I’m curious about how to take more effective notes, so I’ve been researching different systems. I came across Lion Kimbro’s experiment with mapping out his thoughts years ago. I finally sat down and condensed the free 131-page e-book on How to Make a Complete map of Every Thought You Think (2003) into this one-page summary. You can click on it for a larger version and print it out if you want.

Feel free to print, share, or modify this image! (Creative Commons Attribution License)

The book describes a system for taking quick notes and integrating them into subject-based sections in a larger binder, with some notes on managing your archive. It also gives tips on splitting large subjects and mapping out the connections between topics.

I’ve been using some of the book’s ideas on colour and icons, indicating TODOs with green boxes and structure with blue ink. Maps are handy too, although I tend to use computers so that I can link and rearrange easily. Both visual thinking and technology have come a long way since 2003, when Lion Kimbro wrote this book. With Evernote and the Fujitsu ScanSnap, I can scan my sketches and file them along with my blog posts and other notes. I back up my data so that I’m less worried about losing my archive, and I also keep my paper notes by date. I’ve started using Freeplane to build my global subject map, which I’ll cover in a future blog post. There are still some tech gaps, but things are pretty cool.

Want to learn more? You can check out my blog posts about learning. Tell me what you think or what you’re curious about!

I’m celebrating my 30th birthday this August. Milestone birthdays are great excuses to look behind and look ahead. I don’t know how other people do it. I can barely remember what happened last week, much less ten years ago. Me, I cheat. I have blog archive, which 18-year-old me had the foresight to experiment with (although back then, I was just looking for a way to remember all those class notes and Emacs tidbits I was picking up). I’ve written more than six thousand blog posts in the last eleven years. (See Quantifying my blog posting history for a nifty visualization of my blog posting history.) My published posts probably include well over two million words. This is awesome.

Since not a lot of people have the same experience of blogging consistently over more than a decade, I thought I’d share what I’ve been learning along the way.

Have your own domain name. One of my first websites was on Geocities. Another was on Veranda.com.ph (hosted by I-Manila, which was our ISP then). Both services are long gone. I registered sachachua.com in 2006 and moved everything over to that. Since my name can be hard to spell, I registered LivingAnAwesomeLife.com in 2008. I‘ve started experimenting with my own URL shortening domains, sach.ac and liv.gd . While domain names are a recurring expense, they’ve been well worth it.

Move your data instead of starting from scratch. I changed blogging platforms (Emacs Planner Mode to WordPress) and moved web hosts, but I’d taken pains to move my data instead of starting fresh. Now I’m enjoying the benefits of having that archive handy.

Back up, back up, back up. I want this to be around in another sixty years. I like backing up the data in many different ways: database, files, HTML dumps, PDFs, even paper. I lost a bunch of photos and drawings when my Gallery2 setup got hacked, but I restored a number of them from files I found elsewhere. I look forward to being able to review decades and decades of notes.

Weekly, monthly, and yearly reviews go a long way towards making it easier to remember what happened. Day-to-day living makes it hard to see what’s important. A week seems to be the most natural chunk of time for my reviews. I wrote a little bit of code that auto-summarizes my task list and accomplishments. Every month, I

Search is your friend. If it takes a lot of digging to find something, make it more findable. I often use Google Search or my blog’s built-in search to find posts based on keywords that I remember. If it takes me a while to find something, I edit the post and add categories or tags to make it easier to find in the future. I sometimes write a new post that shares what I’ve learned since then, linking to the previous post for history.

Comments on older posts are awesome. Search engines are a wonderful, wonderful thing. I love it when people comment on old posts – it’s nice to know those posts are still helpful. Sometimes people comment on things I’ve completely forgotten writing, so it’s a great way to refresh my memory as well.

Check your analytics once in a while. I don’t really care about the number of visitors or the bounce rate, but I’m curious about what people are reading and where they’re coming from.

Indexes are good, too. Every month, I update this categorical index of my blog posts. I probably should go back and make sure that the WordPress categories match this as well, although in WordPress, I tend to use categories more like tags (I file a post in multiple categories).

Cultivate synchronicity and randomness. WordPress plugins help recommend similar posts, other posts that were written on the same day, and random posts. It might mean that my pages are overloaded with links… but it might also spark an aha! or an interesting conversation with someone browsing around, so I think it’s worth it. Besides, at this point, a computer will often be better than I could be at recommending other things that people should check out, so I use those features myself when I’m browsing my blog.

Write about the small stuff. I used to wonder whether the weekly reviews were worth posting on my blog, seeing as they’re mostly my task lists. Reviewing my blog years later, I was surprised to find that the weekly reviews were excellent at helping me remember what was going on. They were also great for filling in the blanks in my records – When did I fly out? What did I do? Whatever happened to that thing? Hooray for the small stuff.

Revise and summarize. It’s okay to write about something you’ve written before. In fact, it can be a great excuse to learn more and get closer to understanding the big picture.

