A garden is more obviously a living structure because its various parts – trees, flower beds, animals – are all alive. Less visible is the continuous process of unfolding that is taking place, fruit dropping from trees and rotting, being swept away or eaten by birds and insects, a path meandering through the space for…
Niklas Luhmann, emphasizing his notion that the Zettelkasten is a communication partner, stressed that links between notes should point to something you might not have thought of on your own. He talks about drawing on the rich network of ideas in the Zettelkasten to accomplish this. He also usese terms like accidental and serendiptiy. The…
Mike Caulfield talks about his collection of notes in his wiki and how they work together as a rich network of ideas. Part of his method is to very carefully describe the relationship between two ideas when he builds his links. These descriptions become ideas in their own right. Caulfield’s links are by nature structure…
When our desire moves us to make something, we begin to naturally start assembling bits and pieces into a kind of order. It doesn’t matter what we are working on, a piece of writing, a painting, a piece of furniture. There is an ordering process that is common to all creative works. The easiest place…
For some time now I’ve been trying to understand how architect Christopher Alexander’s idea of 15 structure preserving transformations might apply to systems outside of physical architecture. Alexander himself noted that his overarching theory about form and life would apply to all kinds of structures. You can strengthen the whole by systematically strengthening its component…
Niklas Luhmann talked about his box full of notes as if it was a flesh and blood research partner. He could question his notes and they would give him insightful, sometimes surprising answers. Not only did Luhmann talk about the notes as if they were a partner, sometimes he talked about them having a quality…
I wrote in my previous post that Tools for Thought Need a Purpose, otherwise you end up a slave to your note system, whether it’s a Zettelkasten or a collection of Evergreen Notes, creating an endless hoard of ideas because why else do you have a PKM system in the first place? Instead you need…
I’ve read a number of posts recently questioning the whole idea of Personal Knowledge Management. These folks have tried a number of different tools and approaches and always seem to arrive at the same result – it’s a ton of work with little or no ROI. Without exception the writers say “I did all this…
There’s a ripple going through software development right now around “second brain” type note taking apps. Wikis and other personal knowledge management apps have been around for a long time. But suddenly new apps are popping up all over the place. Here’s a round-up of PKM tools that I largely stole from Reddit and added…
It seems like you can’t go an entire week without hearing about a new PKM tool…Notion, Roam, Craft, Logseq, Obsidian…and now there is Tana on the horizon. But what exactly is PKM? Personal Knowledge Management is an offshoot of Knowledge Management, a business initiative launched in the 1990s to curate essential information and deliver it…
In a podcast about “Slow Productivity” Cal Newport suggests that organizations could do a lot to prevent employee burnout by shifting their goals to quality of output over quantity. This would let workers do their jobs at a more natural pace, working the way our brains are wired. But let’s say we can’t wait for…
There’s a lot of talk about burnout these days. Workers are increasingly feeling exhausted. Anxiety levels are on the rise. Employee turnover jumped from an average of 45% in 2019 to 57% in 2020. The question is, what are we going to do about it? Computer science professor Cal Newport thinks that part of the…
In his chautauqua on being stuck Robert Pirsig identifies the cause of “stuckness” has having too many tasks at hand for your mind to process. His solution to get unstuck is “don’t try to force it, that will only get you more stuck.” But I think that’s only one form of being stuck, some kind…
I’ve run into a dead end with my Life Architecture project. My idea was that by making small, incremental changes to the structures of your life, you would arrive at a more satisfying everyday experience and better outcomes overall. Along the way I’ve come up with a workable methodology. But the results don’t seem any…
I first stumbled on A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, and Construction when visiting a friend. I was dealing with some creative roadblocks and the book stirred in me a new passion. It contains 253 “patterns,” design solutions that work together to help people create homes and neighborhoods that feel good and function well. While I’m…
