I Live In Constant Fear Of Doing Things Inefficiently

@scott:

My work has a gorgeous Xerox Document Center multifunction device ( no, i'm not getting paid for that ). I've recently started taking some community college classes and am now taking my textbooks and, once the chapter has been tested over, slicing out the pages and putting them in the doc feeder -> PDF.

1. Less bookshelf space consumed.
2. Less to tote around.

I grant, reading PDF isn't as good as the flip back and forth, so I don't use it for the 'learning' phase of knowledge acquisition, but keep it for reference.

It is a disease. We are pack rats of the digital age. I have several GBs worth of PDFs, code snippets and saved web pages on all kinds of subjects related to computing and not. I can't recall ever using any of it (really, maybe I used one or two bits of it), but still I can't resist collecting the stuff. The irony is that when I need something, I rarerly look in my stash even with Spotlight -- I go to Google instead. To curb this, I've been moving almost all of it into a single folder that I'll burn to DVD or put on an external disk, then delete it from my MacBook. I'm also thinking about disconnecting from the net most of the time at home and at work. Being connected makes it easy to distract oneself with email and surfing, and there are plenty of distractions without that.

I also have a ton of books that serve no purpose for me anymore, if they ever did. How many LDAP books do I need? Again, I go to Google, but it's still difficult to get rid of the books, although I had no problem giving away all of my Java books about six months ago which probably says something about Java (or about me).

*YOU* should not fear this... ;-) you have no control over what you do.
Could not resist.

The funny thing is that tools like vim are often powerful enough that if you tap into just a *little* of what they have to offer you're doing things more efficiently than most people.

In fact, if you try to take it all in, you might wind up spending more time trying to figure out a better way to do something than you would if you just sat down and did it.

Back when I was in elementary school, I did something and my teacher made me write some phrase out a hundred times and turn it into her the next day. Rather than sitting down to write the phrase over and over, I decided to get on the old Apple IIc and write a BASIC program to do it for me. The problem is, by the time I got through writing it and debugging it and I had my printout, I could have written the phrase several hundred times.

The moral of the story is... just relax. Don't stop learning new things, but don't torture yourself to find new things so you can perform a task with slightly better efficiency.

Do you use 'tags' for vim? It's something that I think I should understand, but don't. I'm pretty sure it would help me with Perl development.

Most of my software development, at the moment, takes place inside of an IDE or a non-vim-optimized environment: Java (NetBeans), Rails ( Textmate ) , C (DevC , it's Win32-oriented).

The only writing I do in vim is either short Ruby or Perl ( of long length ). I hear tags is pretty helpful. Perhaps that's the next Meissler tutorial?