// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Pizza Box Project Stack
One of the people who writes for an internet audience and whom I really enjoy reading is
Ratfactor. I find that Ratfactor has a generally great attitude towards things.
On his site he does lovely, lovely deep dives into personal projects of high
personal importance and is generally fantastic at putting in the effort to
document what he does, why he does it, and how he thinks about it. If you’ve read
a massive web page documenting everything about Chuck Moore’s Forth programming
language, you’ve come across Ratfactor.
One of those projects is his paper-based project tracker, or project
stack. The concept is as if you smash together a Zettelkasten, the concept
of a stack (data structure), and a TODO tracker.
The system features one piece of paper per project task with the task you’re
working on right now at the very top. Finished tasks get removed from the stack and
discarded, revealing the next one. I really liked his idea and wanted to try it
out.
Instead of Ratfactor’s sticky paper, I used defunct business cards from a
startup I worked at 7 years ago. The card stock is rigid and feels pleasant to
handle, the back is blank and the size is just right for writing a couple of
sentences. My take on Ratfactor’s system involves three stacks: one stack of
blanks, one stack of project tasks, and one stack for the finished tasks. The
finished stack I have because It’s gratifying to see it grow and helpful to be
reminded of what I most recently finished.
Ratfactor went further in his idea and made a cute display of cardboard that
shows the first task in what looks like a little retro-arcade
cabinet.
Before I went so far as to build my own display I wanted to prototype my use of
the project stack idea and see if I found it useful. My prototype was very
simple: three stacks on a piece of paper where I’d written Done, Tasks,
Empties in three different areas of the paper. I attached the paper to a cardboard folder
so I could, somewhat precariously, move the collection of stacks around as
needed. This flimsy prototype worked well! In general I greatly enjoy systems that let me
offload things I have to keep in my head, while also being of such a variety of
system that I can retain complete autonomy using it and keep its use-friction
low; and for getting project ideas and personal task out of my head, this hit
the spot for me.
the first prototype was a labeled sheet of paper on a folder
One benefit of using physical pieces of paper is how effortless it is to work
with and change: reorganizing, splaying out all cards, quickly striking things over
and amending them, ad-hoc organizing a series of tasks by writing a little label in the
top right. When I use paper that also means I get to use my fancy inks and pens
to write, increasing the satisfaction of the system even more. This particular
paper-based system is great because of the simplicity and focus (one task only!
it’s waiting for you indefinitely until you have the time!) and for how
gratifying it is to toss the top most task into the Done stack when I have
finished it.
After trying the system out for some time (weeks? months? not really sure!:) I
wrote a task to make a cardboard organizer. The card lay dormant
until one day when I had made sure to have everything necessary to execute on it
and felt the fresh tailwinds necessary to getting a new project under way.
What I used to make my display was a set of pretty average city-life stuff: a
piece of cardboard (cut out of a pizza carton), a pencil, a glue gun loaded with
golden glitter glue, a knife with which to cut cardboard, and some clips
to help hold sides together.