§Taking knowledge work seriously (Stripe convergence talk, 2019-12-12)

Talk outline

• Athletes and musicians pursue virtuosity in fundamental skills much more rigorously than knowledge workers do
  • brief history of Knowledge work (appeal to economic growth, etc)
  • Management science focuses on knowledge work at the level of the firm and the manager, not at the level of the individual
  • We don’t know how to measure knowledge worker productivity
• Core practices in knowledge work are often ad-hoc
• Knowledge work should accrete
• People seem to forget most of what they read, and they mostly don’t notice
  • Deep understanding requires detailed knowledge of fundamentals
  • Complex ideas may be hard to learn in part because their components overflow working memory
  • introducing Quantum Country
  • Testing effect
  • Spaced repetition memory systems are extremely efficient
    • Spacing effect
  • Spaced repetition memory systems make memory a choice
  • Effects of the mnemonic medium on reader memory
  • Mnemonic essays may offer detailed retention of their contents in exchange for 35-50% reading time overhead
• Taking note-taking seriously
  • Note-writing practices are generally ineffective
  • “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”
  • People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use
  • introducing the Zettelkasten
  • Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate
  • Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to incrementally develop inklings
• generalizing: Spaced repetition systems can be used to program attention
• spaced repetition and inboxes
  • Inboxes only work if you trust how they’re drained
  • Triage strategies for maintaining inboxes (e.g. Inbox Zero) are often too brittle
  • Software interfaces often harmfully frame destructive operations as final decisions, not contingent preferences
  • Spaced repetition can lower the stakes around destructive inbox-maintenance operations

Meta

• Stance:
  • presenting work in progress
  • more about asking questions than revealing answers
  • definitely not here to provide usable solutions
• What the audience gets:
  • Eyes opened to a set of fascinating questions that lie behind every day of their work
  • Sense of excitement and possibility motivated by a few examples of possible progress

Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate

Much of the day-to-day thinking involved in creative work is simply lost, like sand castles in the tide. Ephemerality can actually be useful in low-fidelity thought, but it’s simply an accidental property in many cases. We should do our serious thinking in the form of Evergreen notes so that the thinking accumulates.

Leaps of insight emerge from prior thought. So where does that thought happen? It could happen in your head, or in a series of fleeting sketches in the pages of your notebook, but Knowledge work should accrete, and those mechanisms are awfully lossy.

Consider some hypothetical leap of insight you’d like to be able to make. To make that leap, you’ll typically need to evolve many independent, partially-formed ideas simultaneously, until they suddenly converge in a flash of inspiration. If you need to iterate on more than a few pieces at once, you may struggle to keep them all in your head.

By contrast, because Evergreen notes should be atomic, they’re small enough in scope that you can start and finish one note in well under half an hour (see Evergreen notes permit smooth incremental progress in writing (“incremental writing”)). Yet each note you write represents an increment in your thinking about that specific idea, and each note enriches the broader network of links (Evergreen notes should be densely linked). Because these are Evergreen notes, you now have a clear place to stand as you iterate on this specific idea.

The notes you write will interact with materials you read (Evergreen note-writing helps reading efforts accumulate) and will produce the foundations of new manuscripts (Executable strategy for writing).

And if you can’t write even one atomic note on the idea you have, Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to incrementally develop inklings.

Related: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”

References

Luhmann, N. (1992). Communicating with Slip Boxes. In A. Kieserling (Ed.), & M. Kuehn (Trans.), Universität als Milieu: Kleine Schriften (pp. 53–61). Retrieved from http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes

Naturally, independence presupposes a minimal measure of intrinsic complexity. The slip box needs a number of years in order to reach critical mass. Until then, it functions as a mere container from which we can retrieve what we put in. This changes with its growth in size and complexity. On the one hand, the number of approaches and occasions for questions increases. The slip box becomes a universal instrument.

Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers.