How to organize navigating the forum?

[SMM]

The reason for this post is to see if there are any ideas or tips on how to organise reading and responding to messages on the forum. For example, setting aside 2 hours a day - 1 hour for reading and 1 hour for responses after some time in between to research or ponder.

I'm curious what works for others for a number of reasons. The main one being the forum is updated frequently and moves fast osit. Personally I often read, respond to what's possible with time constraints then plan to resume responses later, saving drafts, etc. Often there is more to read, responses, links, etc. when I return on the topic(s).

Being able to save drafts is a plus, and I sometimes draft on Word in case I close the browser or it crashes, and the plan to increase reading and typing speed, as well as trying to be more resourceful, is seriously on the cards. There is also the case of the gadget switch without bookmarking topicsnor requesting notifications, and having to remember where and what was read.

Another reason is being able to respond to people and posts in various sections of the forum more efficiently, to help others, network and contribute more as, here, most people ARE genuinely asking when and where they seek help (as opposed to off the forum in general, say).

There's also much that I want to share that seems to take time to type out and divulge however as my brain works more visually or viscerally/intuitively than audibly and words, so typing is quite a process depending on content.

This is something that has been discussed on the forum here and there as I have spotted before, and others may be interested in some guidance, tips or advice with this also - there are perhaps many different approaches to share!

That being said, any suggestions on the forum? Thanks! :)

 

[Aiming]

What works quite well for me is to check the option View the most recent posts on the forum at the bottom of the index page and then scroll to the page you left off last time when checking the forum. This shows you the posts as opposed to only the topic titles and you'll be up to date more easily, because the 'topic title' list can easily have you skip things, when prioritizing other threads.

An additional option I use is the Show new replies to your posts - with this you can easily stay updated on replies to your own posts and get back to those and generally stay updated on threads you've posted in.

Other than that, when short on time and there's a thread I want to come back to which isn't hot currently, I personally leave those tabs open to come back to it at a later point. You can also activate the email notifications for threads. Or when there are links to explore e.g. in the diet threads, I usually save a list of those to work off when I can't get to them immediately.

Generally I've found it's best to post one's thoughts pretty much asap, because often, as you've also mentioned, things will have moved on swiftly, new material has emerged, there's more to read, etc. On the other hand, there also seems to be this phenomenon that you happen on exactly the posts where you can help or contribute, so stressing out about the process isn't needed - especially considering the fact that when stressed, thinking clearly is difficult.

 

[Buddy]

This is something that has been discussed on the forum here and there as I have spotted before, and others may be interested in some guidance, tips or advice with this also - there are perhaps many different approaches to share!

That being said, any suggestions on the forum? Thanks! :)

I don't think I have a structured approach to this, so this might not be helpful - but it's an approach to share!

When I can remember it, I'll mark all posts as read before logging off so that when I return I can use the view recent posts function to see what I missed. At one time I even used the bookmarks function and then forgot where it was. When I do write something to post, it often takes me an hour or more (or a whole day) to edit it until I'm satisfied because I get overly concerned with silly things, like: "edit as much as you need, there's no hurry, just don't make that unprofessional edit line at the bottom of your post...that just looks so unprofessional..." See what I mean? And I have no idea how many times I let myself look stupid because I ran out of allotted editing time and realized too late that I left out a whole line of text that was needed to clarify something!

Mostly now I just play it by ear because that often works out better for me. Most of the time I'll come to the forum and just look across the board or click board sections at random. I don't know what I'm looking for, but I know when I find it because of the "aha!, that applies to me!" Or maybe, "aha! I can add something someone might think is helpful" or whatever.

So, you can probably see my approach is kinda random. When I'm not feeling brain-damaged due to past bad choices and the insanity spirals in the world-at-large, I can get into a very calm state where I feel in tune with natural rhythms and community-to-world-scale current events and then come to the forum and see identical concerns and interests being posted across the board. Really, to me, that's exciting just by itself because it lets me feel like I'm more than just an economic object only programmed to earn less than I produce so that I can make someone else a profit.

Anyway, tangents aside, it depends on your preferred style of working. If you want to turn this into a kind of job, then you can use the standard time management and office-structured routines and techniques you can find all over the web (I suppose). Otherwise, maybe listen to someone other than me, because in fractal terminology with the Mandelbrot set in mind, I tend to hang around "the edge of chaos." That seems to be where the interesting stuff is happening! :)

 

[SMM]

I wrote a very long and elaborate response... and then my laptop crashed entirely.

Hmm, first step clearly is to frequently Save as Draft if writing a mammoth post haha ;D

 

[luc]

I second what Aiming wrote - I use the "view recent posts" option a lot. Also, I activated email notifications, which helps a great deal too.

