Note-taking continues to be a conundrum

The simple task of note-taking has turned out to to be harder to master than I would have thought. It is my primary information capture activity, central in how I remember and learn and communicate.  

Yet my system for taking notes is far from settled. For many years I took notes on a paper pad and then transcribed them into an e-mail message or an MS-Word document. Here, the process of transcribing notes from paper to screen helped to organize them, refine them, and improve my recall of what had happened.  

More recently, I have attempted to capture my notes electronically in the hopes of saving time and being "more electronic."   As a windows user, I tried Microsoft OneNote - a nice tool that let me take notes and capture other kinds of information (and perhaps the only Microsoft tool that has a cult following).  Its organizational system of tabs and notebooks intrigued me, but I succeeded in making a mess of them.  With more time, I suspect I could have made it work for me.  But when I switched to a Macintosh, OneNote was no longer an option. So what are my criteria for a good electronic note-taking solution?  

cc image courtesy of Brady Withers

It must be instantly available when I need it.  I must be able to pull up the writing space quickly and save my information quickly.  When something comes up in a meeting, or when a thought occurs to me, I don't want to wait to type it in. This is a problem with cloud-based services like Google Docs and Mindmeister, because in both cases I've run into network delays that have interrupted my notetaking. Likewise, Microsoft Word is a large, bloated program that takes time to load.  For this reason I prefer a more lightweight program, like a text editor.  

The notes must be portable and easy to pull into other tools.  My notes must be easily converted into an e-mail or a formal document; or posted into a mindmap or a blog post or a personal knowledge-base.  This argues for basic text with minimal formatting.  This too, points towards a simple text editor

My notes must be searchable and organized. A quick keyword search should pull up any notes I want to put my hands on.  Ideally my notes are filed, tagged, or linked in such a way that related information can be reviewed and worked on together.  

For most of the past year, I took my notes with the web-based mindmapping tool, Mindmeister.  The notes were stored in simple text. They were well organized within the framework of various mindmaps, and I could access them from any computer, including my iPhone. Then I started running into network hiccups that meant the tool was not available when I needed it.  This, and my concerns over my excessive reliance on a cloud-based service have me looking at alternatives. 

Today I am using a free product for the Mac called Notational Velocity.  I like it because it is lightning fast, easy to search across all my notes, and easy to synchronize across multiple machines through the use of the free Dropbox service.  It is streamlined and has no extraneous functionality.  According to its maker:

It is an attempt to loosen the mental blockages to recording information and to scrape away the tartar of convention that handicaps its retrieval. The solution is by nature nonconformist.

So far it is working well, though I haven't worked out all the details about how I will use this tool in conjunction with the rest of my information management tools. 

This is part of a series of posts summarizing my PIM activities in 2011.

A new password management system gives me some peace, sort of

Last year I wrote about getting my password management problem under control using a Mac-based password management product called 1Password.  Now that I've used it for a while, this is what I've found.

The Pros

This software has delivered on its key promise: all my passwords are in one secure location and accessible to me via a single master password. I have used it to store all kinds of account information, from financial accounts to reward programs to the access keys for my wireless router. It has allowed me to create long, difficult to crack passwords for my sensitive accounts, because I am freed from having to remember them.  When it comes time to retrieve a password for an infrequently used account, I can get it quickly.

The Cons

The problem with the software is that the web browser extensions, which allow you to easily save and submit passwords on the web, haven't always worked. They don't always "remember" enough to ensure that I can automatically sign-in to a password protected site later. At times it works beautifully. At times it falls on its face, whereupon I have to open up the 1Password software, retrieve the user information and login manually to the site in question. Not fatal, but enough to diminish the sense of smug, self-satisfaction that accompanied my possession of such an awesome tool (when I thought it would work seamlessly).

The mobile iPhone companion app has also been problematic.  Entering my long master password (with numbers and letters) proved so difficult on the iPhone that I had to switch the master password to a long compound word with no numbers in it so that I could actually type it in without botching it. The built in dropbox sync to my iPhone is not working for some reason, so the new passwords I'm saving on my other machines are not propagating to the iPhone. When I have some time I'll see if I can get it working again.  The basic iPhone app that I paid extra for lacks the ability for me to copy and paste passwords on the iPhone.  This capability is only available if I buy a more expensive version of the app, something which really annoys me.  I wasn't aware of how important this would be when I bought the cheaper version of the app.  Now I'm just angry because they withheld essential functionality from the mobile app that I did buy. Last, I am prompted to update the base 1Password software with annoying regularity, which interrupts whatever I am doing at the time. 

On balance, this has been a useful tool that hasn't delivered on all of its promises.  The peace of mind that accompanies better and more secure control of my passwords is mine, but at the cost of aggravations that make me, well, less peaceful.

This is part of a series of posts summarizing my PIM activities in 2011.

