I think I’ve written about something before, but I can’t find it. I have thirteen tabs open with Google search results from my blog. I’ve tried countless keywords and synonyms. I’ve skimmed through posts I only half-remember writing. (Was that blog post really that short? I thought I wrote more details.) I still haven’t found the post I want.

I wonder: Did I really publish it? Or did I just outline or sketch it? Am I confusing it with something similar that I wrote, or someone else’s post that I admired?

Ah, well, time to write it from scratch. It’s a little like writing code. Sometimes it would take so long to find an appropriate open source module that you’re better off just writing the code yourself. Sometimes it would take so long to find an existing post that it’s better to just write it from scratch.

I was looking for that particular post because of a conversation with Flavian de Lima where I mentioned the benefits of blogging while you’re learning something. He resonated with the idea of sharing your notes along the way so that other people can learn from them, even if you’ve moved on to different topics.

Despite having a clear memory of writing about this topic, when I went to the post that I thought was related to it (spiral learning), it didn’t mention blogging at all. “Share while you learn” didn’t quite address it, either. After trying lots of searches, I gave up and started writing a new post. After all, memories are fallible; you could have full confidence in an imagined event.

The reason this came up was because Flavian described how he often took advantage of open loops when working on writing. He would stop with an incomplete thought, put the draft away, and let his subconscious continue working on it. Sometimes it would be days or weeks before he got back to working on the article. He mentioned how other authors might take years to work on novels, dusting off their manuscripts and revising scenes here and there.

Keeping loops open by stopping mid-sentence or mid-task is a useful technique often recommended for writing or programming. Research describes this as the Zeigarnik effect: an interrupted task stays in your memory and motivates you to complete it.

But after reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done, I had become a convert of closed loops: getting tasks, ideas, notes out of your head and into a trusted system so that you don’t have to waste energy trying to remember them. I noticed that if I kept too many loops open, my mind felt buzzy and distracted. To work around this, I got very good at writing things down.

In fact, I took closing loops one step further. Publishing my notes on my blog helped me get rid of the guilt and frustration I used to feel whenever I found myself wanting to move on to a different project. Because my notes were freely available for anyone who was trying to figure out the same thing, I could go ahead and follow the butterflies of my interest to a different topic. My notes could also help me pick things up again if I wanted to.

I didn’t stop mid-sentence or mid-thought, but I published in the middle of learning instead of waiting until I finished. Even my review posts often included next steps and open questions. So I got a little satisfaction from posting each small chunk, but I still left dangling threads for me to follow up on. I closed the loops enough so that the topics didn’t demand my attention.

Writing helped me clear my mind of strong open loops–but it worked a little too well. I tried to close things off quickly, so that I could revisit them when I wanted to. The trick was remembering that they were there. Sometimes I forgot the dangling threads for a year or more. I never followed up on others. Even with my regular review processes, I often forgot what I had written, as in the search that prompted this post.

Writing and memory have an ancient trade-off. Even Socrates had something to say about it, quoting an ancient Egyptian king in Plato’s The Phaedrus:

“…for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”

as quoted in On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik

In 2011, Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner showed that people remember less if they think a computer will keep their notes for them, and they tend to remember how to get to the information rather than the information itself. Having written the words, published the posts, and indexed the titles, I’ve forgotten the words; and now I can’t find my way back.

Hence my immediate challenge: sometimes I forget how to get to the information I’ve stored, like a squirrel stashing nuts. (More research: tree squirrels can’t find 74% of the nuts they bury. So I’m doing slightly better than a squirrel, I think.)

Google helps if I can remember a few words from the post, but since it tends to search for exact words, I have to get those words right. Hah, maybe I need to use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques like writing with different keywords – not for marketing, but for my own memory. It reminds me of this SEO joke:

How many SEO copywriters does it take to change a lightbulb, light bulb, light, bulb, lamp, bulbs, flowers, flour…?

My blog index is helpful, but it isn’t enough. I need to write more descriptive titles. Perhaps I should summarize the key point as well. Maps can help, as can other deliberate ways of connecting ideas.

Let me take a step back and look at my goals here. Linking to posts helps me save time explaining ideas, build on previous understanding, and make it easy for people to dig into more detail if they want. But I can also accomplish these goals by linking to other people’s explanations. With so many people writing on the Web, chances are that I’ll find someone who has written about the topic using the words I’m looking for. I can also write a new post from scratch, which has the advantages of being tailored to a specific question and which possibly integrates the forgotten thoughts even without explicit links.

