Granted, achieving balance on any ephemeral level is largely the emergent property, or effect, of getting one’s life sorted out. And sometimes getting your life sorted out is getting your desk in order. Let’s face it. Oftentimes sitting down to meditate is just escapism. While it’s certainly important to have some quiet time and stillness in life, productivity and organization are also virtues. For some inspiration and solid advice, lay your eyes upon this brilliant Flickr photoset, Getting Things Done With Index Cards 2.0 [1].

The Hipster PDA [2] runs circles around any more advanced technological solution, and it totally circumvents a particularly deep and nagging problem in the psychology of American culture and early 21st century capitalism: the idiotic idea that your problems will be solved, eased, or mitigated by the purchase of some real or imaginary fetish object; that you need something else in your life to make you happy. Forget all that hogwash.

Okay so maybe you need to go purchase some envelopes and index cards and clips. But you just might already have them laying around the house. And you’re not limited by the size of your screen, or by some corporation’s silly GUI decisions. And index cards don’t crash like PDA’s do.

Finally, is this not an amazingly brilliant use of the formal qualities of Flickr photoset? Bravo!

Now if only you could run a quick and effective keyword search through stacks of index cards without reading every one… Maybe that’s a feature for 3.0.

[via CP [3].]