Free Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by C. Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell Page B

realize my mistake until I had boarded the plane and it was too late to go back. I managed to have it over nighted to me for $150, and all I could think was that I would gladly have paid many times that amount to ensure no one else had my data. More than a half million of my fellow Americans also left their computers at checkpoints in 2008.
    A busy person may be plagued by absentmindedness, simply because he has a lot on his mind. You forgot to bring home the milk, because by the time you got to the grocery store you were thinking about the items needed for your pets. You forgot your lunch meeting, because you had just gotten off the phone with a colleague and were engrossed with new ideas for your next project.
    Reminders must be made at the appropriate time; it is no good having a shopping list that is back at your office while you are in the grocery store. A reminder to make a phone call while you are wasting time in rush-hour traffic would be priceless. Likewise, you must be able to create reminders anytime, anyplace, or they may be lost. If you think of something that needs doing while driving, it will not suffice to have to wait a half hour to get home and write it down. Probably by then you will have thought of three other things that need doing and forgotten at least one.
    This is why e-memory will be in the cloud, accessible anywhere, anytime. We want to be able to type or speak notes and to-do items whenever they occur to us. The to-do items will be associated with a time, place, or mode of activity. For example, the task “Buy milk ” is associated with the grocery store (a place). The task “E-mail Catherine” is associated with using your computer (an activity). The task “Pick up Suzy at 4:00” is associated with a time. If you are struck by the thought that a cell phone is capable of knowing time and place, and can input text, voice, and pictures, then you realize how close we are to the reality of this vision. All we need is a little more software that can understand such things as milk being available at grocery stores.
    In addition to giving you all the right reminders, it will not be too long before your e-memories will fill in your other absentminded gaps. Your increasingly location-aware cell phone will remind you where you parked your car. You will track where you have left things like your glasses, either by noting where your devices last detected their RFID tag, or by taking pictures of them. When your mind is absent, your e-memory will always be there.
    Having too much on my mind doesn’t just make me absentminded; it can make me feel mentally cluttered, impeding my productivity. David Allen’s popular book and seminar series Getting Things Done stands on the central premise that we are hindered by mental clutter:
First of all, if it’s on your mind, your mind isn’t clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind. . . .
    Unlike your bio-memory, your e-memory will never be overwhelmed. Total Recall software can make sure you are protected from clutter. For instance, if I were to show you all my 150,000 recorded Web pages, you would see that nearly half are duplicates, or are near duplicates that differ by just a tiny amount from some other page. A natural reaction would be to delete all the near duplicates to eliminate clutter. However, e-memory never needs to suffer from clutter; only a poor recall interface looks cluttered. Good recall software could simply group all the near duplicates together and show a single representative in response to your queries. Suppose I have repeatedly gone to the same Web page and the only thing that changed on it was the advertisements. Most of the time, I just want to see one page, hiding away the clutter of all the extra copies with inconsequential differences. But on that one day that I want to recall an ad for 50 percent off a new GPS, suddenly the differences are very consequential—and I’ve