It’s an acceptable trade-off, I think. I’ll continue writing, even with the increased risk of forgetting. If I have to write from scratch even when I think I’ve probably written about the same topic before, I can accept that as practice in writing and thinking.

Other writers have better memories. Flavian told me how he can remember articles he wrote in the 1990s, and I’ve heard similar accounts from others. Me, I’ve been re-reading this year’s blog posts in preparation for my annual review, and I’ve come across ones that pleasantly surprised me. Posts two or three years back are even fuzzier in my memory. I can try to strengthen my memory through exercises and processes. The rest of the time, I can work with the brain that I have. In fact, I’m inclined to build more memory scaffolds around myself, moving more of my memory outside my mind.

[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. …The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

• Albert Einstein, as Wikiquotes cites from Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007)

And really, how much difference would perfect memory make? I might add more links, include more citations, cover more new ground. I can still learn and share without it.

Forgetful squirrels have their uses. Forgotten acorns grow into oaks for others to enjoy. From time to time, I hear from people who’ve come across old posts through search engines, or I come across old posts in a review. Loops re-open, dangling threads are taken up again, and we continue.

I’m curious about the internal citation of my blog. Which thoughts have been developed over a long chain of posts? Which posts do I often link to? Where are there big jumps in time? Where have I combined threads?

I’ll probably need to build my own data extractor so that it can:

• ignore weekly and monthly reviews, since I link to everything in those,
• reconcile short and long permalinks, redirection, and sneak previews,
• and maybe even index my sketches and look at follow-ups

and I’ll probably want to create something that I could eventually plot as an SVG or imagemap using Graphviz, or maybe analyze using Gephi.

It would be super-interesting to create some kind of output that I could fold into my blog outline or into individual posts. I would need a static dump for that one, I think.

How would I build something like this? One time, I used Ruby to analyze the text of my blog. That might work. I might be able to pull out all the link hrefs, do lookups…

As of Dec 3, 2014, there are 87 posts in 2014 that link to previous posts, out of 259 non-review posts (so roughly 34%). I used this SQL query to get that:

SELECT post_title FROM wp_posts WHERE post_content LIKE ‘%<a href=”https://sachachua.com/blog/20%’ AND post_date >= ‘2014-01-01’ AND post_title NOT LIKE ‘%review:%’ AND post_state=’publish’;

Hmm. I might even be able to do some preliminary explorations with Emacs and text processing instead of writing a script to analyze this, if I focus on 2014 and ignore the special cases (short permalinks, redirection, and sneak previews), just to see what the data looks like. Rough technical notes:

perl -i -p -e s/href/\nhref/gi 2014-manip.html
grep http://sachachua.com/blog/20 2013-manip.html > list-2013
perl -i -p -e "s/(<\/a>(<\/h2>)?).*/$1/gi" list-2013

(defun sacha/misc-clean-up-reviews ()
  (interactive)
  (while (re-search-forward "\\(Monthly\\|Weekly\\) review: .*</h2>" nil t)
    (let ((start (line-beginning-position)))
      (re-search-forward "</h2>")
      (delete-region start (line-beginning-position))
      (goto-char (line-beginning-position)))))

(defun sacha/org-tabulate-links ()
  (interactive)
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (let (main-link edges nodes)
    (while (not (eobp))
      (if (looking-at "^href=\"\\(.*?\\)\".*?</a></h2>")
          ;; Main entry
          (progn
            (setq nodes (cons (match-string 1) nodes))
            (setq main-link (match-string 1)))
        (if (looking-at "^href=\"\\(.*?\\)\"")
            (setq edges (cons (concat 
                               main-link  ;; from
                               "\t"
                               (match-string 1)   ;; to 
                               ) edges))))
      (forward-line 1))
    (kill-new (mapconcat 'identity edges "\n"))))

Ooooh. Pretty. Gephi visualization of the edge list formed by links, using the Yifan Hu layout. That big thread in the middle, that’s the one about taskmasters and choice and productivity, which is indeed the core theme running through this year of the experiment. The cluster on the right is a year in review. We see lots of little links too.

Internal links for entries posted in 2014

Now I’m curious about what happens when we add the posts and links from 2013 and 2012, too. I’ve colour-coded this by year, with It ties together posts on sketchnoting, blogging, choice, learning, writing, plans… Neat.

