I recently wrote (“Astonishment“) about the metaphor of an amusement park for my PKM. This morning I was listening to a podcast on my morning walk in which the host was encouraging us to use AI to help extend our thinking in various ways.
When I got back from my morning walk, I asked Anthropic’s Claude to help me brainstorm some more on this amusement park idea. I really like some of these suggestions – which definitely to extend my thinking about the various nooks and crannies of my PKM system!
A funhouse with distorting mirrors that show exaggerated or distorted versions of my ideas and beliefs. Allows me to see things from new angles.
A merry-go-round where I can revisit my favorite ideas and insights over and over. A place of comfort and familiarity.
A haunted mansion filled with doubts, fears, and limiting beliefs that I need to face and overcome. Facing the ghosts helps me grow.
Food stalls and snack bars representing nourishing ideas and mental models. Brain food to feed my thinking.
An arcade or midway where I can play games with ideas, combining them in new ways to see what emerges. Allows combinatorial creativity.
A lazy river where I can relax and let my mind wander, making new connections. Effortless flow of insights.
A hall of mirrors where ideas build on each other, combining and recombining. Represents the compounding nature of knowledge.
A carousel with different animals representing different perspectives – a way to look at ideas from different viewpoints. Expanding my frames.
A safari ride to discover new lands of knowledge I haven’t explored yet. Pushing beyond my comfort zones.
A hedge maze representing the challenge of finding my way through complex ideas and systems. Navigating nuance and ambiguity.
A theater showing films of my memories and vivid imaginings. My dreams, fantasies, and reflections come alive.
A Ferris wheel giving a bird’s-eye view when I need perspective on things. Rising above for clarity.
Bumper cars allowing ideas to collide and bump into each other randomly. Sparking new insights through serendipity.
A petting zoo with metaphors and analogies I can interact with. Making the abstract more concrete.
A sky tram/gondola lift connecting different domains of knowledge. Seeing interconnectedness.
A fun slide for taking quick leaps between ideas. Intuition and rapid insights.
A carousel of cognitive biases I need to watch out for. Remaining aware of my blindspots.
A picnic area for intellectual nourishment and pausing to reflect. Healthy thinking habits.
A mirrored labyrinth of ever-deepening knowledge. Infinite recursion of ideas building on themselves.
I’m in the midst of one of the Linking Your Thinking workshops taught by Nick Milo. Recently, during one of Nick’s talks, I had one of those flashes of insight that surprised me. Aha!Â
What came to mind is that my PKM system is kind of like an amusement park of my mind.
This morning while taking my daily walk I was listening to George Saunders on the Talk Easy podcast talking about his writing process. He used the metaphor of how when he’s writing he thinks of himself designing a roller coaster. That he spends a lot of time designing and redrafting over and over again that first climb up the big hill and the swoosh down – the one that takes your breath away – followed by all of the other hills and dips and curves and twists until the end of the ride. We all know that sense of astonishment when we come over that first hill – after the clackety clack of the hill climb – and it looks like we’re heading straight down!
So for sure the amusement park of my mind has a roller coaster like that in it! Maybe it starts with the big hill of my home note?
But my amusement park has other lands as well – I think of my own Fantasyland, Adventureland, Tomorrowland, and more. Maybe there’s a Main Street that is my daily note – a place for grounding me each morning?
I’m sure there’s a pirate cove in there somewhere along with a submarine and a rocket ride. Some kiddie cars and even a junior roller coaster when I’m just wanting a small thrill.
I have pundits in my park too – some long dead – who speak to me on the town square and suggest I respond to them.
And there’s a big train that circles the whole park and provides me with a gentle ride when I’m just wanting to relax and reflect.
Good fun! No metaphor is perfect – but this amusement park of my mind idea is feeling like it is a pretty good one!
I’m a long-time user of Safari in MacOS (and iOS and iPadOS) and was happy to see Tab Groups added as a feature in macOS Monterey two years ago. I’m a heavy user of tab groups – having separately my browsing activity into various categories which help me focus my work and reading.