Cloud-based information travel runs into some turbulence

My love affair with cloud-based information services is now in the post-honeymoon period. I know the many benefits of these services and use them heavily:  Google Apps,  Mindmeister, Flickr, and Delicious among them. Yet as my dependence on them grows, I am starting to see what this dependence costs me.

First, there is the matter of network connectivity.  In the past month I ran into situations where the lack of instant on, immediate access to these services has cost me.  Flickr uploads that take forever; Mindmeister mindmaps not available for me to jot down that quick thought or those meeting notes; A google e-mail or document not immediately available to me.  The explanation for why this happens is rarely clear, I only know that at those moments I wish the files were on my own machine.  I'm starting to think that my assumption that I will always have a fat pipe, and that this pipe will only get fatter and more reliable with time may not be correct.  Given the net neutrality controversy and what I see to be the increasing fragility of our economic, financial, and energy infrastructures, I am less sanguine than I was a year ago about relying on the "cloud" to store my data.

Then there is the question of data fragmentation.  Each cloud-based information service is its own data silo. I want to be able to search across all my information with a single search, and these services don't let me do that. Then there is the question of vendor lock-in. The more data you put in a service and the more time you spend with it, the greater the disruption should you ever need to get your data out. Mindmeister requires me to export one mindmap file at a time. Flickr only lets me download one photo at at time. If I want to download the thousands of photos I have in that service, then I need to buy additional third party software.  Google docs is better, but it too only lets me export 2GB of files at a time--and it's not clear to me how smooth this process will be. My use of the Delicious bookmarking service is another case in point.  I will discuss this in a follow-up post.

This is part of a series of posts summarizing my PIM activities in 2011.

 

CC image, courtesy of Yuan2003 on Flickr

Web-based mindmaps become my primary PIM and PKM tool

I have written about Mindmeister before, a web-based mindmapping service that I am fond of.  During this past year I have used a single mindmap to manage my day-to-day to-dos as well as my longer term goals.  I use this mindmap as an all-purpose dashboard, linking to other documents as needed--such as a google docs spreadsheet I use to track my project work hours and my personal journal, also a google document.  I also use it to store and manage what I refer to as my "directional" information, including my mission, my goals, my key research questions. My daily routine involves consulting this mindmap first. During the day I check tasks off as I do them, and add notes and new to-dos as they come up. 

 

I also use Mindmeister to capture book notes and thoughts on certain topics, in some cases attempting to capture and outline my current thinking on a topic.  Sometimes I return to these mindmaps and review them so I can increase my retention and memory of the topic.  Sometimes I add to them.  In this fashion, I use this tool for personal knowledge management (PKM).

Although this service is powerful and continues to be improved I have run into two issues.  As a cloud-based service I am dependent on my network connection to use it.  Occasionally this connection falters and the tool is not available when I need it.  Second, I am concerned about the lack of portability of these mindmaps.  So long as I stick with this service, I am OK.  But should it go out of business or change its terms so as to make it unattractive,  I will be forced to save/migrate each file one at a time to get the information out of the service.   Bulk backups are available, but only to large scale business users with a much more expensive subscription.  I will speak more about this in a follow-up post about cloud-based services. 

This is part of a series of posts summarizing my PIM activities in 2011.

Personal Information Management: 2012 Update

My personal information management activities in the past year can be characterized by the following headlines:

• Web-based mindmaps become my primary PIM / PKM tool
• Cloud-based information travel runs into some turbulence
• A password manager gives me some peace, sort of
• Note-taking continues to be something of a conundrum
• The revenge of the file system
• Au revoir, Delicious
• Knowledge-base nirvana eludes me still.

In the days that follow, I will write the brief stories behind these headlines.

Keep an important list of problems handy

The blog Taking Note just took note of a kind of information that deserves to be kept handy:

Richard Feynman seems to have given younger scientists the advice that they should keep a list of a dozen or so of their favorite problems. They should have this list constantly present in their mind. In this way they could relate everything they read or heard to one of the problems on the list and then determine whether the new information could help them in solving the problem. The claim was: "If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work."

Although my notion of an "important problem" might be different than Feynman's I like the notion of carrying a list of important problems around with me.  I can see myself including this in my category of important information to keep in touch with and in some fashion "manage."  This includes the directional information that gives meaning to my personal research activities: my goals, my personal mission, and my guiding principles.

A new student perk: personal digital archive for life

Incoming students at UNC's School of Information and Library Science are being given a personal digital archive for life. The LifeTime Library, as it is called, provides a personal storage area and back-up service. Support for file versioning and other enhancements are envisaged, such as "drop box" type synchronization across devices and support for archiving content from social networks.

This experimental program seems to have two goals: 1) Get the students thinking about what it means to "manage their digital life" over the long haul and 2) Give them an alumni service that connects them to the school.

It makes sense that students of information science should grapple with issues of personal information management and that such a service could help them do that.  And with any luck, the service would evolve and become better as the result of the attention that students and faculty give to it.

The question of personal archiving is important.  I have written before on the need for cloud-based services to support this  (Yes, Virginia, you can take it with you).  It will be interesting to see if this service will keep pace with developments in commercial services and whether it can serve as a model for similar offerings elsewhere. 

