Capturing new ideas in the informational age
In the last years, a kind of practice associated with the development of the internet and memory loss has been consolidated. Older people remember that we memorized a series of phone numbers, whereas today we barely remember ours.
This is due not only to the speed at which information travels, but also to the facilities that the digital world brings, especially from the point of view of information storage. For such a reason that if we lose our contacts app we become absolutely lost.
💡From this diagnosis, it’s possible to notice the rise of a kind of literature based on what we can to deal with the enormous volume of information that we go through, from David Allen’s GTD, to Thiago Forte’s Second Brain.
However, whether we like it or not we are living in the information society, and the solutions the authors present are undoubtedly interesting. Inspired by this literature that I adopted a simplification of GTD, but the idea is the same.
1. Capture
In fact, it could have a step zero, which is to define the sources of information sources. Assuming we know what we want and we have a source of information, the first step is to tick our RSS Feeder. I use Inoreader, but there are several alternatives as shown in this Wired article.
The idea is for you to raise the blogs, pages, sources that you have a habit of reading and leave on the page and whenever they post new articles or you open.
- What to do after immediately opening an article?
❌Discard. If isn’t interesting.
🗃️ Save it for later. If it’s interesting and you don’t have time to read right now [step 2].
📒 Read it. If it’s interesting and you have time to read it right away/it’s short and you can do a quick read. [step 3].
2. Organize
Here is where all your article’s storage should be and at first caught your attention. For this there are also several alternatives, like Raindrop, Pocket, and the one that i use, Instapaper.
For this there are only two steps:
💾Save. Instapaper have a chrome extension that allows automatically saves to your profile.
🗃️ Catalog. In your inbox, you should create thematic folders and drag the articles according to its corresponding theme. I recommend that if there is more than one article on the same topic, it is interesting to create a thematic group to group them together, otherwise it can be in a generic folder named like “others”.
3. Read
While this is the simplest step, it is also the most important. How the reading itself can be done varies from speed reading, reading several times and, most importantly, taking notes. The way how to take notes it’s so diverse and complex that demands his own article.
The place where the reading notes are stored also has a variety of options such as Notion, Roam Research, Evernote. I use Obsidian, although I’m considering reviewing this option.
Another issue that demands his own article is what to do with what was consumed. For that, we can think about the P.A.R.A. Method associated with Second Brain, to Zettelkasten method .
⚠️What I would like to emphasize is the possibility of falling into a common vice, which is a certain fetish of being more concerned with storing unread texts than actually reading them. For this reason, what I believe is the biggest challenge of this method is to create a routine for reading the texts. For that, it is possible to define in the calendar a certain day and time of the week destined exclusively for reading.
💭My personal critic’s of these models is that they start from a certain naturalization of the way our memory has operated. David Allen says “The Mind Is For Having Ideas, Not Holding Them”. It’s not necessary a great historical knowledge to counter this statement. We just need to think about the importance of Oral history. The criticism is basically for understanding that the works start from the way our mind works today as if it were something intrinsically human, and not as something that has become, especially over the last few decades. What I mean is that the way human memory operates is socially constructed, a concept that have a common ground in anthropology for some decades.
