My system is not that complicated and very much resembles what I was doing seven or eight years ago, which was close to plain-vanilla journaling. Now I use printer paper, which I line myself with microsoft word in alternating colors: tan-lavender-orange-light green-rose-light blue-gray. There are fifteen pages per color. At any given time I carry with me sixty pages; the fifteen in the active queue and the filled three previous sets. Right now my active pile goes back to the 23 rd of August. The first thing written on every new page is the date and this date’s page number in the top right corner.
When I fill up the current active set (of fifteen pages), I carefully read the set that will go upside down on the stack of a thousand pages or so on my bedroom floor. Some stuff will get copied onto a new fresh sheet to keep in the current active bin. Other stuff will get circled in red, starred, or otherwise annotated as something I would like to be able to review, or to find fairly fast. I use a lot of cartoon drawings and glyphs and diagrams and graphs.
I personally find it easier to find stuff out of hardcopy because keyword searches only work if you can remember the keyword and how to spell most of it. Depending on what I am looking for, I can scan through up to ten or fifteen pages in a minute; also, if it takes me a long time to find something and I have to search through a lot, I always find at least one pleasant surprise by happy happenstance.
JenniferRM, I looked at those links and some of it is intriguing. I do not log everything and am not interested in a complete map of every thought I think. What I am after is to refine and rewrite and connect my very best thoughts. This is the sense I read Foucault’s discussion of the hypomnemata. If you are interested in looking at this, you can find it on page 364 of the 1st edition of the Foucalt Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books. Foucault is generally thought of as intimidating, but I find this book very approachable. Rabinow has done a careful job presenting his version of Foucault, and it is a different guy than you see in the originals. There is always humor in Foucault, but in Rabinow’s presentation there is a sense that the humor is a mask for a deep underlying sadness, like Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a clown when there is no one around” character.
In any case, the man was a tornado of a scholar in terms of his ability to dig into library stacks and extract original connections from the overabundance of material waiting there for anybody with the exploratory instincts of people such as Michel Foucault, and when he talks about his methods, that is something which is worth attending to closely. The section on the hypomnemata is in the context of Rabinow interviewing him specifically on the topic of his methods.
Can you give an example of the kind of thing you use this to record? Is it for ideas, new concepts, notes to self, things to do later … ? What kind of things do you save, and how are they useful?
I was thinking about something similar recently, although I came at it from a different direction. Every once in a while I’ll think of something I call a “puzzle piece”—a bit of my own personality, or a rationale for something I do or feel. A piece of the puzzle that is me. Examples are along the lines of “Oh, I just remembered this experience I once had regarding such-and-such; no wonder I react to such-and-such so strongly now.”
I usually talk to someone about the puzzle pieces in a logged medium, but I don’t otherwise record them. It occurred to me that if I did, I’d be writing a manual to myself, and that might be very handy. Would anyone else be interested in some kind of structured site with the purpose of helping people develop their own “manuals” in this way? I’ll need to think about the requirements a little more before committing to building it, but I’m tentatively interested, especially if someone wants to help. (It wouldn’t be IA specifically, but self-knowledge is a useful thing.)
It’s also possible that the right format for this would not be an interactive site so much as a text guide for finding your own puzzle pieces.
Sorry for the delay, I didn’t see the reply because it wasn’t “leafward” of my response but on another branch so the software didn’t point me back here.
I read Foucault’s discussion of the hypomnemata. If you are interested in looking at this, you can find it on page 364 of the 1st edition of the Foucalt Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books.
Thanks, I appreciate the reference! Its in my system now, with a link back to here. It sounds like I do similar things already though not optimized for finding my mental gems. My working processes tend to be more “coral like”—with waves of growth and death and re-use of ancient content, but without a strong habit or theory to keep things stably repeating. Still, I like to see how other people tend their own thought gardens out of pure curiosity even when I don’t apply very much.
Kimbro’s system sounds like an impractically expensive version of yours, but there are similar themes. He prefers the flexible utility of physical note taking systems, uses four-color pens to track different phases and attitudes toward writing and re-writing, encourages ideogram invention, has mutating archival/mobile distinctions, and has numbering/sorting/reference systems so that the structure can be adjusted on the fly.