What does this say? It says that even though I write about lots of different things, there are connections between the different topics, and the biggest tangle in the middle has more than 320 nodes. I have lots of blog posts that build on an idea for three or four posts, sometimes spanning several years, even if I don’t think about it in advance. There are 90 such clumps, and it might be good to revisit some of these 2- and 3-post chains to see if I can link them up even further.

Also, it could be interesting to do this analysis with tags, not just year. Hmm… Also, I should dust off my data structures and algorithms, and make my own connected-component analyzer so that I can get a list of the clumps of topics. Good ideas to save for another day!

I’ve been thinking about how to improve the inter-post organization of my blog so that I can write more effectively and so that other people can find things faster. I often link to posts I’ve previously written, but I rarely update old posts to link forward to other related posts. There are quite a few internal linking plugins for WordPress, but they seem more slanted towards SEO and keywords than I’d like.

I wanted to come up with another approach that could take advantage of the big outline of my blog posts at https://sachachua.com/index that I update every month. I’ve found this to be pretty handy for organizing things into finer categories instead of going back and updating lots of posts in WordPress. I can search this easily on my computer by using helm-swoop, and I can move things around using Org Mode.

It got me thinking: Is there a way I can make it easier to connect posts to the index so that if people find an old post useful, they can explore related posts?

So here’s what I came up with: a small See in index link at the end of the post.

Index link on old posts

Not all the posts are indexed yet, but for those that are, clicking on that link will open up the blog index and scroll it to the right post, highlighting the match, so people can see what else is in the neighbourhood.

Matching link

To make this work, I added the following HTML code to my blog index:

<script type="text/javascript">
// from http://www.jquerybyexample.net/2012/06/get-url-parameters-using-jquery.html
function getURLParameter(sParam)
{
    var sPageURL = window.location.search.substring(1);
    var sURLVariables = sPageURL.split('&');
    for (var i = 0; i < sURLVariables.length; i++)
    {
        var sParameterName = sURLVariables[i].split('=');
        if (sParameterName[0] == sParam)
        {
            return sParameterName[1];
        }
    }
}

function sachaScrollToBlog() {
  if (getURLParameter("url")) {
    var link = $('a[href="' + getURLParameter("url") + '"]');
    if (link.length > 0) { 
      $('html, body').scrollTop(link.offset().top - 100);
      link.addClass("highlighted");
    } else {
      alert("Sorry, could not find post in index.");
    }
  }
}

$(document).ready(sachaScrollToBlog);
</script>
<style type="text/css">
a.highlighted { background-color: yellow; padding: 10px }
</style>

Then I added this to the post.php and single.php for my WordPress theme:

<?php
if (get_the_date('Y') >= '2008' && get_the_date('Y-m') < date('Y-m', time() - 60 * 60 * 24 * 7 * 2)) {
  print '<a href="http://pages.sachachua.com/sharing/blog.html?url=' . get_permalink() . '">See in index</a>';
}
?>

The date condition is there to minimize frustration. I’ve indexed posts published 2008 or later, and I usually post an updated index within the first half of the month. I might spend some time indexing older posts; if I do, I’ll update the starting position.

It would be interesting to refine my writing workflow so that my blog index is always up to date. That way, even new posts will have this magic indexing power. It might be difficult to get that squared up with my scheduling, though, since I sometimes write a few weeks in advance. Anyway, neat, huh? This should make the archives marginally more useful. =) Good for me too!

When it comes to connecting the dots between ideas, would you rather be methodical or inspired?

We prize the flashes of genius, the intuitive spark. We idolize inventors who bring together ideas from different fields in a brilliant moment. The tortoise wins in children’s books, but history belongs to hares.

I would rather be methodical, I think. I’d rather get better at taking lots of small steps instead of counting on big leaps. I plan assuming mediocrity, not talent, and then I try to build towards excellence.

Just relax and the ideas will come to you, people sometimes say. Yes, I do some of that, but I’m more interested in conscious, deliberate action. The sparks will come when they want, but in the meantime, why not get better at preparing the groundwork or making progress? I think you can get better at making sense of things, coming up with ideas, seeing gaps. This is a skill you can develop. You’re not limited to waiting for a fickle muse or wishing you’d been born a hare.

