Self-organized Life
Notes on time ⌛️🌍🌀🪐
Two weeks ago I received this whatsapp message from a close friend:
He was frustrated. Understandably, to be honest. Nothing frustrates me as much as this feeling.
I’ve always considered this a memory problem. It’s the reason behind the overwhelm.
Think about the increasing number of information streams, and now mix it with our short attention spans. We’re becoming very distracted, and it seems to be getting worse.
This presents a challenge that I personally find interesting:
How do we ‘remember stuff’?
How ‘remembering’ works
You’ve likely had this experience when looking for an old picture in your phone’s camera roll: you navigate directly to photos in a known time frame, then look more closely forward or backward from there.
This little back-and-forth is exactly what your brain does when trying to remember stuff.
Memory generally works through associations - I automatically recall specific memories by connecting them to other events that happened around the same time frame. This is especially true when trying to remember something from long ago - I find myself remembering related events that happened around the time, then using associations to find the specific memory. However, I can't usually access the exact memory directly right away.
Here’s a small peek into what does that mean..
Below are some example scenarios where I had to remember a different thing in order to remember THE thing:
Example I:
Whenever I go to my grandmother's, she shows me printed old pictures from when I was young. I love them, and she makes sure to show me a different set every time. Sometimes, I take photos of the ones I particularly like. Now, whenever I want to search for photos from when I was young, all I have to do is search photos captured at my grandmother's place (location). Since each image captured already has geo-location data, I don't even need to remember when they were captured. This search often gives me photos from different points of time in the same view, and aligns exactly with how my brain works. The location acts as a crucial anchor point for retrieving the memory → My brain associates childhood photos with my grandmother.
Example II:
2 weeks ago I went out to have dinner (sohour) with some friends. I was lost and kept searching Google Maps for the place for 10 minutes. Then I remembered we went there at the same time last year (we only have dinner there during Ramadan). I searched my journals for "Ramadan 2024," and found it in 10 seconds. I clicked directions to the location and got on my way → My brain associates places with times of the year.
Example III:
I usually take team meetings from cafes. When I try to remember a specific meeting that happened weeks ago, I sometimes can't remember anything about it but the cafe name. By searching for that cafe's location in my timeline, I can quickly find the meeting details → My brain associates meetings with places.
Example IV:
I'm outside and hear a familiar song playing, but I can't remember its name or the artist. I happened to only remember the name of another song by the same artist (very close). I search for it, get to the artist, then finally get to the song → My brain associates similar music together.
Self-organized Life
I actually believe this associative property of the brain is interesting.
Because it means we don’t have to remember everything.
And it shades the light on the importance of ‘time’ as an organizer.
Think about this:
Time gives this dimension of context for free. As things happen in your life, you don't have to manually associate them - when time is your organizing principle, everything organizes itself.
In the photos example, if photos you previously took on your phone aren’t having any timestamps (i.e aren’t attached to time) → there won’t be any possible way to fetch your photo memories, because then it would’ve been a huge bucket of non-organized stuff, and you’d be lucky if you found the exact photo that you want!
Now this is the same challenge happening with my friend. Except that the things he’s trying to remember are not photos, it’s actually everything else: projects, conversations, files, emails, notes, etc.
There are two problems with this:
When nothing is organized, every item is an orphan, easily lost
There’s no way to manually organize all that stuff
Enter ‘The Timeline’
Using time as an organizing principle could be the only thing we need to stay and feel organized. And could be the only way to solve both problems.
Fact is this simple idea is transformative for every line of work.
For so long I’ve been imagining what it feels like to construct that digital timeline of ‘things’, and this concept evolved to be the inspiration behind the homepage of hyperspaces†.
Because if I have this timeline it would mean that I’d finally get rid of the overwhelm of having to organize my life.
When you don't have to care about 'where' to include everything from your digital world, you can just be. What this means is that documentation doesn't have to interfere with performing. So if I want to attend meetings, have ideas, write drafts, and plan next steps, without having to overthink it, I can just do that. My brain doesn't actually have a designated place for anything. At the end of the day, all I need is to not care about deliberately reviewing what happened during the day but also be sure that it's there somewhere such that I can always return to it at my own will.
