Tools for better thinking. These could be digital or analog tools.
The Center for Humane Technology is working to popularize the term “AI drift,” describing a model’s tendency to degrade in performance over time. I’m not crazy about the term because I don’t think it clearly communicates the dangers that AI presents to people as they go about their daily lives. In my workplace I’m seeing…
I’ve been working for years on “life garden” document, trying to come up with an at-a-glance view of where my life is working and where it isn’t. I’ve been trying to apply Christopher Alexander’s principles of living structure. And I’m stuck. My document has all kinds of structures and centers and boxes and arrows. But…
I just got from the library Kevin Kelly’s book Excellent Advice for Life: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. It’s a pithy little volume, packed with tiny bits of wisdom. It’s like a cross between the best package of fortune cookies you’ll ever find and the Biblical book of Proverbs. Friends are better than money.…
I’ve been using David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology almost as long as GTD has been around. But I’ve been struggling with the “Someday/Maybe” portion of the Weekly Review. This week I found something that put it all together for me. Luke, a commenter on the GTD website writes: It’s not a parking lot for…
Correlation is not the same as causation, I get that. But the past week I felt positively wrung out, crumpled up, and stomped upon at the end of every workday. And every day was a full-court press to write four pages of user documentation by EOD, using Anthropic Claude as my research assistant. Are the…
I’m old enough to remember the warning about social media, “if you’re not paying for the product, then you’re the product.” In any social club, somebody’s got to pay to keep the lights on. With online platforms there is a process of growing a customer base, locking people in to the platform by making it…
Links, backlinks, tags, atomicity…what’s the most important part of your note-taking system? People. Denham Grey believes that any knowledge system that isn’t driving toward sharing and collaboration is pointed in the wrong direction. In fact, Grey is fairly skeptical about the PKM movement in general, with its focus on information organization at the expense of…
Mike Caulfield makes a distinction between online posts that are “gardens” and posts that are “streams.” Streams are posts that you read, and then they move on, disappearing into history. They are utterances, meaning that they can only be correctly understood by what was said before. You can follow the chain of utterance back, thanks…
In a post titled The Memex Method Cory Doctorow notes that he thinks of his blog as a kind of commonplace book. It is a sort of digital journal where he collects whatever captures his attention and saves it for future use. The benefit that his blog gives him over a notebook or a PKM…
The process of picking a topic and finding supporting research is a trap. At the best you engage in a high degree of confirmation bias, seeing only the information that supports your premise. I remember in college many times writing a paper only to find near the end that the research was pointing in a…
Niklas Luhmann observes that in order to think in any constructive way he must write down his thoughts. This seems to be one of the main purposes of his Zettelkasten note-taking system – capturing thoughts and refine them by writing them down, reflecting on them, changing them. In addition to capturing thoughts in his notes,…
The Cornell notetaking system uses a college-ruled notebook with each page divided into thirds. These sections are for points that the lecturer makes, questions about these points, and a final summary of everything on the page. Ideas are captured in the largest section of the page, each idea getting a couple of lines with ample…
Andy Matushack’s Evergreen Notes are notes that grow and improve over time. They become valuable building blocks for thinking and writing. Most people take notes as a way to remember key facts and details. These are jotted down in a notebook and reviewed just before a test or a project. Evergreen notes, on the other…
Photo by Pete Birkinshaw from Manchester, UK – Data Storage Device, CC BY 2.0, Link I stumbled across the zettelkasten note taking process while watching Beck Tench’s helpful Tinderbox series. Beck uses Tinderbox software to create a hyper-organized system of notes for her Ph.D. studies in contemplative practice and information science. Her method of managing these…
