In nature there are no boxes. More specifically, and also more metaphorically; in your brain, there are no boxes, either. Nothing you can think, or ever could, is unrelated to anything else you ever thought, or will. So while outside of your brain, you may have something you need to take note of, there'll always be the question of where to keep that note for future reference, inside your brain no such problem exists. The note doesn't go into a box, it becomes part of the web. (The web that is your brain; the brain that is your you).
One of the petty frustrations that pervades my working life is a total lack of organisation viz. the way information is processed and stored. I'm sure this isn't unique to my employer, and is probably commonplace. Wherever any kind of filing system is used (and particularly when that system collaborative, not just personal) unless the conventions by which what information goes into what file are clearly, objectively defined, the whole thing becomes an unnavigable labyrinth almost immediately.
In the simplest terms, imagine you send me an important picture, and ask me to file it away for future reference:
C:/Main
/Cats
/Animals
/Pictures
/Animal pictures
/Things that are cute
/Email attachments
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Where do I file this important picture? It could go in any one of these subfolders. So how to decide which one? There is no answer to this question. So I just have to pick one. Looking for the file, two months later, you could just run a search of C:/ - but by now the drive is bloated and improperly formatted, with no indexing or defragmentation procedures, so the search takes forever, which you do not have. And all you need is that picture of a kitten someone else sent someone else two months ago. You need it now for the important meeting, because it's an important picture that's relevant to this important meeting. Nothing is in C:/Main except the subfolders themselves. So you look in /Pictures. Thousands of pictures, but not the one you're looking for. Ah - there's a subfolder for "animal pictures"...but it's not there either. That folder is totally empty for some reason. Somebody created it at some point, but it's not clear who, or when.
So maybe it's in /Things that are cute. But you haven't been given access rights to this folder, so you no way of knowing. Unlikely to be there anyway, since you don't find kittens cute. You find them disgusting. But the file is nowhere else to be found, so you go the meeting unprepared. Pointless stress pervades your afternoon.
Why is this experience so commonplace, and why is it so annoying? I don't think it's only because it is commonplace that it's annoying, though that's a factor. A deeper aspect of the problem is that this isn't how brains work. In your brain there are no boxes. And no arbitrary systems either.
This, as I understand it, is the power and intuitive appeal of bidirectional note taking; a new feature of many a fledgling note-taking app, from Roam, apparently the grandaddy - which already has its own "cult", cf. #roamcult - to the all singing, all dancing Notion to a swath of (sometimes) free imitators and alternatives.
Bidirectional note taking works like this. You make a note, and give it a title. In the course of making that note, you realise you need to refer to an existing note. So you create a link on the fly to that note - as with OneNote's "double bracket" function, for example; if the note already exists, you now have a link to it; and if it doesn't, one is created to a new page - and that's all very nice and useful. With a bidirectional note taking - lacking in the bells and whistles software of the likes of OneNote or Evernote - the new note you have just created/linked to, is cross-referenced back with the note you're taking now. Over time, you spin a web of notes. Which means as you're looking back through them, connections made at the time are immediately to hand, and new connections can be made. It's a very simple step forward in software terms, but a giant leap in terms of allowing your digital information universe cohere with your organic one.
I'm using Relanote - both for work and pleasure - to build my web. It's free and feature-lite, but has everything I need for jotting down quick nuggets of information, and connecting them with the chaos of everything else that's already going on in my mind and life. One lovely feature is the visual "graph" of all the bidrectional connections you've made in your notes, which can be navigated (and filtered, by tag or category) easily, allowing you to jump into the labyrinth at any point and out again.
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| Day 4 inside my head |
I'm a sucker for personal "efficiency" apps anyway, but using Relanote - and internalising the concept of bidirectional note taking in general - has been a stonkingly stimulating experience, one I highly recommend. I think this could be the beginning of something really quite important. Not as important as a kitten, but close.
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