I'd like to add that for me, a more "structured" approach didn't work, i.e. setting specific hours for read/response time etc., at one point I kind of accepted that for me it's more about "going with the flow", see where I can contribute something and do so immediately or very soon (as Aiming said, this seems to work better), and I follow threads that I'm interested in. Sometimes, I also plan to read a specific thread for a specific reason, even though I'm not "drawn to it" per se.

One thing that helped me as well was the realization that I can't possibly read everything, follow everything, or respond to everything. If I have the feeling I missed something or would have too much to catch up, for me it's more a matter of not worrying about it and "re-enter the flow", so to speak. In another thread, I compared it to learning Morse code (which I did a while back): If you listen to it and it's fast, you will miss a few characters, words or even sentences. But if you start worrying about it and try to reconstruct the missed information in your head ("what was that again?"), you will miss much, much more letters than the ones initially lost because you loose your focus. In other words, don't worry about the information you missed, and instead work with the information you're receiving!

Finally, I tried to take notes, save links to forum threads etc., but this didn't work for me either. Now I'm only taking notes for very specific reasons, but generally try to train my brain to remember things, most importantly concepts. Usually, I can find most threads later on by just remembering a few key words from the thread in question and using the search function (for example, I may remember who wrote the post I'm looking for, or a sentence, or just an unusual word, or the thread title, or a combination etc.). I think this also helps with forming networks/pathways in the brain. But I guess successful approaches vary individually here.

Connected to this, I think it's better to do one thing right than to do many things too fast. For example, it's probably more valuable both for the network and our individual learning to take the time to respond to one post very carefully and make it the best we can than to quickly respond to a couple of posts that would require more careful thought. I think Pierre expressed it very well here:

I understand this mechanicalness of ours. That’s the way we were taught for years in school: listen, repeat, agree, forget your critical thinking. We were also pushed to maximize our output: more pages, more figures, more dates for better marks.

Having spend years working directly with Laura I also understand her suggestion. Here the keypoint is trying to rewire ourselves, re-discover our curiosity, our critical thinking, our discernment. It won’t happen overnight, it’s like a muscle that we almost never used and that we finally decide to train.

It might lead to results or not. We don’t know and anticipating a result would be counterproductive. It’s even a paradox: how is it possible to anticipate the solution of a problem we haven’t really solved yet?

Such anticipation can only lead to prejudice and it can also make us overlook/discard/ignore a data that we would consider as irrelevant because of our prejudice but that was actually the missing piece of the puzzle.

If you think about things you discovered during your life, you’ll probably see that it was due to some kind of serenpidity. When you expected the discovery the least, while reading a barely related book, while thinking about an unrelated topics, having a seemingly irrelevant discussion, suddenly the idea popped up, out of nowhere.

As the Cs said, and I’m paraphrasing here: don’t hasten on your path or you will miss the gems hidden between the cobblestones.

The quotes from the chroniclers are the cobblestones. We can pile them up blindly and quickly (quantitative and mechanical approach) but then we will miss the gems: all those seemingly irrelevant and unimportant things that are more or less related to the quoted event. The gems are in the context that you explore because of your curiosity. It’s open-mindedness acting together with curiosity that leads to discoveries.

So ultimately your main driver must not be maximizing the number of entry, entering data because Laura asked for it but curiosity: "I want to know more about this event?", “who was this bishop?”, “who was this chronicler?”, “where is this city?”, “what the story of this army?”, “is the same event mentioned by other sources?”, "how is this event compatible with this other data?”, etc.

If you feel this curiosity, feed it. You might even enter only one entry but do it in this spirit.

 

[Mal7]

I wrote a very long and elaborate response... and then my laptop crashed entirely.

Hmm, first step clearly is to frequently Save as Draft if writing a mammoth post haha ;D

For a long post, you can also work on it offline in Word or a similar program, then copy and paste it to the Forum. This would safeguard against losing it through an internet-connection problem.

 

[SMM]

I wrote a very long and elaborate response... and then my laptop crashed entirely.

Hmm, first step clearly is to frequently Save as Draft if writing a mammoth post haha ;D

For a long post, you can also work on it offline in Word or a similar program, then copy and paste it to the Forum. This would safeguard against losing it through an internet-connection problem.

Word processors are super useful in that regard!

Thanks everyone for contributing. So far, I'm swaying in a state of flow as a result of checking in more frequently than, say, a month ago.

Daily interactions would be ideal, at least once or twice in 24 hours, however we are all aware life happens.

And I think reading everything would take over lifetimes, and you still would not be finished.

Better to be flexible with it. The main thing for me now is to Save as Draft frequently if a post is taking time / long or lengthy instead of using Quick Reply.

All the other functionalities of the forum don't need reorganizing.

Just saving in case the browser ends up refreshing or crashing, or worse; that will help me respond straight away and not have to reiterate all those past attempts at rewrites from memory as much.