The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible
system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of
your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully,
supports optional categories and beaming, and is configurable to
an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into
your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain.
The way I work, I get sidetracked easily. If I have a great idea, it will disappear in a moment,
Memento-style, if I don't write it down. I used to carry a moleskine everywhere, but it was almost impossible to organize my jottings afterward and, at $10 a pop, space costs money. It turned out I needed a more basic solution, and I settled on a stack of 3x5 cards held together with a binder clip: the
Hipster PDA. It's extensible, cheap, and easy to use. I use it to log finances, keep track of tasks, and jot down all my crazy ideas. If you're sick of expensive productivity tools, or you just enjoy the simplicity, I encourage you to try it out for a couple weeks. I'll provide some customizations and links to useful resources here, but you don't need any of those to get started right away. Just grab a stack of cards, put them together with a binder clip, and tweak as you go!
According to Mann's original
workflow, you write down a task or a piece of information that you need
later on the top blank card, turn it over, and "file it" behind some
separator on the back. When you see your pile of used cards get too big, you
offload them into a box or folder somewhere to work on later. The process is simple, it fits in your pocket, and it doesn't rely on batteries to operate.
After stumbling on this tool, I perused a couple
hacks and
variants to the original design. If you're looking to have some structure with your hPDA, the
D*I*Y Planner Hipster PDA Edition is a great tool. It has a variety of productivity forms you can use, including a day planner, a calendar, ToDo lists in several line-heights, finance forms, grids, project forms both with checklists and grids, and a whole slew of tools for David Allens
Getting Things Done (GTD) system and the Covey Planning system. I had read a little about David Allen's system and decided to bastardize it. I had my ToDo list on the back for daily stuff, but any multi-step task became a Project, and I listed everything related to it on its own Project card. I kept a couple extra project cards for tasks as well as a couple blank cards in the back for free-form ideas.
I made a helper to my hPDA that I dubbed the "external hard drive" where I kept an overstock of blank forms and extra cards if I needed to replenish my supply on the go as well as cards I wanted to off-load but couldn't file right away. Mine was just another stack and a binder clip, but people use cork-boards for this as well. As I filled up the cards, I wrote the date on the back and filed them away. Every couple days, I would backup the contents into Google Docs, so I had a digital copy and could check the task list of any project from anywhere on my iPhone.
I used the system for a couple months, and it was so easy to write things down that the amount of information my hPDA held became overwhelming. At first, I would sit down in the morning and leaf through my cards to get a sense of what I needed to work on. Later, I had too many cards, my binder clip was on the verge of bursting, and I simply couldn't process the entire list in a short amount of time. I opted to include only the project cards that I was most likely to work on, but of course my brain never really functioned that way, and ideas and tasks started to get disorganized and out of hand.
A couple months in, I redesigned the system to scale better. I had originally used my hPDA as my entire system, but it's really better as a collection device than a project manager. Google Docs worked as a backup for the information, but it didn't help me prioritize, and I was really bad about syncing the two together regularly. I needed a big list where I could dump my ideas into, an easy way to move them around and organize them later, and a way to easily say, "This is what I need to do next." I didn't realize it, but I was emulating the GTD system on my own. I realized this when I found a blog post about how to take the online task manager
Remember The Milk (RTM) and
turn it into a GTD system, and since then I've used my hPDA and RTM in tandem very successfully.
My hPDA became much thinner and functioned primarily as a collection device: all my ideas on the go went into my hPDA, and from there to RTM. RTM became my giant box that all my tasks and aspirations went into, and it was smarter, easier to organize, and I didn't have to rewrite it every time it filled up.
I'm now in the process of testing a new model. My original design used a binder ring to hold my cards in order and a pen that hung off the ring, as you can see in the picture above. My fiancee bought me the perfect hPDA pen: the
Zebra Telescopic ball-point pen. It's cheap and it's tiny, but it doesn't have to be. It replaced the original pen, and recently I went back to the original binder-clip only design. I also discovered how to attach your pen to the binder clip (not
an original idea). It makes for a very elegant design, and I plan to
test it out in the next few weeks. I'm hoping this will fix two problems: 1) I lose pens all the time, and I really like this pen, so I don't want to lose it, and 2) my hPDA gets bent in my pocket by the way I sit, so I'm hoping a simpler design will allow it to take the abuse better.
If you have any suggestions on how to improve the resilience of the hPDA, or you have your own unique workflow, please share them. I'm always interested to hear how people use this tool, and I'm not alone in that. I'm also looking for more information about the best kind of index cards (style, colors, thickness) to use for the hPDA and where to get them in bulk.
Here's a summary of useful links if you want to get started on your own hPDA:
Grammar and spelling corrections.
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