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.

How do you organize what you know so that you can use it for inspiration later?

Here’s what I have:

Input:

• Experience
• Conversations
• Books
• Blogs
• Ideas
• Experiments

Capture and sharing:

• Words, sketches, brainstorms – paper and pen
• Mindmap on my iPod Touch and laptop
• Quick tips through microblogging and bookmarks
• Longer thoughts in my blog and on wikis
• Generally useful information – slides, presentations
• Book notes – scanned pages, text files; this needsh to be integrated into my system and set up for regular review
• One big text file organized with outlines and keywords for life, and another big text file for work

Navigation:

• Search
• Indexes in my notebooks
• Randomness, similarity, and on-this-day in my blog
• Hyperlinks
• Summaries
• Outlines and keywords

Index cards are useful for brainstorming too (especially for life planning or when I’m sketching a big talk that doesn’t have an obvious structure), but I don’t use them for long-term storage yet. My blog includes first drafts as well as more polished posts. I need a place to braindump. =) If you want less volume and more thought, just check out the highlights. (Note: I haven't been keeping this tag up to date)

I love the idea of a morgue file. I’d love to eventually build myself a good random-access information management system. I currently stuff most things into my blog, and am slowly figuring out how to organize things more. I used to use howm, which was pretty cool too (if very geeky). I may go back to building a personal wiki. W- uses Tiddlywiki. =) Digital works well for me because I like being able to access things from anywhere. I don’t interact with enough paper to have a full-blown paper system, and would rather go digital instead of printing things out to integrate them with a paper system.

I love mapping things out. Mapping helps me navigate, see gaps, and plan. It’s also a good way to make it easier for other people to discover interesting things.

Next steps for me:

• Digitize paper
• Build indices
• Build online and offline naming conventions for linking
• Flesh out map
• Learn more

More to come as I figure out and improve my system. =)

Thanks to Eric Blue for the inspiration!

I want to map what I know.

I want to make what I know more findable. The reverse-chronological order of blog posts isn’t enough organization. Search is useful, but it’s not enough. I want to make it easier for people to learn my skills or take over my role so that we can all do more than I can do myself. In order to do that, I need to make it easier for people to browse and learn.

I want to map the gaps so that I can see what else I need to reflect on and write about. I want to write what I’ve learned before I take too much for granted. Mapping my knowledge is one way to figure out what else is missing. Answering people’s questions is another way. This is one of the reasons why mentoring is useful.

My ideal would be a visual, expanding map of what I know, with links to additional resources. It would distinguish between things I’m actively learning about and things I’ve archived. It would be easy to update. It would be easy to cross-reference. People could browse it from the top down, or they could search it. It would be back-linked from my blog so that people could see the context of what I’ve posted.

It’s challenging to think about that map in full, but I can start building small pieces of it. People ask me about exploring interests and passions, improving productivity, delegating, being positive, and connecting with others. I can use a mindmap to organize my thoughts as well as previously published resources. As I expand the map, the bigger picture will emerge.

This will be fun!

Have you come across people with similar goals? I’d appreciate any pointers to role models!

– [ ] Keeping Notes in Emacs
Structured vs Unstructured (outline, free-form)
Flat vs Hyperlinked
Private vs Public
File structure (one file, daily, snippets)

In this section, you’ll learn about the different kinds of notes you take, and you will be able to choose one or two Emacs modules to start learning.

– [ ] Capture and retrieve – Remember, search

Getting the ideas out of your head and into your note-taking system; searching your notes (basic), searching your notes (specific)

Wicked cool code: Remembering to different note-taking systems, searching different note-taking systems

– [ ] Outline Notes with Org, Blorg

In this section, you’ll learn how to keep outlined notes using Org. You’ll be able to create headings, sub-headings, and text notes. You’ll also learn how to manage outline items by promoting, demoting, and rearranging them. These basic editing commands are covered in the Emacs Org manual, so I’ll just give a brief summary..

You’ll also get tips on how to capture text quickly (M-x remember, dabbrev), work with large outline files (split windows are useful), and search your notes efficiently (searching headings or text).

Lastly, you’ll learn how to publish your Org file as HTML or LaTeX.

Wicked cool code would be: searching, how to import to and export from Freemind, a graphical mind-mapping program.

– [ ] Daily Notes with Planner

In this section, you’ll learn how to write a day-based journal using Planner. In addition to free-form notes on the page, you’ll also be able to keep semi-structured notes typed in manually or captured using Remember. You’ll also learn how to publish the resulting pages as HTML and RSS, and how to customize the output.

Wicked cool code would be: searching notes and displaying matching headlines, private notes, publishing note headlines, and publishing a note index.

– [ ] Hyperlinked Notes with Muse

In this section, you’ll learn how to create a personal wiki using Muse.  You’ll learn how to create pages, link to pages, and publish your wiki.

Wicked cool code: Capturing notes to specific pages using Remember and keyword matches, private pages, publishing pages when you save them.

– [ ] Snippets with Howm

In this section, you’ll learn how to manage random snippets of information using Howm.

– [ ] Blogging from Emacs – WordPress, LJ, Blogger,Muse-Blosxom, EmacsAtomAPI

In this section, you’ll learn how to use Emacs as a blogging client for many popular platforms. This is mainly for keeping other blogs in sync, although I’ll also talk about the possibility of using planner-rss + something like Feedwordpress.

– [ ] Encrypted Notes (full file, segments) – MOSTLY WRITTEN

In this section, you’ll learn how to encrypt your notes. Actually, this will probably be split up into the different tools…