[Monthly Digest] July 2024
Key notes on the definition of knowledge, improving our note-taking and the benefits of writing by hand.
July was a busy, buzzing, and stressful month because I was juggling work and tectonic shifts in my personal life that required jumping through bureaucratic hoops. In doing that, I felt like I hadn’t done any PKM. Yet, in retrospect, as I’m writing this monthly digest, I realised that I did a lot of it, just not the usual way.
All those calls, emails, meetings, and appointments left me submerged in new information; every time I got a new chunk of it, the whole picture would fully redraw itself like a Three-Body Problem, changing the current plan at hand again. I did not expect to be given everything on a silver plate, but I couldn’t anticipate how scattered these puzzle pieces were. The notaries would have one part, the municipality would have their share of knowledge, and lawyers would also suck some out of their thumbs and pour it on me to add insult to injury.
Today, I finally constructed almost the entire picture, and the process of collecting and connecting these dots was similar to what we, as knowledge engineers, call PKM.
I now have a mental knowledge palace I can traverse in my head to find hints, hunches, and potential answers on the fly. The system has become second nature to me.
Is this knowledge? Is this the real-world application of the continuous effort to improve one’s notes-taking techniques?
I’ve dedicated a few of this month's issues to these questions, and I hope they helped you as these techniques helped me.
Here’s a quick rundown of July 2024 in case you’ve missed a few.
Why Try to Improve Your Notes?
Most people who expend time and energy building their note vaults sooner or later provoke an eyebrow-raising “Why even bother improving a note-taking skill?”. After all, this is what we’ve all been doing since we learned to write. Most people…
Note-taking is rarely considered a skill that requires continuous improvement. But just like running, boiling eggs, or reading, there’s much more than meets the eye. Whether you need to invest energy to improve your knowledge management and note-taking is a different story, but this issue might be a good place to start wondering whether it’s worth it.
On Writing by Hand (Part 1)
“Every writer, no matter how technologically advanced, should learn how to write with pen and ink. There is a visceral connection between hand and eye that calligraphy brings out.” —Kurt Cagle Studies have shown a correlation between writing by hand and improved learning. Interestingly,…
Writing by hand, especially in mindful cursive, is a “dying” activity—or is it? There’s much more behind the act of literally putting pen to paper than simply capturing information. There’s quite a bit of science involved. It’s much more similar to cooking vs ordering food or writing an essay yourself instead of letting generative AI do it for you. Writing by hand is not even entirely about writing.
On Writing by Hand (Part 2)
If you’re interested in languages and writing, I recommend a series of books by John McWhorter, such as his brilliant “Ancient Writing and the History of the Alphabet” and “Language Families of the World”. Excellent writing either educates or entertains. His books do both in a way that no other books do. I can’t recommend them eno…
Since there’s much to be said about writing by hand, the tale was divided into two manageable chunks, of which this issue is the second (and last) part. In it, we’re looking at reasons you might want to consider teaching your kid the act of handwriting despite its dip in popularity. After reading it, some readers said they pulled a trigger on some writing gear. I hope it’ll rekindle your love for writing, too.
What is Knowledge?
It’s not something I emphasise very often, but besides this PKM-related publication, Knowledge Management is also something I do for a living. I’m the head of engineering for a startup that builds a knowledge management tool for life sciences. Therefore, everything I share here applies to real business needs and vice-versa.
This issue (perhaps unsurprisingly) resonated with knowledge engineers the most. In it, fashioned in engineering terms, we’re trying to begin tackling a problem by first coming up with its definition. We do not achieve that in this article, but we might be onto something that could be considered a good start for such a definition.
And that’s our month of July 2024, knowledge engineers. Keep cycling through the data→information→knowledge→insight→wisdom iterations and let our evening versions of ourselves be wiser than our morning selves. See you in August.