evvvverything (and maybe this is not crazy?))
2. The Things 3 app on iOS, with hackery from Philip Hellyer
3. Kanban apps like Trello or GitHub Projects (see parenthetical above)
4. A spreadsheet with a “last freshened” column
5. Plain text files in a directory sorted by last-edited
6. Emacs Org mode, probably
7. Airtable, almost surely
8. Obsidian with the Dataview or Tasks plugin
9. Taskwarrior
10. Mark Forster’s Autofocus on paper
11. Any collection of paper, like sheet music for songs in one’s piano repertoire

Thanks to Alys, Marcin Borkowski, lanthala, Brent Yorgey, and Robert Perce for contributing ideas for this post.