An option that will probably not meet your goals is to choose at the outset which solution you are going with, and value sticking to the plan more highly than you value the possibility of discovering/inventing a better solution. If you’ve ever taken a CPR class, this flowchart simplification was part of the curriculum. If you see someone become apneic and pulseless, you start CPR immediately rather than pondering whether or not it would be a good time to experiment with cooling their body to reduce neural damage until they can be re-perfused in a hospital environment or something. That cognitive topiary option of chopping off all but a few branches is sometimes great, but probably not appropriate to the problem-solving you’re talking about.
The option that’s more likely to meet your needs is to reduce the friction of note-taking. When you externalize your cognition, all the usual rules about written communication for a wider audience can be safely discarded. The purpose of taking notes when tackling a complex, branching problem is strictly to retrace your steps to an exact prior branch point, re-gather the context from that point, and continue down a different branch. Your notes do not have to make sense to anyone other than your near-future self.
When I’m personally exploring conceptual structures too big to let me just memorize my path through them, I take a linear series of note-fragments. I use more detail before and after branch-points that I anticipate wanting to revisit. When returning to a prior concept in order to branch off of it in a different direction, I simply repeat the words that are shared between the former path and the new one, and then go from them. Repetition of a short phrase is generally enough to cue me-when-rereading that it’s a jump back up the tree.
Some combinations of people and problems do better with mind mapping techniques. Some combinations of people and problems do better with putting concepts on sticky notes, index cards, or other small objects, then physically moving them around. For the combination of you and your most frequent problem type, develop a note-taking practice that imposes minimum overhead while fulfilling the purpose of helping you visualize and/or navigate the concept that doesn’t all fit in your brain at once.
Also, don’t assume that any skill worth having will be easy the first time you try it. If you don’t remember learning to type, consider the feeling of learning a new “more efficient” keyboard layout. Getting unstuck from a local maximum usually requires going downhill in some way, before things start improving again.
An option that will probably not meet your goals is to choose at the outset which solution you are going with, and value sticking to the plan more highly than you value the possibility of discovering/inventing a better solution. If you’ve ever taken a CPR class, this flowchart simplification was part of the curriculum. If you see someone become apneic and pulseless, you start CPR immediately rather than pondering whether or not it would be a good time to experiment with cooling their body to reduce neural damage until they can be re-perfused in a hospital environment or something. That cognitive topiary option of chopping off all but a few branches is sometimes great, but probably not appropriate to the problem-solving you’re talking about.
The option that’s more likely to meet your needs is to reduce the friction of note-taking. When you externalize your cognition, all the usual rules about written communication for a wider audience can be safely discarded. The purpose of taking notes when tackling a complex, branching problem is strictly to retrace your steps to an exact prior branch point, re-gather the context from that point, and continue down a different branch. Your notes do not have to make sense to anyone other than your near-future self.
When I’m personally exploring conceptual structures too big to let me just memorize my path through them, I take a linear series of note-fragments. I use more detail before and after branch-points that I anticipate wanting to revisit. When returning to a prior concept in order to branch off of it in a different direction, I simply repeat the words that are shared between the former path and the new one, and then go from them. Repetition of a short phrase is generally enough to cue me-when-rereading that it’s a jump back up the tree.
Some combinations of people and problems do better with mind mapping techniques. Some combinations of people and problems do better with putting concepts on sticky notes, index cards, or other small objects, then physically moving them around. For the combination of you and your most frequent problem type, develop a note-taking practice that imposes minimum overhead while fulfilling the purpose of helping you visualize and/or navigate the concept that doesn’t all fit in your brain at once.
Also, don’t assume that any skill worth having will be easy the first time you try it. If you don’t remember learning to type, consider the feeling of learning a new “more efficient” keyboard layout. Getting unstuck from a local maximum usually requires going downhill in some way, before things start improving again.