Why Filters Are Important for Knowledge Development
One of the core principles of my External Mind focuses on setting up processes that limit the amount of work in progress. By Work in Progress, I mean open loops where unfinished tasks or avenues of exploration are tracked on centralized lists; these lists often create a sense of obligation to complete those tasks.
Work in Progress Hinders Output
I limit the use of up-next lists because it hampers my ability to produce output with my knowledge development system. As I discussed in my previous article about Overdesigned Knowledge Pipelines, we want to create opportunities, not obligations, so we focus on less to produce more. More understanding, more insight, or more content. Whatever our goals, we want our External Minds to help us achieve them.
The Law of Increasing Effort
My External Mind system has four stages to take information and turn it into content, similar to the four phases of Tiago Forte's CODE framework for Building a Second Brain.
- Consumption → Encountering the ideas of other people.
- Categorization → Sorting that information based on when and how it will be useful so that it's easy to find by our future selves.
- Crystallization → Solidifying our understanding by translating them into our own words.
- Creation → Communicating our thoughts to others so that they can consume them.
Work in progress is challenging for an External Mind to handle because each stage requires increasing effort to advance.
Reading a paragraph might take a minute. I'll take a few minutes to think about how and where it will be useful. Then gaining a solid understanding of what it means and how it relates to what I already know will take at least a quarter of an hour. Finally, producing a piece of content is the work of hours. In addition to time, the further I take an idea, the more active I have to be in the process.
It's an exponential increase, not a linear one.
Filters, Not Funnels
The expectation that we can process 100% of the material from one stage to the next is flawed. We need to adopt the mindset of filtering, not funnelling.
I learned this from being a laboratory manager overseeing dozens of people. I needed leaders who filtered out the irrelevant information rather than just funnelling it all for me to deal with. When it comes to advancing our goals by using an External Mind, the same thing is true.
We need to be ruthless in filtering out what we don't need to consume because we don't stand a chance of learning even a tiny percentage of the important stuff, let alone all of it. But the filtering doesn't stop at consumption. At each stage, we need to take a razor to what we pass up the chain so that by the time we get to the end; there isn't a mountain of mediocrity to dig through.
We want to focus on less and less because each phase demands more and more.
Some Useful Filters
Rather than completely processing each idea, you want to identify the most valuable ones.
Current Interests → Although this filter isn't sufficient if you're like me. I caused so many of the early iterations of my External Mind to grind to a halt because I was capturing and processing every little thing that interested me.
Current Projects → This is where I currently live. My projects become the lens through which I primarily decide what to consume. I'll still capture the most poignant items that interest me, but they don't usually make it past the categorizing stage.
Create Storage Rooms, Not Lists
The change that has helped the most is switching from keeping all my notes to process on lists that would continually build to storing them behind relevant index entries. When my projects change, I can quickly review those Index Notes and have curated sources ready.
Rather than creating Main Notes just in case, expend effort to make notes just in time.
Conclusion
It's time to shift from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance; stop trying to process every idea completely out of fear of losing it. A mentality of scarcity leads to a shortage of output. You don't need more information or a better knowledge processing pipeline; you need to focus on less to produce more.
If you enjoyed this content, you can show your support by:
- 👏 Click the clap button!
- 👉 Follow me for more PKM articles.
- 📺 Head over and subscribe to my YouTube Channel for more PKM content.
- 🐣 Follow me on Twitter.