I first ran into Sacha Chua online, when I was flirting with learning emacs planner mode, after John “Genehack” J. S. Anderson demoed his GTD setup for me.
The combination of wiki, planner, and plaintext was seductive, but in the end, I just do too much paper and digital sketching, which can’t be shoehorned into emacs, and the experiment came to an end.
The mental model of emacs planner stuck with me, though. The central idea is so seductive: one central set of simple things, which get arranged around your journal, tasks, and notes. It takes the whole pile of your digital “stuff” and hangs them in a web of magic thread.
Sacha’s “wikiblog” is, in fact, a public extension of her emacs-wiki-planner setup. (Which is utterly brilliant, and I wish more tools offered that kind of thing.) I always thought of her, therefore, as a kind of emacs goddess. Remote and unreachable, stitching together the threads of life with meta-x- commands, she lives in the buffer of the sky. Or something.
So imagine my delight to find on the DIY Planner blog, Sacha Chua explaining how she manages research info-glut, using index cards:
How on earth am I going to keep track of all the information I need for my thesis? Not only do I have to read hundreds of papers, but I also have to make sure I properly cite any ideas I use in my work.
[...]
Index cards to the rescue! A time-tested way to keep track of random bits of information, index cards make it easier to capture, structure, and even shuffle ideas.
[...]
Capture. I get practically all my information through the Internet. Even with focus-follows-mouse tweaks and all the keyboard shortcuts I’ve memorized, taking notes while viewing a web page or PDF file isn’t easy. It’s a lot easier and a lot more fun to scribble ideas on index cards, flipping the card over and recording citation details on the other side.
Structure. Index cards also make it easy to organize ideas into instant outlines and mindmaps. I can simply divide the deck into piles, lay them out on the desk or on the floor, or even stick them on my wall with some tape or sticky stuff. Physically spreading ideas out also makes me think about things that aren’t there yet and find spaces for new ideas. Fun.
The physical act of laying out a huge grid of index cards, and then physically sorting them is an enormously satisfying way to think. It’s like a huge, physical extension of your brain. (You can use other tools besides index cards, of course. For example, sticky notes on a whiteboard are a favorite.) Each individual card holds one thought or idea. (More after the jump.)
Here’s an exercise, if you’d like to play along at home, or if you already use index cards or something similar to take notes on the go: try and use one card per idea, as you go. Then, when you’ve got a bunch, spread them out. You’ve now got one hell of a powerful tool to find the patterns in them.
If you’re collecting your incidental thoughts in one format, then you can easily develop them in that format, and use the existing tools to act as physical tokens for those thoughts. It also lets you use books, bits of clay, odd objects, foam models, and toys in the mix.
You could use an outliner on the computer for this, and many people do. Personally, I find that to be best as the next step.
Whatever your tool of choice is, the important thing is that it allows you to get your thoughts out of your head: externalize your ideas, so that you can reflect on them, and iterate. You won’t know what a good idea looks like until you’ve seen the bad ones. Give it a try.
Final Note
As a (anonymous) comment on the post at DIY planner notes, though, computers are a better tool for tracking and sorting information, long-term. You will likely want to capture the insights and things you get from an index-card outline in some electronic format.
OmniOutliner Pro is my tool of choice for translating “cardthink” into the computer. Other tools, such as Tinderbox, may be a better fit for some. I haven’t found TB to be a great fit, personally, although I keep poking at it. Much like planner mode, it seems a great tool, but it just doesn’t feel right. Feel free to suggest your favorite tool in comments.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have this huge backlogged stack of cards, and i need to sift through them to find out what I’ve been thinking…