Just by including / dumping everything in a day view (we talked about how to automate a big part of that in this post), the only dimension I need to reach out to things that happened in my past is time, not a dozen folders or apps or calendars.
Reason: Dates are great hooks for recall.
We all associate memories with time to some extent or another. So a forgotten memory may often be recovered by recalling what you were doing around that time, which can be enough of a hook to remember the rest.
This is why daily notes are so powerful, and if done right, you wouldn’t need any other structure.
Self-organized Universe
This section is about the philosophy behind using Time as an organizing dimension.
If you pay close attention, everything around us is periodic. While there are many sources that could explain this concept more deeply, the key point is this: the universe follows an eternally repeating cycle that's perfectly balanced. It's the reason behind the harmony we live in – if it weren't for this, the world would have been such a mess. This is why we have seasons, day-night cycles, and celestial motions.
In fact, time itself is cyclical (periodic).
For example, civilization is not linear - most of what we experience today in terms of hot tech is not a global maxima, but a local one. Current advancements in tech, while impressive, are just another local peak rather than an absolute high point in human achievement. This clearly contradicts the common assumption that progress is always linear and forward-moving.
Think about this: Throughout history, every civilization would ruthlessly erase the previous one from the books. In the old ages, this was done by burning libraries bottom-up. In the modern ages, this happens through systematic control of how information is being spread throughout the media and the internet. At every given point of time, "history" becomes just a narrative through the lens of the winner. And this keeps repeating.
On the smaller scale, this is also what’s happening with our very own lives.
Time repeats itself.
Since late 2020, I've been keeping a physical notebook by my side, writing daily logs of my thoughts and life events. I started this practice in late September 2020. Which means I've been doing it for roughly 1,650 days now.
What's fascinating is that when I review entries from the same season across different years, I notice strikingly similar patterns. This is evident in various aspects of life: places I visit, people I spend time with, music I listen to, work initiatives, fitness goals, and even memes!
I found myself naturally gravitating toward the same patterns and moods during particular times of the year, almost like clockwork. While external factors could occasionally affect me, I found I’d ultimately default to the same patterns. The whole thing feels like a pendulum.
It’s a simple idea yet a powerful one – those who understand their patterns are able to have much more clarity. Or better yet make use of their different states for enhanced performance and better outcomes than the rest.
The most interesting aspect about this is I couldn’t access this type of insight without zooming out the 1650 days. Only then I was able to have enough control to jump across time, compare myself to my older versions, and generally get a sense of what my life is about.
So tying back to the concept of maintaining a detailed timeline, I actually believe it could unlock much more powerful patterns and insights than what we could imagine. Think fitness, work, relationships, books, finances, travels.. the list is infinite.
I believe the main challenge though is that it’s generally not intuitive for us to think outside the realm of the physical - we cannot naturally think of ourselves as part of a bigger pattern unless we deliberately assign lots of attention and mindfulness to it.
Most of my work during the past 2 years is about exploring how technology can enhance human creativity. The most prominent insight has always been this: Everything is connected, we just need to understand how to unlock that, whatever software or tools or books we might use.
† The idea behind the naming 'hyperspaces' is that thoughts are interconnected; every thought we get could be a wormhole to a world of thoughts and ideas. Your inner mind is just a reflection of the outer universe. If thoughts are places, then the mind is constantly time traveling. In fact if thoughts are places, what are dreams, memories, and aspirations if not time travel?
In all three cases you imagine yourself going places, talking to people, doing things – Doesn't this feel like a handshake?
This is part III of the ‘Building a Second Brain’ series:
Part I – Software vs Psychedelics
Part II – How to build a knowledge library for creative work?
Update log:
hyperspaces.live is joining antler.co starting this week – big milestone!
We recently rolled out 2 interesting updates:
AI Writer: You can generate text content based on older stuff on your timeline using the new AI Writer – Just reference (mention) older notes and events, enter your prompt, and it handles the rest.
AI Backlinks: Notes will now auto-link themselves based on detected themes in text content, physical locations, or calendar events.
In the next few weeks I’ll be sharing more insights into this journey.
Interesting times – See you around!
Zeyad Mahran