The aha! moments of unconscious connection seem to come more readily when you keep more thoughts in your head, because you have more opportunities to connect the dots. I try to keep very little in my head, as I’m both forgetful and distractable. (I suppose this self-image is something I can change, but it has useful consequences, so I keep it.) I write down as much as I can, which frees me up to remember only hooks and summaries that let me look up more information as I need it.

In fact, I often choose slow exploration instead of a whirlwind of insight. I’d rather take notes as I think instead of jumping from one topic to the other, even if observation changes the nature of thoughts. After all, there are plenty of times when I can think but I can’t write, so I can let my mind meander then. When I’m near a computer or notepad, I may as well take advantage of those tools. If I can capture a thought, then I can remember it, and this helps me build up knowledge over time.

Instead of relying on my brain to trigger an aha! moment out of the blue, I usually reflect on a single topic and see what other associations it brings up. I might link to other blog posts or sketches, include book excerpts, or dig through my private notes for more thoughts. Most of these reflections take small steps forward. Others bring together two or more streams of thought.

I’m often limited by my forgetfulness. I may remember a few relevant references, and I search my blog and my notes for more. However, I don’t always cast a wide enough net. There’s a difference between knowing you’ve forgotten something, and not even thinking that you’ve forgotten something. The first is annoying, but the second is a bigger missed opportunity.

The best way around the associative limitations of my brain seems to be other people. I love it when people tell me how something I’ve written reminds them of a book or someone else’s blog post (sometimes one I’d read and forgotten, sometimes completely new to me), or even how it reminds them of another post of mine.

I can’t count on people to suggest the missing links for most things, though. Fortunately, computers are getting better at suggesting associations. Search engines help when you know what you’re looking for. When you don’t, other tools can analyze what you’re working on and suggest items that are similar in content. I often use Amazon’s book recommendations to find other books I should read. I’ve played around with Remembrance Agent before, and have often envied Devonthink’s ability to suggest related notes. Evernote just released a new Context feature that’s supposed to do something similar. I prefer Emacs for writing anyway, and I don’t have something quite like that set up yet.

The more manual approach of keeping a categorical index of my blog posts lets me get a quick overview. When a category grows too large, I usually break it down into smaller groups. I also take advantage of the juxtaposition of posts in my blog archive when I do my monthly and yearly reviews. Taking a step back helps me see the patterns in my thinking.

Other aspects of connecting the dots also lend themselves to deliberate practice, focusing on one sub-skill at a time. For example, when I read a book, I can practise taking a few moments to place it in the context of other books I’ve read about the topic. With which other books does it agree, and where does it diverge? Thinking about this process lets me isolate and get better at one specific aspect at a time, and that helps me improve as a whole.

Another benefit of using explicit processes to help me make sense of things is that other people can try what I’m learning. I care less about idiosyncratic leaps dependent on individual talent and more about improvements that other people can experiment with. For me, it makes less sense to tell someone, “Be more creative!” and more sense to say something like, “Forced associations are a way to enhance your creativity” and share examples. If I think about how I do things–how my processes are similar to others’, and where it diverges–I can describe them to other people, who can pick up ideas and give me feedback.

So that’s why I choose to be a slow thinker, making sense through process rather than intuition. But I’m getting faster at slow thinking, and that’s opening up more possibilities. I grew up speed-reading and touch-typing, which is a good pair of advantages. To that, I’ve added programming, automation, writing, and different types of note-taking. I’m working on getting the hang of outlining, indexing, reviewing, and synthesizing. There’s a lot to learn, but I’m confident that I can keep improving.

I love swapping notes with other people who’ve made similar choices–the slow thinkers, the methodical ones, the ones who have thought about how they do things and how they think about how they do things. I’m not looking for fast fixes or magic solutions, just ideas for little experiments to try.

Hares might make for better stories, but tortoises have more tricks to share.

