Best Ways to Organize Thoughts

It took me 22 years to realize that ideas are important, especially in relation to other ideas that are important. A thought sometime decides to place me smack in the middle of its wandering trajectory, and then leaves. It’s like you taste your favorite icecream…for one second, before it disappears.

Now the great thing about thoughts and other similarly abstract concepts is that you can preserve them, modify them, and even build on them. But the central question remains: how do I organize my thoughts in a way that will make sense to the future me?

What characteristics would a low-effort, high-value system have? Note that I do not use the word software necessarily, because I’m looking for a holistic approach. In my opinion, it would be the intersection of something that understands both concepts, and me. The most important practical aspect of that would be that it’s intuitive for me to use, responds to my cues and usage patterns, and adapts itself accordingly.

Coming back to the realm of reality, I sometimes like to extend the functionality of traditional organization apps and make them particularly effective:

• Color coded organization — to know whether there’s one dominant recurring theme in my notes (and also whether I want that, or whether I want to think as laterally as possible)
• Links to external references — sometimes, it’s useful to copy just the snippets you need, sometimes you need to mark certain articles for further exploration in a BFS (breadth first search) manner
• Repeatable thought cues using environmental or otherwise triggers — setting up a regular time or a place to think really helps me get those creative juices flowing.
• Making it a habit, even if there isn’t anything significant to log — as an enforceable follow-up to the above point, sometimes, I force myself to write even if there’s nothing of consequence to pen down. Those may not be my most profound thoughts, but you never know what might come up.
• Revisit frequently — I re-read my old notes and diagrams frequently, and see if I feel differently now
• Actively try to combine seemingly unrelated ideas — even if they seem doomed to fail from the start. Sometimes the metaphor is too deliberate, but it gets your brain thinking in cross-pollination mode.

Why is logging any thought even important? *Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it*

Observation, Insight, Action — the iterative learning loop. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but you first observe events in the world around you, combine multiple present and past observations, arrive at an insight, and then use that to modify your interaction with the same world, i.e. take an action.

Without a log for your observations or insights, there can be no action. And where there is no action, there is no impact.

Originally published at jesikaharia.wordpress.com on February 21, 2015.