I’ve been frustrated, however, with my inability to reliably use a keyboard shortcut on my Mac to switch between the dozen or so tab groups I have setup. Sometimes the shortcut (⌘-Shift-⬆︎/⬇︎) would work but most of the time it wouldn’t.
I’ve done a number of searches over time trying to figure out what I might be doing wrong. Earlier this morning I stumbled across one comment in a long thread discussing tab groups saying that for the keyboard shortcut to work the focus needed to be in the URL bar. In other words, if the focus isn’t in the URL bar you need to get it there first (easily done with the ⌘-L shortcut) and THEN you can reliably use the keyboard shortcuts to switch tab groups.
While I appreciate almost everything Apple does in terms of user interface simplicity, sometimes an arcane nuance like this is just way to hard to discover – and I consider myself an experienced “power user”!
Oh well, just another first world problem I suppose!
Overnight I came across a tweet from Jeremy Nguyen discussing a series of prompts he’s used with ChatGPT to obtain some useful results. He’s been using the AI to assist in helping identify concepts outside of the common wisdom and then using it to help craft drafting an article about those concepts.
I decided to try to use Claude for this purpose and used the following prompt:
You are an expert on the field of personal knowledge management. Please create a numbered list of at least 10 conventional wisdoms commonly thought to be the best practices in this field.
Then ask which numbers I think are unhelpful for my audience’s goals. Interview me, one question at a time, pausing for my answers, to find and distill my unique perspectives. The final output will be a bullet point list of my contrarian perspectives, the results I achieved from holding them, and how they differ from conventional industry wisdom.
Start by showing me 10 conventional wisdoms.
Claude responded to my request:
Here is a list of 10 common practices thought to be best for personal knowledge management:
Capture everything – take extensive notes on meetings, conversations, articles, etc. to record all potentially useful information.
Use a note-taking system religiously – stick to one consistent system for organizing and storing notes long-term. Popular choices are Evernote, OneNote, etc.
Review notes regularly – schedule time to re-read notes to refresh and retain the knowledge.
Make notes searchable – use tags, headers, etc. to make it easy to search and find notes later.
Link related notes – use wiki-linking, backlinks, etc. to connect related notes across documents.
Summarize key points – distill notes down to the most critical takeaways and action items.
Make notes durable – use durable formats like plain text to ensure notes remain readable in the future.
Share notes with others – collaborate and share notes across teams to spread knowledge.
Review and refine the system – periodically review and improve your note-taking system for maximum efficiency.
Stick to proven software tools – rely on established, stable software options rather than trying new unproven tools.
Which of these do you disagree with or find unhelpful for your goals? I’m happy to interview you one-by-one on your perspectives.
I responded: 1, 8
Claude responded:
Thank you for identifying #1 and #8 as practices you disagree with or find unhelpful. Let’s discuss them one at a time:
You mentioned #1 – Capture everything – take extensive notes on meetings, conversations, articles, etc. to record all potentially useful information. What is your perspective on this commonly recommended practice? How does your approach differ? What results have you achieved with your approach?
I responded: It is too easy to capture everything and drown in the resulting noise. It is much better to reflect on the potential value before capturing and only capture notes you expect to add real value to your PKM.
Claude responded:
Thank you for sharing your perspective. To summarize:
You believe capturing everything creates too much noise and low-value information.
Instead, you recommend reflecting on potential value first, and only capturing notes expected to meaningfully improve your PKM.
Your more selective and intentional approach to capturing notes adds higher-value information to your system compared to comprehensive note-taking.
Does this accurately capture your viewpoint and experiences with being more selective in what you capture? Please let me know if you would like me to clarify or expand on any part of the summary.
When you’re ready, we can move on to discussing #8 from the initial list.
I responded: Yes, that’s accurate.
Claude responded:
Great, I’m glad I summarized your perspective correctly.
Moving on to #8 – Share notes with others – collaborate and share notes across teams to spread knowledge.
