How to organise your knowledge and build your inner library
Why do we read? The question is beautifully and succinctly discussed by T.K. Coleman in his memorable FEE article “A Book Is a Tool, Not a Trophy”:
“I see the aim of reading as the construction of an inner library. The books in our outer library provide the tools for construction. When we face a problem, set a goal, or have a need, what matters most is our ability to retrieve something useful, relevant, or pleasant from the inner library we’ve gradually built through our studies. In this sense, books are not status symbols, they’re soul stirrers. We don’t read them because we wish to brag about ourselves. We read them because we wish to build ourselves.”
Some of us read books to show off, some are treating them as tools. As containers of useful knowledge. Knowledge that we hope will help us upgrade our career, give meaning to our life, improve our relationship, inspire us to do great things. Some of treat books like trophies we display to mask our lack of erudition. Some treat them as Lego boxes, full of bricks we can assemble to build anything. We think the latter approach is the preferable one (doh) but building such a library is not entirely simple. Let’s explore:
Inner Libraries
Inner libraries are a fuzzy concept that highlight the inner transformation one gets by reading. At Deepstash we take it more literally. Because it’s not just books … we have articles, conferences, social media etc. The information bombardment is so intense that we believe our brains need augmentation to help deal with all of it. It starts by isolating & collecting a relevant insights from any book, article or podcast you are consuming.
This is not a revolutionary concept. Index cards were the rage last century and there was a time when programs that allowed the management of these index cards were all the rage. Does anyone remember HyperCards?
Moving from books or articles to insights is a fundamental first step in elevating your self-education to the next level. But you can get lots of insights and the more you get the more important organisation becomes. How do we link or group them together? It is not a simple question. Our ability to put borders around concepts, to categorise things and to operate discriminately with these categories is one of the ways we navigate the world. Just consider the fact that you can arrange your books on a shelf in infinite ways: by colour, size, author, publication year or month, number of pages, number of chapters or characters etc. Classification is not an easy task.
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist who worked on this problem in the 1980s. He developed a system to organise index cards that he described as his secondary memory (Zweitgedächtnis), alter ego, or his reading memory or (Lesegedächtnis). As you can see, it is quite similar to the inner libraries we have been discussing above. Here is how his innovations are described:
“Luhmann’s notecard system is different from that of others because of the way he organized the information, intending it not just for the next paper or the next book, as most other researchers did, but for a lifetime of working and publishing. He thus rejected the mere alphabetical organisation of the material. Instead, he opted for an approach that was “thematically unlimited,” or is limited only insofar as it limits itself”
His system is focused on working with paper index cards so there are quite a few limitations caused by such an “archaic” medium. He organised his cards by topics (his notation used numbers for easy reference). However, these topics were not fixed, as most of the previous systems proposed, but fluid. Topics could branch into subtopics, thus matching the ways we learn. When we start looking into any subject, we start with very big lenses. We are defining the play-field. Our insights on the topic could be basic definitions, methods etc. If we keep on it, we will start to see the field in higher resolution and segment the topic further.
Example: Say someone at work proposed to work using a Scrum methodology. You go home and look into it. You find out what Scrum is and you save its definition as an insight. You put it in a folder called Agility@ Work. A general topic with one humble insight it in. But say you stick to it. Some colleagues from the engineering department explain you the difference between Scrum and XP. You save that too. After a while your stash is becoming more crowded and you start to see some ways you can break it down: methodologies, principles, examples from successful or less successful implementation, counter-arguments etc. You will want to add better filtering to your stash with these subtopics or branch new stashes. No matter how you do it you would have a knowledge stash to rely on, a secondary brain as Luhmann proposed, that would give you the confidence to be a better professional and colleague.
Organising your knowledge stashes
With Deepstash, we are following Luhmann’s steps, but upgrading it to the 21st century. There are no fixed topics, you can label you insights any way you want. And you can organise your stashes in any way you want as well, based on your interests and objectives. You can make:
- a stash about a project at work
- a stash to collect all the quotes that inspire you
- a stash about the principles you want to live your life by
- a stash with a hobby you want to explore further
- etc
Conceptually you can probably have 2 types of stashes:
- General thematic stashes based on long terms interests. I am a product manager at heart and I have a Product Management stash where I collect insights about the topic from all the sources: Interview questions, ways to announce new functionality, ways to measure the products, methods to deal with office politics. I refer to it quite frequently and it was one of my secret weapons during my “corporate days”
- Focused and narrow stashes, for short term interests and projects. For example I am making a dedicated stash every time I am speaking in public. I collect all the concepts and refer to the resulting map to find the best narrative structure to present them.
The beauty of a well organised inner library is that it can be the starting place for any creative journey. Like your Lego bricks, your knowledge can the the foundation you can base your creative journey on. Go build amazing things.
This article is part of series of articles on knowledge management for the digital era. Read Part 1 & Part 2.
At Deepstash we are building a service to help life-long learners collect and organise their knowledge. Add yourself on the list if you are not already on it. Offer us your feedback if you are one of our early users. We’ll also use this publication to discuss topics around self-education, so please subscribe if you want to continue the conversation.
