Year: 2023

A clean sheet of paper is an oft-invoked image during design efforts of various stripes. Ignore what is happening now and imagine that there are no constraints on what you seek to create. Sometimes this strategy is explicit; often, however, it is hidden in the press to unveil the latest new, new thing.

If I’ve got a product or service that solves a real problem, I want to emphasize how good it’s going to be once you’ve put it into practice. If I spend any time at all on what you’re doing now, it’s only to highlight your pain and persuade you to get a move on to the promised land. If i’m fair to middling honest, I might acknowledge that you’ll have to put in some work to realize the benefits I’m promising.

For all that this is a default sales and marketing strategy, I think it is misleading, and possibly dangerous, in the realm of knowledge work. People with something to sell want you to start from a clean slate because it makes their job easier, not yours.

If you are turning out knowledge work on some consistent basis, then you already have some form of system or practice in place. You likely are all too well aware of your system’s warts and blemishes. The temptation to wipe everything clear and start over can be strong.

What is it, however, that you would be wiping clear? What you have now is a collection of practices and a body of work. Both contribute to your capacity for producing new work. Together they constitute a complex system that works.

This is a time to proceed with caution. Consider the following piece of advice that I encountered in Jerry Weinberg’s excellent Weinberg on Writing

“It is always easier to destroy a complex system than to selectively alter it”
R. James

Both the practices and the body of work you have now evolved over time; they constitute a complex system. You are engaged in craft. Much of that craft may have been acquired by osmosis through multiple apprenticeships.

However acquired, you aren’t starting from a clean sheet of paper. However appealing new practices and techniques may sound, they have to be evaluated within the context of your existing practice and environment. Which means you need to invest in understanding your practices and your environment in some detail.

The question is never “am I doing X (building a second brain, linking my thinking, creating a Zettelkasten) the right way?”. The question has to be “how can I adapt this idea to my circumstances?”

You cannot function as a consumer here; you must accept your responsibility as a designer.

You can observe a lot by just watching.

Yogi Berra

I’ve long argued that invisibility constitutes a major impediment to improving the practice of knowledge work. What we need is to see more practice.

So, I’m setting out to collect and develop stories and case studies of knowledge workers doing their work. Right now, this is exploratory research to discover categories and concepts that might prove useful. My conjecture is there’s an underlying set of skills and practices common across multiple instances of knowledge work.

Further, I suspect these commonalities aren’t immediately evident or obvious. They are “hidden” within the craft elements of different knowledge work jobs (e.g. reporter, consultant, systems analyst, programmer, data scientist, media planner, teacher). The initial goal is to figure out productive questions.

A starting point is to examine accounts of knowledge workers who have shared their journeys in ways that we can extract insights about their methods and practices. For example, Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain presents his solution for a personal knowledge management environment. He does so by sharing a good bit of how he got to his answers. Regardless of whether you find his destination suitable to your needs, you can learn from his journey. Supplement the book with the materials he has shared elsewhere online and we can craft a useful case study.

There’s a decent collection of knowledge workers (authors, scientists, entrepreneurs, etc.) who have shared enough about their methods and practices to form an initial sample from which we can develop the outlines of a theory of knowledge work. Once that exists, we can reach out to other knowledge workers to explore their practices and elaborate a richer model.

I’m a believer in learning by doing – both as a learner and as a teacher. As a learner I’ve largely been content to hack away at things in the belief and lived experience that I do figure something out eventually. I’m a bit more disciplined and intentional when I put on my teaching hat. There, I make a more mindful effort to design doing with the intent of nudging learners to do things I expect will impart the lessons I intend.

If learning by doing is a powerful strategy, shouldn’t we make an effort to develop that skill? What might happen if I bring more of my teaching strategies to my own learning by doing?

Let’s start with one learning by doing strategy. “See one, do one, teach one” is a strategy that’s long been effective in medical education. While typically deployed in the context of a broader curriculum where you can make assumptions about prerequisite knowledge and coaches to keep the learners in bounds and out of trouble, can I adapt it to my individual needs?

My hunch is that that “seeing” is the trickiest part in this equation. I’ve asserted that one of the fundamental problems of knowledge work is that it is largely invisible. What can we do to make it easier to see our own work?

One prior element in making my work easier to see was to worry about the naming of things. Which helps at the later stages of knowledge work. How about earlier stages? I think this is the potential within the world of note-taking/note-making apps and environments.

