[Monthly Digest] May 2024
This month, analogue inadvertently received a lot of limelight in all of the published issues. Check them out if you like tangible things or their photo-realistic simulations.
A few days ago, I had a friendly catch-up call with an old friend who was, to my delight, getting into PKM as a proxy to squeezing more creative juices. Having run a business in the field, she understands the importance of opening up by writing it down1. She’s a compulsive analogue note-taker, moving around the world with a pile of trusty notebooks.
One thing that plagues note-takers is that, like constantly growing databases, navigating those notes and extracting intelligence from them becomes increasingly challenging, even for machines. This perceived friction is a dangerous beast, as it prevents you from reviewing things you wrote regularly, much like the prospect of a physical struggle prevents you from hitting the gym. Yet, it’s crucial to make your notes work for you. We’ve discussed the importance of periodic note reviews in one of the earlier issues.
The answer to the abovementioned struggle is almost always a gruelling but undeniably rewarding process of tidying up2. In PKM, this means revising what was written, pruning irrelevant notes, extracting repetitive thoughts into a single atomic note, and interconnecting those into a highly personal knowledge web. There’s no need to follow the Zettelkasten3 methodology religiously, but some variation of connecting the dots must occur.
I told my friend I had gone through this exercise before hitting the road. I simply couldn’t travel with so much paper the way she does. The byproduct of this one-off transfer was the crystallisation of thoughts and a quantum leap in memory improvement. As a bonus, a few interesting insights cropped up and turned into very popular online writeups.
But I love pen and paper way too much to ditch them fully. Several writing instruments and notebooks are always on my desk and in my bags, acting as a staging area. Writers and thinkers, such as
and Neil Gaiman do exactly that, and they’re not alone. If you want more examples of how it worked for famous folks before us, take a look at the fabulous Noted by dedicated to deep dives into great minds’ physical notebooks.The reason is that this analogue staging enables particular things due to the extremely low friction of a rudimentary user interface. Perhaps a little bit of analogue is precisely what you need to propel your PKMing to the next level.
You can get some ideas and inspiration from this month’s issues below.
The mother-lord analogue PKM desk Memex by Vannevar Bush and its seminal contribution to establishing hyperlinks as a de facto standard couldn’t be ignored here at The Mechanics of Knowledge Management.
Although this Jules Vernesque wet dream never materialised according to its periodically evolving blueprint, we’ve got its equivalent that surpassed Bush’s wildest predictions4.
We don’t always act logically.
Those creating our Tools for Thought (TfT) understand our compulsive and emotional reactions to attractive things. It’s human to find a densely connected knowledge graph as appealing as a beautiful face, which makes it a powerful growth hacking technique for modern PKM toolset creators.
There’s just something magical about realistic virtual simulations of physical objects that makes us fork out hard-earned cash times and times again.
Many PKMers are also avid writers or creators. This article is dedicated to those producing finished long-format work and those with a stationery fetish, like me.
Neil Gaiman, the famous prolific writer, has a few tricks for triggering creativity that I’ve collected and synthesized for you.
Pick a few for your creative tool belt.
And that’s our month of May 2024, knowledge engineers.
What analogue tools are you using? Do you have an analogue Zettelkasten at home, like
, Robert Greene or Ryan Holiday? Do you collect fountain pens like Neil Gaiman or Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let’s geek out.Pennebaker, J. W., & Smyth, J. M. (2016). Opening Up by Writing It Down, Third Edition: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain. Guilford Publications.
Kondō, M. (2014). The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Vermilion.
Luhmann, N. (1981). Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen: Ein Erfahrungsbericht. Öffentliche Meinung und sozialer Wandel/Public ….
Bush, V. (1979). As we may think. ACM Sigpc Notes.
Thanks for the mention! I’m really excited about documenting more of my process when it comes to PKMs and I’ve enjoyed learning about different processes more with each of your posts. I’m also excited to see more writers explore PKMs too. There’s a lot here!