Possibly related:

• Think more effectively by typing to yourself – how I use a text editor to think out loud
• When you feel like you’re spending a lot of time on low-impact activities – laying the groundwork for the accumulation of small steps
• Describing my personal knowledge management routines with Harold Jarche’s Seek-Sense-Share framework (March 2014) – high-level descriptions of how I look for information, make sense of it, and share it with others
• More tips for self-directed learning: deliberate practice (Feb 2014) – some tips for coming up with your own exercises
• Visualizing personal knowledge
  • Mapping what I’m learning (Nov 2013) – also has some links to historical role models.
  • Visual book review: How to make a complete map of every thought you think (Oct 2013) – Lion Kimbro’s 2003 book described taking slow thinking to an interesting extreme
  • Visual book review: How to read a book (March 2013) – I picked up the idea of a syntopicon (index/map of topics across books) from Adler and van Doren’s 1972 book
  • Thoughts in context: Connecting posts to my blog post index – a technical tweak that connects old posts to my outline
  • Visualizing the internal citation network of my blog – another way to see the associations in a large archive

Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow feels a little related to this thought too, but it’s not quite the right fit.

Sometimes I think I go around in circles, trying to figure out a recurring topic. Like this! I've written about this before. I want to get better at writing my way towards understanding. It's like when I write, I'm so focused on adding just one more square foot to what I know. But I might not be spending enough time zooming up to make sure I'm going in interesting directions and that I'm not backsliding.

Maybe I need to pick up that pattern from programming with user stories: “As a …, I want to …, so that ….” As a learner, I want to get better at expanding on previous thoughts so that I waste less time repeating myself.

What is it, really? Let me dig around a little.

• Not enough context/review: Is it that I write something, and then I discover I wrote something like it recently? No, I tend to be pretty good at finding 1-3 past posts related to what I'm thinking about.
• Background : new thoughts ratio: Is it that I work in too small steps? What's a good ratio? Background : thoughts : resolution : connection with others? Hmm, this might be interesting to quantify. Let me sample a few posts:
  • Post 1: 1 paragraph background, 4 paragraphs thinking, 2 paragraphs resolution
  • Post 2: 1 paragraph background, 7 paragraphs process description, 2 paragraphs resolution, 1 paragraph translation
  • Post 3: 1 paragraph background, 4 paragraphs thinking, 1 paragraph resolution.

  Oh, okay, that's not too bad, actually. I do tend to have a certain “shape” to my blog posts: I think about stuff, and then I decide to try one or two new things. Also, my word count is nowhere near as high as I thought it used to be, which is good. My blog posts have a median of 500 words or so. Sometimes, if I remember, I'll add a paragraph or two to help people translate things to their own experiences.

• Not enough follow-up: Is it that I decide on something, but it doesn't stick? I'm generally good at identifying one or two actions to try, and actually doing them (even if just for a short while). I'm not as good at following up on, say, books not stocked by the Toronto Public Library, because I'm lazy and my free backlog is infinite. I can learn to change that.
• Not enough updates: Is it that I do stuff, but I don't reflect on the update and share more notes? Hmm, possibly this; I do end up writing about things again, but it can be quite a while afterwards. Maybe I can schedule TODO items to update, and get back to keeping track of active experiments in my learning.org? That was useful. Why did I stop that? Agenda clutter? Worth revisiting. Also, sometimes I lose the references to interesting comments/conversations that recommended something. I'm generally good at looking up blog posts where I decided to do something, but I don't track conversations as much. I've been trying to keep track of who recommended a book so that I can get back to them when I finally read it, which could be weeks later.
• Not enough focus or structure: Is it that my posts are too scattered and don't build up? A little of this, yeah, but I think that might be just how I work for now. I still have a hard time staying motivated enough to work to a larger outline. I talk about making little pieces that I could collect into larger things, but that's passing it off to some smarter, more organized future self since I currently don't do that kind of harvesting. This is something I could experiment with.
• Not enough focus on helping other people: Is it that I feel self-conscious about focusing on internal discussions? Yeah, but it feels a little weird to tell other people what to do with their lives. Internal discussions seem to be helpful, and working out loud does help me get things done. I can be more didactic when I've earned it with experience, when I have the knowledge and reputation to back it up.

Hmm. Maybe it would help to imagine what awesomeness would look like, and then look into the differences between that and where I am now. Would it involve writing longer blog posts with larger insights, maybe aha!s that require significant non-writing time, so that there are bigger pay-offs for the reader? It's the difference between

• three posts that go, “Hmm, I've been thinking about this, and I'll try this;” “I'm trying this, and this is what I'm seeing;” “I tried it and this is what I learned.” and
• one post that says, “So last year I did this long experiment and this is what I learned.”

Nah, I like showing the in-between steps. It helps me think more clearly, and people often have great suggestions.

