Postings

I’m a voracious reader. I have been all my life. I devoured books in my childhood summers out of school, so my Mom used to take me to the public library weekly to feed my habit. We had a mimosa tree in our yard that was struck by lightning but survived, and as it grew, the split between the two main trunks was the perfect place for a young girl to crawl into and read for hours during the hot summer days. The flowering branches hid me from view, and that’s where I hid from everyone to read my books. At night, after everyone in my family had gone to sleep, I would sneak out of bed with my flashlight and crawl into the bathtub, hidden by the shower curtain, and read. Incorrigible! I heard my Mom once discussing with my Dad about whether my behavior was so abnormal that maybe they should consult a therapist? Happily, they maintained a worrying distance and did not intervene. {Smile} 

I also tend to go down rabbit holes when I read. If I read a book by an author that I like, I will read everything I can find by the same author. Same thing for concepts, ideas, categories. So, little wonder then that when I recently read The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul, discussing human beings as networked organisms, I dove deep into the idea of extra-neural resources. 

In 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers published an academic essay that asked, ‘Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?’ They argued that human cognition had become increasingly entangled with technology and that technology was no longer functioning as simple tools but affecting how we think. (See my previous blog post about The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.) They argued that the human mind is extended through our bodies, environments, and relationships. (At about the time I was reading this book, I also watched My Octopus Teacher—an Oscar-winning documentary about the relationship between a human being and an octopus. I highly, highly recommend this movie. One of my takeaways from the documentary was that some of an octopus’s cognition is derived from its tentacles and not just its brain. See how the book and the documentary connected for me?)

Paul takes this idea further in her book by arguing that elements of the world outside our brains may effectively act as mental ‘extensions,’ allowing us to think in ways our brains could not manage on their own. She talks about the importance of designer environments that enable an extended perspective and one in which the rich resources of our world can and do enter into our trains of thought. “As long as we settle for thinking inside the brain, we’ll remain bound by the limits of that organ. But when we reach outside it with intention and skill, our thinking can be transformed. It can become as dynamic as our bodies, as airy as our spaces, as rich as our relationships, as capacious as the whole wide world.” By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these ‘extra-neural’ resources, we can focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively—to entertain ideas that would be unthinkable by the brain alone. Paul argues that intelligence is not a fixed property of the individual but rather a shifting state dependent on access to extra-neural resources and the knowledge of how to use them. And that concept reminded me of a book by the award-winning dancer and choreographer, Twyla Tharp, called The Creative Habit, where she stresses how important it is to creativity to have a space in which all of our behavior is focused on the creative act, the connection of new ideas, and thinking.

Okay, so hang on because we’re heading down the rabbit hole. The concept of personal knowledge management was not a new one to me. I was introduced to commonplace books when I was in college. Commonplace books have been with us since the mid-17th century and were an information management device in which a note-taker stored quotations, observations, and definitions. Commonplace books were kept and shared between learned men to share ideas and knowledge, especially before the printing press. Women often used them as the only outlet they had for writing down their observations since they could not publicly acknowledge that they even had a brain! I’ve been keeping a commonplace book most of my life. When I was a teenager, we called them diaries. In my 30s, we called them journals, prompted by Julia Cameron’s book The Artists’ Way. (I think it’s an interesting aside that human beings seem to be animals obsessed with collecting things. How many people do you know that are collectors?) I think this idea that humans collect items also relates to photographers, who collect photos and organize them into books. I’m a photographer, so I’m guilty of that vice. But, I also collect ideas. {smile}

As I explored the concept of personal knowledge management, I was introduced to the idea of the zettlekasten – a German word for slip box. Niklas Luhrman was a prolific scientific writer (over 70 books and 400 scholarly articles), and he attributed his productivity to his use of the slip box technique. A zettlekasten is an organized system of notecards, with each notecard containing a single idea but with extensive links between all the cards. This is contrasted with a commonplace book, which also allows the logging of disparate ideas without the easy possibility of connecting those ideas.

I tagged the zettlekasten concept and then headed further down the hole, drawn to the idea of ‘smart notes.’ The book by Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes, was eye-opening for me. Ahrens outlined a system for gathering information by systematic note-taking and then fusing the data into your memory by coupling your ideas with the notes you’ve taken.

As I was diving deep into the tunnel, the next stopping-off place was in the realm of productivity and getting things done. Business consultants argue that information is coming at us so fast, we have to use technology to organize our environment for maximum productivity. The book by David Allen, Getting Things Done—The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, is considered almost a bible by these people. The acronym GTD is used frequently on their forums as a shortcut way of referring to all the techniques discussed in the book. GTD and personal knowledge management (PKM) are often considered flip sides of the same coin.

But I wanted to separate personal knowledge management from productivity issues because I’m no longer part of the ‘women who work, manage a household, family social life, and parent’ group. I’m, gratefully, retired from that mayhem. Instead, I’m facing the end of my life. I am interested in managing my knowledge base, increasing my ability to procure ideas, distill them with my own accumulated wisdom of old age, and produce new ideas and new thoughts. I have always believed that creativity means connecting seemingly disparate ideas in new ways. That is how the knowledge base for humanity is expanded. That requires a collection of ideas—the larger, the better. And I want to be creative. I also believe that part of the purpose of life is to learn as much as you can for as long as you can. 

That drew me to Tiago Forte, a business consultant who teaches a concept called building a second brain. He argues that the function of the human brain is to be creative, think, and create new ideas—not the remembering of schedules and numbers and most of the mundane things we spend our time focusing on. He argues that if you can place those items in a technological ‘second brain’—a repository of information that you trust will be there when you need it, your brain can focus on what only the human brain can do. And that is creating new ideas. 

Forte teaches that creativity is not a mysterious force that is conjured from nothing; it emerges from practical efforts to gather, organize, and digest your ideas and the ideas of others. He encapsulates this process by the acronym CODE, which stands for Collect and Curate, Organize, Distill, and Express. Your thoughts have value, and by capturing them and saving them, you can allow them to live forever in a trusted system that reflects your goals and interests. This also leaves your mind free and clear to develop even more ideas! He also argues that organizing your ideas is critical. Rather than using a decimal system, like libraries do, or broad categories, like most of us do, we should organize based on projects. He also argues for a ‘slow burn,’ letting ideas percolate, adding to them over time. This fits very well with the productivity of Luhrman’s zettlekasten. Luhrman often argued that his prolific writing resulted from daily dialogue with his zettlekasten. And Forte stresses the same process: don’t passively consume vast volumes of information that soon gets forgotten, but use what you’re learning to make new things, new ideas. You have to put your second brain to work daily.

So, I’m sure this was TMI (too much information) about GTD and PKM. But when I’ve taken a deep dive down a rabbit hole, reviewing my journey by writing it down allows me a different perspective. I think I will continue on this journey, but I promise you that I will not bore you with continued details!

Travel Safe, my friends. Remember—it’s the journey, not the destination!