If you’re starting out today, don’t worry. Stick with it, and in ten years, you’ll have something pretty darn awesome too.

Out of curiosity, do I know anyone else who’s got a big archive? How do you manage yours?

I’ve been blogging for almost ten years. I started with notes from my university classes and snippets of open source code, and became comfortable enough to share decisions I’m puzzling through and things I’m learning about life. There’s a lot of stuff in my archive, and I want to be able to review things again.

Categories would probably make this easier, but I use categories liberally and sometimes inconsistently. I use them like tags, quick keywords that I add so that people might explore a category and bump into other posts. I probably should split it out so that I assign posts to one category and leave everything else as tags. Someday.

In the meantime, it’s easy enough to maintain a manual topical index of my blog posts, and it’s a good opportunity to review what I’ve been writing as well.

I use Emacs Org Mode to manage a large text file divided into headings. Every month, I copy a list of titles into my topical index. I hacked Org-friendly output into my WordPress theme – you can see April’s blog posts as an example (sachachua.com/blog/2012/04/?org=1). I manually organize the list items under different headings, splitting off new headings when I can see a pattern. Working with two windows viewing the same buffer makes it easy to move information around, and org-refile is handy too. I use a checklist structure so that Org can automatically update the number of posts under each heading (C-u M-x org-update-statistics-cookies). When I’m happy with the structure, I use org-publish-current-file to publish it using the settings I’ve configured. The files are in my public Dropbox folder, so they’re automatically published to the Web. It takes me about 10 minutes to add a month of posts to my index and publish the page.

I like seeing how much I’ve written about different topics, and it encourages me to write and organize more posts. Maybe the index might be handy for other people too!

• Topical index as a webpage
• Org source for my blog index

I was thinking about information management and how I could get a better sense of what’s in my blog archive. I’ve written a lot over the years, enough that I’m surprised by what I find in here.

Topical index of blog posts from 2008-2012

I’ll add 2007 and earlier posts over the next week. I’m also looking forward to revisiting the map of things I want to learn, and consciously planning what to write.

To create this index, I used the Org-compatible output that I built into my WordPress theme (it outputs post titles in list format). I copied and pasted the list into an Org file, temporarily changed all the list items to headings, and used org-refile to move items under categories as needed. Afterwards, I converted the link headings back into list items and used org-export to export the HTML. The process was fairly easy, but it took me about four hours to process slightly over three years of blog posts.

Whenever I want to pick up more tips on how to read better, I turn to How to Read a Book. This is not some speed-reading manual that overpromises and underdelivers. It’s a thoughtful, practical guide to getting the most out of your reading: picking the right speed for a book, taking better notes, building a topical index of books and their relationships with each other… (Still working on that!) The book has plenty of tips for reading specific subjects, and even includes exercises to help you improve your skills.

If you already enjoy reading books, this is probably going to be a fantastic book for you. If you’re working on getting more books into your life, this might have some tips that will help you read more strategically.

How to Read a Book
Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren
New York: Simon & Schuster 1972 Rev. ed.
ISBN: 0-671-21209-5

We’re in the user acceptance phase for the project I’m working on. There are a number of small things to fix, styling issues that we’d put off until the base functionality was in place. So I fix things and send them back, waiting for feedback.

In the meantime, there’s time to write, and to work on other things. There’s a nonprofit project that I want to do as much as I can on before I go, and I want to leave notes for the next developer. There’s the Community Toolkit that I’d like to add more to before I go.

I’m mapping things out, seeing what else I can share. The things I’ve learned about collaboration have become part of what IBM knows; BlueIQ and wikis and community managers doing awesome things have taken it much further. The Community Toolkit has what I understand about the Connections API, and there are enough people who have used it and even tinkered with it to keep the idea going. The Idea Lab processes and tools have been in other people’s keeping for a year, and they’re doing well. There are people who do Drupal and who do Rails, and my notes are on my blog. This is good.

So now, in the gaps between things to do, I write about the other things I’ve learned from IBM. There’s a lot to write about, and I’ll see how much of it I can put together in the next three weeks. =)

It’s a good idea to plan what you want to learn. One of the good things we do at IBM each year is to put together an individual development plan, which combines formal learning, informal learning, and on-the-job experience.

I’ve written about some of the things I want to learn at work, such as facilitation skills. I’ve also written about some of the things I wanted to learn in life: getting better at storytelling, helping new hires connect, sharing what I’m learning, helping people change, nurturing relationships over a distance, and being more practical. What I hadn’t really done before was to make a map. (Or if I did, I forgot about it, and what use is that? ;) )

So here is what I want to learn, and now I can take that and translate the work parts into an individual development plan, and add next actions for work and life learning to my to-do list. =D I definitely recommend going through the process of thinking about what you want to learn and sharing that with other people. I’m sure that I’ll add or remove things from this, but it’s a good start!

Thanks to TerriAnne Novak for the nudge to think about this.