So small steps are okay, as long as they stick. Sometimes I review year-old posts and go, “Oh, yeah, I meant to look into that!” Other times, I look at those posts and go, “Yep, I did that and that definitely worked out well. That gives me new ideas…” I think awesomeness is more of the latter.

How can I get better at covering ground?

Part of this is getting better at remembering previously-covered ground (and keeping it covered).

• I'm pretty good at searching my blog for posts I remember writing about the same topic, although there have been a few occasions when people have reminded me of things that I'd completely forgotten writing about.
• I could make better use of my blog index by reviewing the general topic as well, which is a good excuse to refine the categorization.
• Then there's integrating those links to previous posts into my writing outline, building up bigger chunks.
• And there's also the power of the old-fashioned chronological review – simply re-reading old posts, maybe based on time. For example, when I do my monthly review, it might be interesting to reread the posts for that month, the month before, and the month one year before (or more). I might even challenge myself to schedule some of those posts for processing/updates so that I get practise in organizing and polishing previous posts.

Part of this involves clearly phrasing the question so that I can see the new ground to be covered. I'm not just thinking about a topic. I want to figure out something I didn't know before. Here, for example, the central question that emerged after lots of outlining was “How can I get better at covering ground?” I learned more about the question while contrasting what I do now with what I'd like to be able to do. Working with outlines rather than prose for as long as possible seems to help, since it's easier to cut and move around points, and it's easier to see the bones of the post that I'm writing.

So that gives me a couple of things to try.

I know a few people who've made blogging part of the way that they learn, so I can learn from their examples as well. And there are non-blogging approaches, like the way W- keeps a professional notebook. So much to learn, and so many ways to do that better! =)

I've written before about how a blog is like a time machine, reflecting on my growth as a speaker or looking back over the past decade. It's wonderful having all these notes. I often find myself referring to things from years ago – many of the technical posts are still useful, surprisingly – and then I bump into other memories nearby.

What can I do now to build a better time machine for me to use in another ten years or more? How can I tweak what I'm sharing and how I'm sharing it so that I can make the most of it? Let me think about how this has worked in the past, so that I can build on what's been working well.

People like the tech posts, the workflow posts, the reflection posts where they recognize something they've been thinking about themselves. So those are all good. I also like point-in-time descriptions to help me remember what it was like. Maybe I'll take those process journal entries and copy them in periodically so that they're available somewhere.

I wonder: what other people have learned about writing for their futures? Here's a snippet from Louise DeSalvo's The Art of Slow Writing (2014):

p98. In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook”, [Joan] Didion describes what her notebook isn't. It isn't “an accurate factual record” because our recollection of an event might be vastly different from someone else'.s It isn't to “dutifully record a day's events” because that task inevitably becomes boring, and such a record conveys little or no meaning. Nor should we necessarily expect that we might one day open our notebooks and find “a forgotten account” of an event we can pluck for our work.

Instead, Didion believes that the notebook's value lies in its record of “How it felt to be me” at a particular time. This, she says, is the notebook's truth. Although we might imagine using it to fix our impressions of others, instead, “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point” of the notebook. Part of a writer's education is “to keep on noding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Reading our notebooks helps us to keep in touch with those past selves, and a record of “How it felt to be me” can be extraordinarily useful in writing memoir, creating fictional characacters, or writing poetry.

p100. Didion remarks on the fact that we change over time but that we forget the people we were: “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be,” she says. Without a notebook record, these selves are lost to us. For a writer, “keeping in touch” with our past selves is helpful. … As Didion reminds us, “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

So, maybe the occasional snapshot of “How it felt to be me,” a way to remember that there are selves to remember. Otherwise the time blurs.

From that essay of Joan Didion:

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

I think that might be part of it, a little bit of that worry (not a lot, but it's there, lurking in the background) that I might forget (no, will!) large chunks of my life, because even last month is a little fuzzy without notes and last year gets condensed into a few highlights. But no, that isn't quite it either, since I don't really hang on to the memories tightly even with my notes and my archive; I don't reread, I don't memorize.

Ah. I think this is it: my blog lets my past selves connect with other people who are looking for this stuff here and now (or in the future, as the case may be). So even if I am a different self–focused on other projects, learning about other interests–those past selves are there to nod at other people and share a little of what we've learned along the way. Mostly I leave things as snippets and blog posts, but on occasion, I consolidate things into summaries and documents – a clearer guide, a past self updated with a little present knowledge.