You indicated you disagree with or find this practice unhelpful. Could you explain your thinking on sharing notes with others? How is your approach different and what results have you seen from it? I’m looking forward to learning your viewpoint.
I responded: By definition, PKM is personal, not collaborative. Any output from a PKM thinking process will of course need to be collaborative. But seeking collaboration too early can be very distracting.
Claude responded:
Thank you for elaborating – I understand your perspective better now:
You believe the “P” in PKM stands for “personal”, meaning knowledge management should focus on optimizing for individual thought processes initially.
Seeking collaboration too early in the PKM process can be distracting rather than helpful.
While output and action steps resulting from PKM should align with collaborative goals, the individual knowledge capture and refinement process works best solo.
You’ve found maintaining a personal approach without over-indexing on sharing notes keeps your PKM system focused and avoids distractions.
Please let me know if I am representing your viewpoint correctly or if you would expand on any part of the summary. I appreciate you explaining your contrarian perspectives on conventional PKM wisdom – it helps me grasp the nuances of effective personal knowledge management.
I responded: Yes, that’s correct.
Claude responded:
Thank you for confirming I accurately summarized your perspective on keeping PKM personal rather than over-collaborating.
To recap the key contrarian viewpoints we discussed:
On capturing everything: You are more selective and intentional, only capturing notes that seem likely to meaningfully improve your PKM rather than comprehensively documenting. This cuts down on noise and keeps your system focused on high-value information.
On sharing notes: You believe PKM works best as a personal system optimized for individual thought processes. Too much early collaboration can distract. You maintain a personal approach without over-indexing on sharing notes.
Let me know if you would like me to clarify or expand on any part of this summary. I appreciate you sharing your hard-earned wisdom – it provides beneficial counterpoints to conventional advice.
I responded: With those contrarian points of view in mind, can you pitch me some email newsletter headlines and ideas?
Claude responded:
Absolutely, let me propose some newsletter headline ideas that could highlight the contrarian perspectives we discussed:
“Forget Note-Taking Overload: How to Build a Lean, Focused PKM”
This headline promises to provide an alternative to exhaustive note-taking, focusing on your idea of intentional, high-value capture.
“The Power of Personal: Keeping PKM Independent Before Collaboration”
This headline emphasizes the benefits of maintaining a personal system before collaborating, per your advice.
“PKM Success Without Endless Reviewing and Sharing”
This headline speaks to your points about avoiding collaboration distractions and extensive review sessions.
“X Habits Holding Back Your PKM System – And What to Do Instead”
This headline can lead with the conventional practices you disagree with, contrasting them with your effective counter-approaches.
“Building a PKM System That Works for You, Not ‘Best Practices'”
This general headline contrasts standardized advice with your personalized, optimized approaches.
Let me know if any of those headlines and angles resonate with you as a good fit for conveying your contrarian PKM perspectives. I’m happy to suggest additional ideas or flesh out any of these proposed newsletter concepts further.
I responded: Great, please write a draft of a blog post for the first idea.
Claude responded:
Here is a draft blog post for the “Forget Note-Taking Overload: How to Build a Lean, Focused PKM” headline:
Forget Note-Taking Overload: How to Build a Lean, Focused PKM
Conventional wisdom says your personal knowledge management system should aim to capture everything – exhaustive notes on every meeting, conversation, and piece of content you encounter. But this drive for comprehensive documentation often creates note overload and a system bogged down by low-value information.
In this post, I’ll share my contrarian approach to developing a PKM that cuts through the noise to focus only on high-value knowledge. Here are the key principles:
Be intentional about capture. Don’t default to taking notes on everything. Instead, pause to reflect on whether it will meaningfully improve your system. Evaluate potential ROI before documenting.
Limit noise. Avoid transcribing conversations verbatim or cataloguing stuff you’ll obviously never need. Keep only truly vital points.
Let some things go. You don’t have to write down every insight. If it won’t provide lasting value, move on without capturing it.
Depth over breadth. Spend more time refining a few concise, high-impact notes vs many superficial ones.
