Rolls in fridge
I wake up and go downstairs to make breakfast. By the tea pot is a hand written note on card from a mobile phone box that will be recycled. The words say ‘Rolls in fridge’, reminding me of where the food I need when I’m volunteering that day is located. Simple and effective, just pen and card. No need for an alert reminder from the home assistant, no need for a reminder from any number of electronic calendars I operate. No additional power consumption, however small.
But why perhaps did I need the note in the first place? Surely my own memory storage and situational aware temporal alert system would remind me? Yes, in all likely, but… we have busy lives. Lots and lots of information going in, processed and out again. To the point of neural overload. We simply for whatever reason; forget. We need to have notes strategically placed within the context of their purpose to remind us of what we could forget. A backup put in place in the past for the future to deal with the unknowns of life in-between.
The physical note though has more, it has an emotion bound to it. Something more private than the cold electronic notes that seem to land in from all directions. Something personal that others don’t need to know about the running of my everyday life, well until now. But the electronic notes have the advantage of being able to be used from whatever device you have at the time and can easily be shared with others that need to be involved. A physical note is singular, unless you go through the annoying and time consuming process of making copies.
When you read a note / alert / notification how does it make you feel? Annoyed that you needed to create it in the first place? Pleased that you did because you’d forgotten? Anxious or happy because of what it is reminding you of? The note itself, like all the tools we use, doesn’t care because it doesn’t have feelings. It just does the job you created it to do.
All of this can be equally applied to shopping lists, to-do lists and alike, such as course design in terms of the overview. All there to help your mind cope in this saturated information driven society. But thinking about that, have ‘notes’ and alike been around for centuries? For example, the verb ‘note’ as described by www.etymonline.com/word/note. Therefore something not new but today the tool used to implement it has an electronic form.
In conclusion, it’s one little event that has triggered a thought and made me think about the details of life. A spark that has lead to learning, inquisitiveness and thought beyond its original purpose.
What do you think please?
Note: The featured image is my copyright, please don’t use without my permission.
- Rolls in fridge – 16th June 2026
- Learning never stops – 16th May 2026
- Uniformity – 16th April 2026