OK a couple more details.
My system is not that complicated and very much resembles what I was doing seven or eight years ago, which was close to plain-vanilla journaling. Now I use printer paper, which I line myself with microsoft word in alternating colors: tan-lavender-orange-light green-rose-light blue-gray. There are fifteen pages per color. At any given time I carry with me sixty pages; the fifteen in the active queue and the filled three previous sets. Right now my active pile goes back to the 23 rd of August. The first thing written on every new page is the date and this date’s page number in the top right corner.
When I fill up the current active set (of fifteen pages), I carefully read the set that will go upside down on the stack of a thousand pages or so on my bedroom floor. Some stuff will get copied onto a new fresh sheet to keep in the current active bin. Other stuff will get circled in red, starred, or otherwise annotated as something I would like to be able to review, or to find fairly fast. I use a lot of cartoon drawings and glyphs and diagrams and graphs.
I personally find it easier to find stuff out of hardcopy because keyword searches only work if you can remember the keyword and how to spell most of it. Depending on what I am looking for, I can scan through up to ten or fifteen pages in a minute; also, if it takes me a long time to find something and I have to search through a lot, I always find at least one pleasant surprise by happy happenstance.
JenniferRM, I looked at those links and some of it is intriguing. I do not log everything and am not interested in a complete map of every thought I think. What I am after is to refine and rewrite and connect my very best thoughts. This is the sense I read Foucault’s discussion of the hypomnemata. If you are interested in looking at this, you can find it on page 364 of the 1st edition of the Foucalt Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books. Foucault is generally thought of as intimidating, but I find this book very approachable. Rabinow has done a careful job presenting his version of Foucault, and it is a different guy than you see in the originals. There is always humor in Foucault, but in Rabinow’s presentation there is a sense that the humor is a mask for a deep underlying sadness, like Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a clown when there is no one around” character.
In any case, the man was a tornado of a scholar in terms of his ability to dig into library stacks and extract original connections from the overabundance of material waiting there for anybody with the exploratory instincts of people such as Michel Foucault, and when he talks about his methods, that is something which is worth attending to closely. The section on the hypomnemata is in the context of Rabinow interviewing him specifically on the topic of his methods.
Can you give an example of the kind of thing you use this to record? Is it for ideas, new concepts, notes to self, things to do later … ? What kind of things do you save, and how are they useful?
I was thinking about something similar recently, although I came at it from a different direction. Every once in a while I’ll think of something I call a “puzzle piece”—a bit of my own personality, or a rationale for something I do or feel. A piece of the puzzle that is me. Examples are along the lines of “Oh, I just remembered this experience I once had regarding such-and-such; no wonder I react to such-and-such so strongly now.”
I usually talk to someone about the puzzle pieces in a logged medium, but I don’t otherwise record them. It occurred to me that if I did, I’d be writing a manual to myself, and that might be very handy. Would anyone else be interested in some kind of structured site with the purpose of helping people develop their own “manuals” in this way? I’ll need to think about the requirements a little more before committing to building it, but I’m tentatively interested, especially if someone wants to help. (It wouldn’t be IA specifically, but self-knowledge is a useful thing.)
It’s also possible that the right format for this would not be an interactive site so much as a text guide for finding your own puzzle pieces.
Everything that is now up on my blog comes directly from my hypomnemata.
Sorry for the delay, I didn’t see the reply because it wasn’t “leafward” of my response but on another branch so the software didn’t point me back here.
Thanks, I appreciate the reference! Its in my system now, with a link back to here. It sounds like I do similar things already though not optimized for finding my mental gems. My working processes tend to be more “coral like”—with waves of growth and death and re-use of ancient content, but without a strong habit or theory to keep things stably repeating. Still, I like to see how other people tend their own thought gardens out of pure curiosity even when I don’t apply very much.
Kimbro’s system sounds like an impractically expensive version of yours, but there are similar themes. He prefers the flexible utility of physical note taking systems, uses four-color pens to track different phases and attitudes toward writing and re-writing, encourages ideogram invention, has mutating archival/mobile distinctions, and has numbering/sorting/reference systems so that the structure can be adjusted on the fly.