Review sparingly. Don’t get stuck in an endless review loop. Re-read only notes critical for current projects.
Quality over quantity. Assess the value of your notes periodically. Prune liberally to keep only the best 10%.
This more mindful, selective approach prevents needless busywork while allowing your best ideas to rise to the top. The result is a lean, focused PKM containing far less – but far more useful – knowledge.
For me, this system delivers:
Sharper thinking by cutting through noise. I can see key insights clearly.
Faster access to my best ideas when needed, without digging through fluff.
Reduced burnout, since I’m not under pressure to document everything.
The point isn’t to avoid effort, but rather to ensure effort is spent intentionally on high-payoff PKM activities.
So try being selective in what you capture. Prune ruthlessly. Spend more time refining fewer notes. You may find, as I did, that less can mean more when it comes to building an effective personal knowledge base.
How does this draft look? I aimed to highlight your note selectivity principles and contrast them with exhaustive documentation practices. Please let me know if you would like me to modify or expand this draft blog post in any way. I’m happy to keep refining it.
I responded: That draft is good. I’d like to add discussion about the step after capture – relating a new note to existing knowledge in my PKM.
Claude responded:
Thank you, I’m glad the draft is headed in a good direction. Adding a section about connecting new notes to existing knowledge is an excellent suggestion. Here is an updated draft with an additional paragraph about that:
Forget Note-Taking Overload: How to Build a Lean, Focused PKM
Conventional wisdom says your personal knowledge management system should aim to capture everything – exhaustive notes on every meeting, conversation, and piece of content you encounter. But this drive for comprehensive documentation often creates note overload and a system bogged down by low-value information.
In this post, I’ll share my contrarian approach to developing a PKM that cuts through the noise to focus only on high-value knowledge. Here are the key principles:
Be intentional about capture. Don’t default to taking notes on everything. Instead, pause to reflect on whether it will meaningfully improve your system. Evaluate potential ROI before documenting.
Limit noise. Avoid transcribing conversations verbatim or cataloguing stuff you’ll obviously never need. Keep only truly vital points.
Let some things go. You don’t have to write down every insight. If it won’t provide lasting value, move on without capturing it.
Depth over breadth. Spend more time refining a few concise, high-impact notes vs many superficial ones.
Review sparingly. Don’t get stuck in an endless review loop. Re-read only notes critical for current projects.
Quality over quantity. Assess the value of your notes periodically. Prune liberally to keep only the best 10%.
Connect new insights to what you already know. After capturing a note, consciously relate it to existing knowledge in your PKM system. Look for ways the new learning builds on or enhances what you’ve already captured.
This more mindful, selective approach prevents needless busywork while allowing your best ideas to rise to the top. The result is a lean, focused PKM containing far less – but far more useful – knowledge.
For me, this system delivers:
Sharper thinking by cutting through noise. I can see key insights clearly.
Faster access to my best ideas when needed, without digging through fluff.
Reduced burnout, since I’m not under pressure to document everything.
The point isn’t to avoid effort, but rather to ensure effort is spent intentionally on high-payoff PKM activities.
So try being selective in what you capture. Prune ruthlessly. Spend more time refining fewer notes. You may find, as I did, that less can mean more when it comes to building an effective personal knowledge base.
Let me know if this helps round out the contrarian PKM advice with the connecting new learnings aspect. I’m happy to continue refining the draft with your guidance. Please feel free to provide any other feedback as well.
Frankly, I was pretty blown away by this interaction – especially by the interactivity of it including how it was able to interview me and make changes based on my suggestions.
This is definitely a prompt sequence that I’ll want to further explore!
Onion soup is the ultimate hug in a bowl. The sweetness of slowly cooked onions combined with the richness of the broth makes for a soul-soothing dish. A slice or two of cheese toast is the perfect accompaniment.
But the process of caramelizing onions was always frustrating for me – it just took too long (40 minutes).
A while back I discovered in an issue of Cooks Illustrated a better method for caramelizing the onions for making homemade onion soup – and wrote about it over on my recipe blog Scotts Kitchen.
