Reading source material, taking notes, then transcribing and rearranging those notes, and finding connections between them are all central to thinking, according to Sönke Ahrens. Legendary note-taker Niklas Luhman argued that it was impossible to think without writing. Now of course you could very easily feed a LLM a big stack of research papers and…
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 heard that Annie Dillard, a writer who expressed the wonder and wildness of the natural world, has passed away. Reading Dillard I became aware that, far from being conservative…selecting for the least amount of energy consumption…the creative forces that bring us life are wildly playful, exuberant, and wealthy. After the one extravagant gesture…
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…
Here’s to the start of another year. My personal goal for the coming year is to spend a part of every day simply “writing to be writing.” Not writing for blog posts, not writing for publication, not writing to anyone in particular. Just putting my butt in the chair and putting words to paper…or whatever…
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…
When you first start on a writing project you don’t know what the structure of your project will be. As you do research, collect ideas, and clarify your thoughts, the structure will emerge. Using a tool like Tinderbox lets you test your ideas and see what kind of structure provides the best fit for your…
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…
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…
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…
DevonThink 3.0 is available right now as a free public beta. This is a great opportunity to give this Mac-based knowledge base an extended test-drive, seeing that you won’t have to pay a penny until the beta period ends some time this summer. Here’s the use-case for DevonThink: you write, study, or otherwise manage a…
I want to write faster. I want to write better. But I struggle with research in a way that’s more like hoarding than sense-making. The zettelkasten method of note-taking has given me a simple way to organize my research and bring a lot more clarity to the information I’ve collected. But I still get bogged…
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…
I wrote this article on the 101 freeway during the morning rush hour. To be completely honest I did some light editing and added links afterwards, but the bulk of the material was drafted while I was behind the wheel. Before I go too far, there are some risks to multitasking while driving even when…
