Re:The joy of index cards (2009)
by wpietri on Sunday April 08, 2018 @02:47PM
(#16787595)
I think the question is, "effective for what?"
Index cards are incredibly flexible. Anybody who has made it through elementary school can use simple office supplies to construct rich, elaborate systems to support particular workflows.
For software to come as close in utility requires a trained professional to put in a fair bit of labor, and that is done in large part by closing off possibility. Trello, a very good product, has tried to stay a pretty generic card-like tool. But it's mediocre for kanban workflows, and downright terrible for a flashcard deck or a recipe collection or quickly jotting a shopping list that you hand to your partner.
As an aside, getting words on the card faster is often a negative. As others mention, hand-writing something aids memory. It also makes me choose my words more carefully, and write less. I find writing less to be especially valuable during software planning, in that I see cards as tokens for conversation. The more people can write, the more they try to turn them into mini-specs, which shifts them away from collaboration and back toward waterfall-ish isolation.
Index cards are incredibly flexible. Anybody who has made it through elementary school can use simple office supplies to construct rich, elaborate systems to support particular workflows.
For software to come as close in utility requires a trained professional to put in a fair bit of labor, and that is done in large part by closing off possibility. Trello, a very good product, has tried to stay a pretty generic card-like tool. But it's mediocre for kanban workflows, and downright terrible for a flashcard deck or a recipe collection or quickly jotting a shopping list that you hand to your partner.
As an aside, getting words on the card faster is often a negative. As others mention, hand-writing something aids memory. It also makes me choose my words more carefully, and write less. I find writing less to be especially valuable during software planning, in that I see cards as tokens for conversation. The more people can write, the more they try to turn them into mini-specs, which shifts them away from collaboration and back toward waterfall-ish isolation.