a pizza carton with a hole

Appreciating Ratfactor

One of the people who writes for an internet audience and whom I really enjoy reading is Ratfactor. I find that Ratfactor has a generally great attitude towards things. On his site he does lovely, lovely deep dives into personal projects of high personal importance and is generally fantastic at putting in the effort to document what he does, why he does it, and how he thinks about it. If you’ve read a massive web page documenting everything about Chuck Moore’s Forth programming language, you’ve come across Ratfactor.

One of those projects is his paper-based project tracker, or project stack. The concept is as if you smash together a Zettelkasten, the concept of a stack (data structure), and a TODO tracker.

The system features one piece of paper per project task with the task you’re working on right now at the very top. Finished tasks get removed from the stack and discarded, revealing the next one. I really liked his idea and wanted to try it out.

Instead of Ratfactor’s sticky paper, I used defunct business cards from a startup I worked at 7 years ago. The card stock is rigid and feels pleasant to handle, the back is blank and the size is just right for writing a couple of sentences. My take on Ratfactor’s system involves three stacks: one stack of blanks, one stack of project tasks, and one stack for the finished tasks. The finished stack I have because It’s gratifying to see it grow and helpful to be reminded of what I most recently finished.

Ratfactor went further in his idea and made a cute display of cardboard that shows the first task in what looks like a little retro-arcade cabinet.

First prototype

Before I went so far as to build my own display I wanted to prototype my use of the project stack idea and see if I found it useful. My prototype was very simple: three stacks on a piece of paper where I’d written Done, Tasks, Empties in three different areas of the paper. I attached the paper to a cardboard folder so I could, somewhat precariously, move the collection of stacks around as needed. This flimsy prototype worked well! In general I greatly enjoy systems that let me offload things I have to keep in my head, while also being of such a variety of system that I can retain complete autonomy using it and keep its use-friction low; and for getting project ideas and personal task out of my head, this hit the spot for me.

the first prototype was a labeled sheet of paper on a folder

One benefit of using physical pieces of paper is how effortless it is to work with and change: reorganizing, splaying out all cards, quickly striking things over and amending them, ad-hoc organizing a series of tasks by writing a little label in the top right. When I use paper that also means I get to use my fancy inks and pens to write, increasing the satisfaction of the system even more. This particular paper-based system is great because of the simplicity and focus (one task only! it’s waiting for you indefinitely until you have the time!) and for how gratifying it is to toss the top most task into the Done stack when I have finished it.

After trying the system out for some time (weeks? months? not really sure!:) I wrote a task to make a cardboard organizer. The card lay dormant until one day when I had made sure to have everything necessary to execute on it and felt the fresh tailwinds necessary to getting a new project under way.

Making the cardboard organizer

What I used to make my display was a set of pretty average city-life stuff: a piece of cardboard (cut out of a pizza carton), a pencil, a glue gun loaded with golden glitter glue, a knife with which to cut cardboard, and some clips to help hold sides together.

the cardboard organizer being made

I winged the design based on the dimensions of my stacks. I put three cards in the middle of the cardboard to measure out the approximate size, drew lines where I wanted to cut the borders and other lines with indications of where I would cut for folds and then cut the cardboard accordingly. One thing I wanted in this revised organizer was for the Tasks stack to be angled such that I can easily see what it reads. To do that I used a cardboard offcut and folded it into a triangle which I glued to the middle of the area that would host the Task stack. Another offcut I used to separate the empties stack from the other two stacks by cutting a hole in the base and passing it through from the bottom.

the finished organizer without cards

I threw it together quickly once I had gotten started and have been using it since! It works great! Compared to my previous version I can move it around a lot easier, which helps since I often rest the organizer on the docked laptop I use for working. The angled Task stack helps a lot to keep the next project in view and top of mind. Pizza box cartons are great building material for small things like this organizer especially lids from pizza bakers making less oily pizzas :)

the cardboard organizer with populated stacks

Cardboard paper-crafting is a really fun way to satisfy one’s need for specific physical items and I encourage people to try it out with whatever cardboard one can save up and to have a glue gun on hand (buy one or borrow one from a friend or tool library/DIY meet) as it makes it just that much more fun!