Hmm…

I spend much of my time learning, making sense of things, and sharing what I've learned. I like connecting with other people who think about how they do this. I chatted with Harold Jarche about how he manages his 10-year blog archive. We thought it might be good to describe our knowledge management processes in more detail. Here are more details on mine!

2014-03-03 How I work with knowledge – seek, sense, share #pkm

Seek

One of the things I'm working on as part of this 5-year experiment is to be more proactive about learning. It's easy to fall into relying on client requests or a serendipitous stream of updates to teach me interesting things. It takes more work to observe what's going on and come up with my own questions, ideas, and experiments. I think learning how to do that will be more interesting.

I used to get most of my information through reading. I love being able to slurp a book and take advantage of someone else's experience. I turn to the Web for more current or on-the-ground information. I read social network updates and blog posts to find out about things I didn't even think of searching for.

I'm learning more about asking people. There's a lot written down, but there's also a lot of knowledge still stuck in people's heads. Asking helps me pull that out into a form other people can learn from.

Trying things myself helps me test knowledge to see if it makes sense to my life. I learn how to adapt things, too, and I might even come up with my own ideas along the way.

Sometimes I get interesting questions through e-mail, comments, or other requests. Those are worth exploring too, since explaining helps me understand something better. I fill in gaps in my understanding, too.

(Make) Sense

Many of my blog posts are reflective. I think out loud because that helps me test whether I make sense. Sometimes other people help me learn or think my way through complex topics. A public archive is helpful, too. I can search my thoughts, and I'm relatively confident that things will continue to be around.

Chunking

The main challenge I'm working on is getting better at “chunking” ideas so that I can think bigger thoughts. I'm comfortable writing my way through small questions: one question, one blog post. As I accumulate these posts, I can build more complex thoughts by linking to previous ones.

Sketches help me chunk ideas. Like blog posts, each sketch addresses one idea. I can combine many sketches into one blog post, and then use a sketch to map out the relationships between ideas.

I'm learning how to organize my posts into series. A better writer would plan ahead. Me, I usually work backwards instead, organizing existing posts and tweaking them to flow better. When I get the hang of series, I'll be able to start thinking in chunks of short books.

Reviews

I have a regular review process. I do weekly reviews of my blog posts, sketches, reading, and time. I do monthly reviews and yearly reviews, rolling the summaries upward.

I've written some scripts to simplify this process. For example, I read blog posts with the Feedly reader. If This Then That imports my Feedly saved items into Evernote. I have an Emacs Lisp function that reads Evernote exports and formats them for my blog, and then I annotate that list with my thoughts.

Archive hacks

Even with this review process, I can't remember everything I have in my archive. Fortunately, I'm a geek. I like building and tweaking tools. I've written about the different things I do to make it easier to go through my archive. I can find things faster thanks to little things like having a browser search keyword for my blog. Recommendations for similar posts help me find connections that I might not have thought about myself.

Delegation

One of the unusual things I've been experimenting with is delegation to a team of virtual assistants. I ask people to research information, summarize what they find, and draft posts. I can find things faster myself, and I can write pretty quickly. Still, it's a useful way to learn about things from other people's perspectives, and I hope it pays off.

Share

My website is the base for all my sharing. Having seen so many services come and go, I don't trust anything I can't back up and control. I keep most things in a self-hosted WordPress blog. I also use Google Drive for easy, granular sharing (such as my delegation process folder), and Dropbox for other features.

I keep a copy of my sketchnotes in Evernote for convenience, and I share those notebooks as well. See my sketchnotes, sketchbook, and visual vocabulary.

Google Hangout on Air is great for recording podcasts and video conversations. The broadcast is available as a live stream, and it's automatically recorded too. I've been moving more of my conversations to Hangouts on Air so that other people can learn from them.

I don't want to clutter my main Twitter account with automated posts. I use @sachac_blog for blog post announcements. On occasion, I'll post links or sneak previews with my main Twitter account, @sachac.

For free/pay-what-you-want resources, I use Gumroad. I like the way that it lets me offer digital resources while giving people a way to show their appreciation.

I'm also experimenting with paper books using CreateSpace. I'm looking forward to releasing some sketchnote collections through that.

How about you? How do you work with what you know?

Check out Harold Jarche's post, too: What is your PKM routine?. Want to watch our conversation about large blog archives? See Youtube video below.

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