Reorg.el is a journal-based “personal attention reorganization system” (PARS) built ontop of emacs org-mode and the senters framework. Unlike personal organization systems such as Paul Allen’s GTD and Ryder Carroll’s bullet journaling, its goal is not merely to stay ontop of an endless incoming list of tasks, but to achieve greater agency over personal attentional resources. Further, while it is mainly a solitary system at present, it is designed to boost cooperative intelligence.
This README is very much out of date and I am in the process of revamping it. The code is in flux at moment as I’m trying to make a big push to get a lot done on it this weekend and the next few evenings most likely. The most immediate things I’m working on are listed below, which will get it at least to that state. The next step after that is to complete the implementation of expressing centers, and dirt-minimal non-AI attendent algorithm, (only instruments are so far supported, and only steps actually work, not yet signs, because I need to implement inql).
- [X] rename project to reorg
- [X] separate reorg server and senters library
- move server into reorg.el repo
- code for supporting an emacs-based PASS goes into reorg-server
- [ ] update reorg-server to expect one step and one sign per instrument
- [ ] change reorg.el functions to seek the instrument by name and use its one step
- [ ] recreate personal instrument calls to test with
- [ ] new syntax for instruments define the engine as the first
segment that in a sense namespaces the instrument
- new syntax
# + instrument inql.$INSTR # - sign $QUERY # - step $ARGS - [ ] remove expectation of “sign name” and “step name”, which are longer things that exist
- [ ] continue to support optional engine key in case there’s a way in which makes sense to pass params to engine in instrument definition, which it seems there could be plent of reason to do
- [ ] update reorg-step to use new instrument syntax
- [ ] define, generate, and parse instruments as $ENGINE.INSTR
- new syntax
- [ ] update reorg README
- [ ] update senters spec doc
Personal organization matters. Not just for efficient task management and prioritization (though that is important and valuable in its own right) but to exercise more intentionally the uniquely human capacity for self-authorship, both at a personal level and at a social, cooperative level.
Writing (in a general sense of “graphical technology” including diagramming, mathematical notation, software code, etc) is a tool for thinking, that permeates and defines the modern human niche. As Alva Noe explores in his book “Strange Tools”, the arts and philosophy are “bent on the invention of writing”, which is to say that writing is a means by which we engage in a second-order activity of reorganizing our first-order activities.
All graphical practices have their own charactistic merits as tools of thought, and at root this is because ecologically situated embodied human cognition is externally scaffolded by the use of tools that enable us to coordinate attention socially. Reorg.el is designed within the framework of the Senters project, which seeks to develop a graphical practice at the basic intersection of machine-learnable behaviors and human joint attentional scaffolding to make computing, and human cooperative communication in general, more expressively powerful. Further details can be found at http://senters.info.
It has been my own experience that it can’t be overstated how much tangible satisfactiom and life-saving benefit comes from having a graphical practice of reorganization, that is to say any sort of system by which one’s own life is effectively and reliably controlled by semiotic acts within the system.
The following are core principles of both Reorg.el and the Senters project broadly:
- Self-authorship
Writing our own attentional scaffolding is a vehicle of self-reorganization.
- Collaborative Sensemaking
Writing our own attentional scaffolding facilitates points of common ground in networks of authors sharing use of the same scaffolding.
- Intelligence Amplification
Writing our own attentional scaffolding empowers individuals, and networks of individuals establishing common ground through use of scaffolding, to wield cognitive capacities that would not be possible without these tools.
One caveat to be made about Senters as a broader project versus the current state of the Reorg as a PARS, is that Senters is designed to become a system integrated into immersive interaction in a fine-grained way. Presently it is not yet developed to that extent. In Reorg, Senters is generally likely to be more coarse-grained in its application at its present stage. Eventually it should start to approach its aspirations of being a seamless bicycle for the mind or “ecology of bike paths for embodied minds”.
Another caveat to make is that Senters is designed with joint attention and intelligence augmentation through building on a broader pool of socially shared scaffolding. At its present stage Reorg is much more solitary. However as Senters becomes more well-developed, if successful it can benefit from a larger pool of authors interfacing through the gestures that they intentionally share with one anouther.
This section is currently in the process of being rewritten
- Is Reorg ready for use by someone encountering the current
docuementation and supporting tools?
To be honest, probably not yet, as it’s flux and I’m still feeling out what are the best ways of doing/expressing things. It will become increasingly accessible as the level of “cognitive automation” increases with more of the methodology being baked into the supporting framework.