My Journey with “Dassia”
Alright, so today I want to talk about this thing I called “dassia”. It wasn’t a piece of software or anything, more like a system, a method I tried to get my chaotic digital life in order. You know how it is, files everywhere, notes scattered across ten different apps. I was drowning.
So, I started by thinking, “There’s gotta be a better way.” I read a bunch of articles, watched some videos. Most of it was the usual productivity fluff. But then I stumbled upon a concept, not by any specific name, but I just started calling my approach “dassia”. The core idea was to create a super-minimalist, text-file-based system for everything. Notes, tasks, even ideas for projects.
First off, I decided on the tools. Just a plain text editor. Nothing fancy. I created a main folder, imaginatively named ‘DASSIA_CORE’. Inside, I made a few key files: ‘*’, ‘*’, ‘*’, and a ‘*’ to kind of journal what I was doing or thinking.
The plan was simple:
- Dump everything into these files.
- Use simple symbols for tasks: ‘-‘ for to-do, ‘+’ for in-progress, ‘x’ for done.
- Review ‘*’ every morning.
- Move completed tasks or dead ideas to an ‘archive’ folder periodically.
Sounds easy, right? Well, the first few days were great. I felt so organized. I was typing away, moving lines around, feeling like a real command-line hacker, even though it was just Notepad. I told myself, “This is it! This is the ‘dassia’ magic!”
But then, things started to get… clunky. ‘*’ became a monster. Finding anything specific was a pain. I tried to implement a tagging system, like #projectX or @context, but then I was spending more time managing the tags than doing the actual work. My ‘dassia’ was becoming a chore.
I remember one afternoon, I was trying to find a specific note about a phone call. I spent a good twenty minutes scrolling and using Ctrl+F. And I thought, “What am I doing?” This was supposed to simplify things, not make me a text-file librarian. It felt like I was trying to build a car when all I needed was a bicycle. You know, like those companies that spend millions on some super complex internal tool that nobody uses because Excel just works better for what they need. Classic.
It reminded me of this one time at a previous gig. We had this fancy project management software. Cost a fortune. Had all the bells and whistles. Gantt charts, resource allocation, you name it. But we all just ended up using shared spreadsheets and a whiteboard because the official system was too damn complicated to update quickly. We’d spend half the meeting just trying to get the data into the system right. Total waste of time.
So, with “dassia”, I eventually scaled it back. I kept the ‘*’ because I actually liked that part – quick, unfiltered thoughts. For tasks, I went back to a simple dedicated app that just works. Notes? Well, still figuring that one out completely, but a mix of things seems more practical than forcing everything into one text file.
The big lesson from my “dassia” experiment? Simplicity is great, but oversimplifying to the point of inefficiency isn’t the answer either. And sometimes, a dedicated tool, even if it’s not “pure,” just does the job better. My grand “dassia” vision didn’t quite pan out as a revolutionary system, but I learned a lot about my own workflow and the pitfalls of chasing a perfect, one-size-fits-all solution. Sometimes, good enough is actually pretty good. And that’s my story with “dassia”.
