Note: See also my earlier post: Link-based Note-making.
I recently finished the five week Linking Your Thinking Workshop run by Nick Milo and his excellent team of associates. The workshop (I was in cohort 11 – LYT 11) provides a process for helping foster and sustain an advanced personal knowledge management (PKM in the current vernacular). I first learned about Nick from discovering his excellent YouTube videos.
LYT 11 was a very valuable and enjoyable experience for me. Nick has done an excellent job of organizing the workshop, crafting the curriculum and being open and interactive with participants every step of the way. The interactive exercises captivated participants and facilitated a profound introspective process. Collaborating with Nick’s mentors further nurtured our growth by providing insightful feedback, reinforcing the ethos of capturing less, reflecting more, and amplifying our cognitive faculties.
While Nick terms it “linking your thinking,” I prefer to envision it as “looping your thinking,” for the process manifests as a rhythmic cycle of reflection, revisitation, and revision, employing notes as our cerebral canvases.
Through a dynamic blend of interactive lectures, hands-on tutorials and engaging sharing sessions, we immersed ourselves in Nick’s methodology to cultivating and curating your own personal system. Although Nick champions the use of Obsidian as the PKM tool of choice, he’s also quick to point out that other tools – as long as they support linking between notes – can be used as well. Obsidian is definitely an acquired taste – but it’s free for personal use making it easy to play with initially. Obsidian is built in such a way that it’s very extensible with a large set of add-on plug-ins from the user community that extend its basic functionality.
Nick’s framework, aptly named ARC (Add / Relate / Communicate) illustrates the workflow underlying the art of crafting and curating a robust PKM. From the outset, he masterfully distinguishes between mere note-taking and the transformative process of note-making, wherein the true value of learning from our discoveries becomes evident.
Similar to fellow participants, my inclination has long been to avidly capture intriguing internet findings during my daily browsing endeavors. Engaging in extensive skimming, I often save numerous items in a read-it-later service, intending to delve into them at a later date (though regrettably, such intentions are often left unrealized).
This captures the essence of the “add” phase within Nick’s ARC framework. He emphatically highlights our tendency to overindulge in this phase, succumbing to the allure of over-collecting. Alas, such behavior diminishes the time available for genuine learning, impeding our ability to effectively relate to and internalize the knowledge we encounter. Consequently, we may unintentionally neglect the final step of communicating our learnings. Instead of fostering an environment conducive to learning, we inadvertently immerse ourselves in a cycle of ceaseless capture and accumulation, devoid of meaningful contemplation.
Once we learn to recalibrate our time allocation, diminishing our emphasis on relentless accumulation, we unlock the gateway to one of the most invaluable aspects of a robust PKM system: the emergence of ideas.
Nick recommends we think of this initially as going from “spark” to “remark” – having the spark of an idea as we read something but then taking the small incremental step to actually remark on that spark. What thoughts does it ignite? Ask the questions and capture what we’re thinking – without worrying about perfection. Wherever possible, we establish interconnections with related ideas, thereby embarking on the creation of an expansive “ideaverse.”
This intricate dance becomes the process of sensemaking – a foundational pillar of Nick’s LYT approach. As we encounter a spark of inspiration, a cascade of questions ensues: What does it remind me of? How does it relate? What distinguishes it? Why does it resonate with me? To what can I connect it?
Out of that process can come concise “statement notes” which are short, to the point notes about a particular subject. These statement notes diverge from “thing notes,” which adopt a descriptive tone, avoiding undue bias. Statement notes become the realm of personal opinions. Furthermore, the concept of “evergreen notes” may evolve – originally described by Andy Matuschak as “written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects.”
An invaluable lesson from LYT 11 lies in the relative insignificance of folders. When I first started using Obsidian I anxiously sought out a folder structure that would make sense for me. But as you use this tool you come to realize that folders are relatively unimportant. Instead, links between notes transcend any folder structure. If you put a note in a folder and later move it all of any links associated with that note will be updated automatically to point to it in the new location. This liberating realization alleviates the burden of pursuing an elusive perfect folder structure.
In lieu of folders, a far superior concept emerges: the notion of content maps. A content map, represented by an MOC (Map of Content), serves as a note that expertly organizes interlinking pathways to other notes. Resembling an index or table of contents, the MOC boasts dynamism, continuously evolving and adapting as concepts progress.
Nick uses the notion of mental squeeze points to signal the opportune moment for creating a new MOC, enabling thoughts to crystallize. A mental squeeze point is that feeling your have when you realize you’re not quite understanding whatever it is you’re working on – you’ve done research, read a lot, collected some highlights but now it’s a bit of a jumble – that’s a mental squeeze point. And that’s the trigger for pulling back a bit and organizing – employing an MOC may be the best way to work on that process fostering clarity and organization around whatever you’ve been working on.
The pinnacle of our PKM note hierarchy can be your home note – a note that provides an outline of ways into your knowledge base. Like all notes, your home note can be dynamic – it’s not a static document but can evolve and change as often as you like as your needs and interests evolve. Your home note might also be a place to anchor yourself with a daily motivational quote, a favorite image, etc. that acts as a beacon guiding our initial forays into knowledge exploration.
Complementing the home note, daily notes can be used to capture the essence of each day. Often used as a place for “interstitial journaling” – capturing and logging our thoughts as they occur throughout the day. Moreover, daily notes can be used to enable the monitoring of habits to reinforce, list tasks to complete, and describe plans for the present and future.
I’ve now been using Obsidian for over a year and have enough experience with it to appreciate its power and the advantages it brings to this kind of a system – unmatched in my view by other tools I’ve tried. Along the way, I benefited a lot from LYT Kit – a sample Obsidian vault that Nick makes freely available separately and which I really recommend for coming up the learning curve and seeing some “best practices” applied. But I’ve also learned that it can be a place where I become too “fiddly” – wasting time playing around with the application itself, installing new plugins to try, etc. I’ve come to appreciate the importance of keeping it simple, using just enough of the full range of capabilities it offers to get the job that is most important for me to do. That said, I’m glad I was familiar with Obsidian before taking the course as it really adding on to my existing skills without starting from scratch.
In this specific cohort of the LYT Workshop, Nick introduced an exciting “AI Week” where we delved into the application of AI chatbot techniques to enhance our personal knowledge management (PKM) practices. These sessions focused on advanced techniques that truly expanded my understanding of the potential applications of AI chatbots, especially as invaluable assistants for brainstorming. Inspired by Ethen Mollick’s concept of considering AI chatbots as “interns,” we applied this perspective throughout our exercises in LYT 11, which added an intriguing dynamic to our interactions with AI technology.
We had three outside experts during LYT 11 – all were LYT alums from earlier cohorts. They provided additional insights based on their experiences applying PKM techniques and added a lot of value.
Moreover, the showcase sessions held the last week of LYT 11 were incredibly insightful. During these sessions, participants had the opportunity to share their experiences and insights, dedicating 10 minutes each to discuss how they have been applying the knowledge gained in the workshop. The discussions sparked numerous thoughts and ideas, motivating further exploration.
All in all, LYT 11 provided me a comprehensive view on constructing and, more importantly, using a personal knowledge management system every day. Nick and his team have done an exceptional job in delivering the course content and providing support to all participants. If you’re seeking a valuable approach to constructing a genuinely beneficial personal knowledge management system, just as I was, I highly recommend Nick’s course.