It’s the last day of September and here in northern California we can feel the seasons changing.
We don’t get the brilliant fall colors in the trees here like in New England. Our seasons change more subtlety.
Instead, we tend to notice the little things of seasonal change – like how dark it’s getting to be in the mornings. When we’re used to waking up with the sun already up and daylight outside to this morning where it was dark until almost 7 AM.
Likewise in the evening when the darkness settles in much earlier than we’re used to – and sometime soon we’ll have the startling shift of moving back from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time – giving us back a bit more of our morning light but robbing us even more of our evening light.
We also got a touch of very light rain overnight – the first glimmer of our traditional rainy season which will be here soon enough.
On my morning walk this morning, I noticed the splotches the rain left behind on the pavement. But what I first noticed was the first smells of fall – that smell of musty wet bark on the ground at our local park – a reminder for me of my years growing up in the midwest when the first good snow would fall and I’d notice how incredibly silent it would be outside – cold, crisp, still – and that beautiful silence.
Tomorrow we leave September behind and arrive in October. Fall is here.
Just for fun, I shared the text of this blog post with Claude, the AI chat bot from Anthropic, and asked it to transform it into the style of David Foster Wallace. It’s much more dramatic than my writing!…
Almost October
The last grubby light of September drags itself wearily over the expanse that is northern California, but even this seemingly endless reach of suburbs and strip malls cannot escape the subtle signs announcing autumn’s ingress. We do not, it is true, experience the pyrotechnic explosion of foliage that sets New England ablaze in actinic oranges and cadaverous greens; our vegetation shifts from its summer torpor to its winter slumber far more discreetly.
And yet the evidence accumulates nonetheless: the darkened dawn that delays its arrival until nearly 7 a.m., the premature nightfall that plunges us into gloom while work and school still claim our attention.
Soon enough the yearly sham of Daylight Saving will end, returning some of the stolen sunlight to our mornings yet robbing even more from our evenings.
A damp breeze scuttles in, bearing advance notice of the imminent rainy season, and leaves behind scattered dark splashes on the pavement.
On my quotidian constitutional this morning, I detected more signs of autumn’s advent: the fungal reek of wet bark in the local park conjured sense-memories of Midwestern childhood, of the first snow’s hushed and glorious descent, the implacable cold, the crystalline perfection of utter silence.
September expires today; October arrives tomorrow. Autumn makes its presence known, however quietly. The year winds down.
Like a lot of folks, I’ve been a long time user of Apple leather iPhone cases. I like how they felt in the hand – with just enough friction to my grip to allow me to hold my phone securely even while angling for the best photo shot.
With the iPhone 15, Apple for environmental reasons has eliminated the use of leather cases and replaced them a new case material called FineWoven. I recently upgraded to a new iPhone 15 Pro Max and got one of the new FineWoven cases to match.
There have been a LOT of complaints in various articles online about this new material – about how it’s just not an adequate replacement for the old leather material. My view is different – I’m pleased with the feel of the new FineWoven material and find it to be a suitable replacement – especially if it’s better for the environment to make cases from this material instead of leather.
There is one minor complaint I have, however. I find the FineWoven case to be a bit “slippery” in my grip. I’m hoping I’ll adapt to it but at least initially its slipperiness is bothersome – as dropping my iPhone isn’t something I at all want to do!
I don’t have any particular suggestion to make as to how Apple might make the material less slippery and I certainly wouldn’t want some new additional coating to attempt to address the issue. I’ll hopefully adjust soon enough and try to extra careful in the meantime.
I’m enrolled in cohort 2 of Mike Schmitz’s Obsidian University. Mike is an excellent educator and he’s developed considerable expertise in Obsidian. His first two sessions are deep dives into setting up a personal knowledge management (PKM) system. The first session was about philosophy, the second about specific tools he uses/recommends.