Ideas are rarely so accommodating as to show up fully formed. Sometimes they arrive as a phrase or as a handful of words. Sometimes as a sentence or two. They’re often rude enough to intrude when I’m half asleep without a writing implement nearby. I’ve had to accept that many will escape before I can write them down. However, I have slowly gotten better at capturing a reasonable percentage before they disappear.

Way back when, I did much of this capturing by hand in notebooks. Now, I capture these evanescent items in Obsidian. I don’t generally know what I will do with an idea at that point. But, bits are cheap and better to have a record and decide to throw it away later than miss collecting a gem. (One of these days, I will have to do a piece on why I am suspicious of the notion of the collector’s fallacy).

Gradually, I’ve been building a collection of my ideas that I can “see” from something resembling a single vantage point. It includes everything I’ve posted to this blog since 2001, everything I’ve highlighted on my Kindle (via the excellent Readwise Reader), and my journals going back to 2019. It leaks. And, there are remaining pools of thinking and ideas worth integrating over time. For now, the view is still fuzzy and incomplete but it’s moving in a good direction.

 

The notion of “tools for thought” is undergoing a resurgence from niche topic to something approaching a fad. Everyone’s got a new tool for making notes or a course on how to optimize their Zettelkasten. Too few of them seem familiar with the prior art fueling their work. You might want to start by adding Howard Rheingold’s Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology to your reading list.

The problem is that we mostly get trapped talking about tools in isolation. The folks marketing and selling tools focus on what sets their tool apart from others. People looking at a new tool are seduced into comparisons between individual tools. Discussion threads revolve around narrow questions of “how do I force this tool to behave like the tool I already have” or “how can I import my collection of left-handed, Gregorian chant, meditations”. We don’t appear to have a principled way to talk or think about how a new tool might fit into a collection of tools and how tools (plural) enable and support the craft of thinking. We slide past the phrase “tools for thought” without giving much thought to where that might take us.

There’s more to quality work than any individual tool. 4.0. My wife is a photographer. If you want to irritate her, suggest that she must use a very expensive camera. She takes better photos with her iPhone than I can with $10,000 worth of equipment.

The eye behind the lens matters more than the camera. Or the mind at the keyboard.

Talking about tools is easy. Thinking about craft is hard.

Working out how tools enable better craft is the nub. George R.R. Martin still writes with Wordstar. Anne Lamott was pushing yellow legal pads in a recent workshop. John McPhee was rearranging index cards on the floor. I don’t take any of this as recommendations to adopt their tools. But it does make me wonder how I ought to think about how tools and craft intertwine.

A starting point is to turn Sturgeon’s Law into a working strategy. Sturgeon’s Law asserts that “90% of everything is crap.” Churn out a lot of output and learn to distinguish the 10% from the 90%. Becoming a better photographer consists of throwing away most of your shots. Same for writing. Step one in getting better is producing something to critique. Over time, you can begin to wonder about producing things worthy of critique. To start, focus on pure production.

Two things become possible once we’re producing something. One, we can begin to compare our outputs with one another and with similar outputs out in the world. Two, we can pay attention to how we’re going about our production. Both of these can work as individual practices. With a bit of confidence, you can expand your comparisons to others.

I’m an average photographer at best. I haven’t put in the reps that my wife has. She’ll take a dozen shots of a scene and throw eleven away to get an image worth keeping. Most of what she throws away put my efforts to shame. Slowly, I’ve learned there’s a body of knowledge about what separates a good shot from a mediocre one.

I’ve put in more reps at writing than I have at photography. This blog post is about 600 words at this point. There’s another thousand words of notes in the window next to this one and I’ve probably thrown away another 1500-2000 so far. There’s an extensive body of knowledge about blogging in particular and writing in general. I’m familiar enough with both to know the rules and to be comfortable breaking them when it suits my purposes.

I’ve got plenty of output that I can assess and evaluate. The second development path to explore is the production process. The tools I employ are pretty easy to identify. Teasing out the process is trickier. Discerning where improvement opportunities lie is harder still. It is most definitely a work in progress.

I’m on record that knowledge work should be treated as a craft. Lately, I’ve been lamenting that there aren’t enough case studies of knowledge work in action for us to learn from. Let’s see if we can start to generate and collect some to see what we might learn from one another.