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I have been tormented for many years by multiple vague ideas about calendars, todo list apps, task trackers and video games, and at 4am lying in bed I think it all just came together for me. I hate you @visabrain. Why can’t we do this after the sun comes up 😭
The idea is a little bit (inverse?)-tetris-y, a little bit simcity-esque the fundamental unit of the game is The Brick. You get to define what a brick is, or maybe pick something from a predefined list. 10 push-ups is a brick. A published blogpost is a brick https://t.co/fr9xnkbH5y
Why use this hypothetical site/app instead of a journal? Well, the cool thing about the web is hypertext. Each brick has a time stamp and you can write notes in them. Each day, you lay as many bricks as you can. At any time, you can proudly survey at all the bricks you’ve laid https://t.co/OHbjBkwWj7
For this to really work it has to be extremely lightweight, extremely fast. It’s really about maximising density of meaningful information onscreen - that’s how/why it would be better than say, an excel spreadsheet (which might actually be the best way to prototype this 🤔)
This is a broader thought experiment about displaying data. I have over 96,000 tweets. Displaying them all in a spreadsheet feels overwhelming. It would be more interesting to have them displayed as bricks. Threads = same color. Fav / RTs = intensity of color. Mouse-over to read https://t.co/KagyxoT2v7
Another way you can think of this is as a sort of compressed view of Google calendar, if you use your Google calendar very judiciously. Is there a simple/easy way to see all of the “bricks” (events) from a calendar over a year? Overview Effect for your own tasks/accomplishments https://t.co/c6TUP7qvo1
Take this thread, which is kind of one of my ways of collecting bricks. It’s 55 bricks of me meeting friends. I’d like to, at a glance, see all 55 bricks against a calendar, contextualized by all the other bricks, or in isolation https://t.co/xiudRxgayt
55. Mediterranean with @sharanvkaur, @made_in_cosmos & @artpi: remote work, travel, being semi-nomadic, the spirit & letter of rituals, incentives, schooling, infrastructure, customer support, online stores, forums, languages, different cultures, Patreon, blogging vs tweeting https://t.co/69diBr06Ud
Here’s a list of 865 of my threads. A lot of scrolling 😅 what if I could have them displayed as little squares instead? 🤔 https://t.co/mtWq6QnJN0
I have another 780 bricks over at @1000wordvomits Right now I have to do a lot of context switching to make sense of all of my bricks, it would be super cool to have all of them in the same place The humble little square as a visual interface https://t.co/fXSZwdSbm3
The bullet journal community understands the power of humble little squares https://t.co/FO6B7pKsCR
Some decisions have to be made about what precisely each square is allowed to represent, and how they can be presented. You can’t be too flexible, there have to be constraints. Will think more + experiment and find out what’s best for me. Devil in the details
😩 but also 🤓! https://t.co/Ly5uPL5bkn
One day you’ll get to walk around a room full of your bricks and pick them up and inspect each of them. Every brick has a story, and every pattern of bricks has a story too https://t.co/0Dc3WaCwmf
feeling quite morose that I can't splay out all 58,400 of my tweets onto a giant 360 degree superdome, with all the threads visualized, and then wave my hands around Minority Report style to delete the clutter and rearchitect the best into a megaweb of megathreads
Yes! Another approach I read about was using paperclips to count pomodoros IRL. Now imagine having jars and jars of paperclips, and every paperclip can actually tell you what was the task you did, and when, and even links to the relevant thing https://t.co/ZIr2iXbymW
Another thing I used to do was to write on post-it’s and then skewer them when I was done. I intended to review them afterwards, but it was a hassle to write all the dates and times and to then re-log them. Could be done automatically by software https://t.co/yyYgJLvMrp
And I also use the power of humble little boxes to track my @1000wordvomits. It’s very fulfilling to watch it fill out over time. But again, kinda sad that real life paper doesn’t have magical metadata attached https://t.co/DpHe2wKqBR
I see that github too understands the power of humble little squares I want this but for everything https://t.co/V8n21xgfD5
🧱 b r i c k s 🧱 https://t.co/90iPy3Xk7A