I’ve been using Obsidian pretty heavily since I first started playing with it in May 2022. I’ve got lots of notes collected and have a workflow that’s been working for me in terms of capturing information I want to think about later. Here’s my basic workflow:
I’m doing all of my browsing in Safari on Mac, iPhone or iPad. I have used Instapaper as my read-later service for years and articles I find while browsing that I might want to save I’ll capture in Instapaper. I like Instapaper’s “clean up” approach – taking all of the extra stuff out of web pages and distilling them down to the essence of the text on the page.
A second source of capture is Feedly which I’m using as my RSS reader and in which I also capture articles to Instapaper.
Sometime later I’ll open Instapaper and read through what I’ve captured. If I find an article I want to add to my Obsidian vault, I will email it to Drafts using its recently added mail drop feature. Once it’s in Drafts, I used an action to save the article to my Obsidian Inbox folder which is stored in iCloud.
Later, I’ll open Obsidian and review my Inbox folder and open each item in turn, add metadata properties to the top (using an Obsidian template that I’ve created), and – once I’m finished editing it – I’ll move the note to my Zettlekasten folder in Obsidian which is where I store all of my notes.
That’s it.
I also use Drafts from time to time to just capture text that I either write or dictate – and process that later in the same fashion.
What I’m still trying to figure out how to do better is taking advantage of the notes I’ve captured – revisiting them, summarizing them, using them as the basis for a new note or a blog post, etc. In other words, creating some useful output from all of the input I’ve been adding. This is very much a work in progress!
By the way, sometime that’s important to learn before or while you’re learning Obsidian is the Markdown text format. It’s a simple, easy to learn way to “markup” text and it’s important to become fluent in using it with Obsidian.
Note: in addition to Mike Schmitz’s Obsidian University, I’ve also purchased David Sparks’ Obsidian Field Guide which is also a useful educational resource for learning the ropes of Obsidian.
We will soon, if not already, be drowning in the Sea of Infinite Content!
It’s become clear that we’re heading into a world of infinite content – as if we aren’t already drowning in that sea of meaningless, automatically generated content. What was once a seemingly manageable stream of books, websites, and media is becoming a overwhelming tidal wave, threatening to erode the shores of human creativity. The age of innovation is impacted.
What’s moving us from today’s world of “just a lot” to our future of “way too much”? Why do I say we’re drowning in a sea of infinite content?
In two words: generative AI.
Since the launch last fall of ChatGPT (and many similar tools), it’s become increasing clear that we can now use these tools to churn out endless repetitive, low quality content. Indeed they can create spammy nonsense for themselves, with no regard for truth or diversity. All that matters is predicting the best next word.
The focus is on quantity over quality. So much garbage is being produced that it’s becoming harder to find meaningful information and creative art amidst the noise. Useful voices are being drowned out by the drone of algorithmic imitation of what’s already popular.
There is also the risk of misinformation as fake AI-generated content spreads. Propaganda and radicalization loom as nefarious actors exploit these tools. Jobs in creative fields disappear as AI replaces human creators and artists.
All this tidal wave of endless content needs is electricity. Power. And ever more semiconductors.
Where does this path lead us? What will become of creativity and originality if AI takes over? We must question how to harness infinite content ethically to serve humanity, not overwhelm it. The age of human innovation cannot be allowed to end under a sea of meaningless artificial content. We cannot lose what makes us human.
How can we ensure these technologies are used responsibly? How can we stem the tide before it’s too late? The debates must begin now.
And where will all of that power – and all of those semiconductors – come from?
On my morning walk this morning, I came across this young woman sitting on the pavement adjacent to pond at Sharon Park – looking across the water to the fountain and a sunny Sunday morning sky.
The fountain in the pond was just re-activated a few days ago – and it adds so much to the image by creating a point of interest where otherwise there’d just be negative space. It was blessed with great timing – both her being there and the fountain now active again.
There’s a walkway behind where she was sitting which is elevated by about four feet so I walked around behind her on to that walkway and snapped a few photos with my iPhone 14 Pro Max. This is the most peaceful and Zen-like of them – and I opted to post-process into black and white to remove all of the color and focus the eye on just the contrast between light and shadow.
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