Dipping my sneakoscope into the tweet stream

As a curmudgeonly and reluctant Twitter user (bah humbug!) I have been pleasantly surprised by the sorts of discovery that Twitter can enable.  Until recently, I dismissed Twitter as the latest shiny thing that the cool kids had to have; you know the kind. But no more. I find the ability to search twitter interesting, and even more the ability to save a Twitter search and track it in my RSS feed reader.

I am currently a partner in a startup that provides tools to help academic libraries weed their book collections. Accordingly, we have all developed an "unhealthy" interest in weeding or "deselection" as it is sometimes called.  So it is with some interest that I can see what people who are actually doing this have to say about it.   A search today reveals the following tweets that contain the words "books" and "weeding":

@janchief
Love weeding books. Hate weeding books. Love/hate relationship.

@LieBerryBooks
Weeding the food pyramid books #nightlibrarian

@cottage46
How do librarians have fun? Ruthless weeding of old, crappy books.

@mealmaguer
Weeding through the closed stacks' oversized reference TT books; there's years of Pittsburgh coal dust along the tops of them! #fb

@librarygirl79
Still, on the plus side, I've a been weeding again today :-) Bye bye grotty books.

@InfoWitch
Shifting AND weeding. Have moved 800 books so far. Catalog still won't delete records, tho, so piles threatening to take over.

@tadpole99
I think stock weeding is my favourite job of all. I've always enjoyed throwing books away. #badlibrarian

@JessLibrarian
Spent most of the day weeding books. #notenoughshelves

@adamdelaura
Weeding is kinda fun once you overcome the natural compulsion to horde books.

I find reading these interesting and informative. Interesting, because they connect me with the humanity of our potential customers; informative, because they tell me about issues with weeding.  Who knew that some librarians *like* to weed?  The reference librarian in me is happy that I have a shiny new hammer to use.   I'm sure I'll graduate to other, productive uses of Twitter, but for the time being, this makes me happy.

On the costs of tooling up

The next phase in my plan to build out my personal information managememt (PIM) system is on hold. My plan is to buy a ScanSnap scanner from Fujitsu to allow me to scan and OCR all my printed documents and thus make my personal document archives more searchable, saveable, and portable.  I even freed some cash specifically for this task, by allocating the proceeds of my recently sold comic book collection. Yet some months later it still hasn't happened. 

There are predictable reasons for this: procrastination and other stuff needed to be done, and the fading of that initial enthusiam that comes with being seduced by a new possibility.  The key reason, though, is that I didn't have an immediate project I was going to use it for.  And my recent experience has shown me that it is easier to buy a new tool or technology than it is to effectively integrate it into your life.  Kevin Kelly speaks nicely to these issues in a recent post titled Techno Life Skills: 

"Anything you buy, you must maintain. Each tool you use requires time to learn how to use, to install, to upgrade, or to fix. A purchase is just the beginning. You can expect to devote as much energy/money/time in maintaining a technology as you did in acquiring it."

"What do you give up? This one has taken me a long time to learn. The only way to take up a new technology is to reduce an old one in my life already. Twitter must come at the expense of something else I was doing -- even if it is just daydreaming."

"Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything until 5 minutes before you need it. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete. Therefore acquire at the last possible moment."

 I think it will eventually happen, just not today.

 

To remember or not to remember, that is the question

Having recently trumpeted my aquisition of a tool that frees me from remembering passwords, I came across an interesting podcast on "The End of Remembering" which reflects on how the transition from antiquity to modernity has been accompanied by an ever decreasing reliance on human memory.  The speaker is a journalist named Joshua Foer who researched the culture of memory competitions and ended up becoming a competitor himself (also discussed in this article in the NY Times Magazine).  Given my interest in Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) this topic seemed relevant. Here are some interesting points that were made:

• When books were scarce and few, people read them over and over again. They read them aloud to one another and could recite large passages from memory. Today, we gallop through books with barely a pause and rarely do we read them again.
• The art of memory enhancement goes back to the ancient Greeks, who learned to use visual structures or "memory palaces" to help them remember large amounts of information. These techniques were widely used in the Middle Ages and Renaissance but have passed out of common use.  
• The trick is in making things that are unmemorable, memorable.  The use of absurd, bawdy, even obscene imagery is part of the game.
• People of average mental abilities can learn these skills. The ability to memorize large amounts of information is not limited to savants and extraordinary individuals.  

For me the question is, when would it make sense to memorize lots of information?  Joshua Foer does it because it's fun.  Fun and games aside, I don't see any immediate uses for this.  But I do like the idea of mastering information in a specific domain and being able to quickly draw on it without having to consult a book or a computer. Perhaps some of these techniques could provide better interior scaffolding on which to arrange this information. That, it seems, might be worth pursuing.

Robert Fludd, The Memory Palace of Music

Getting the password management problem under control and then some

For 10 years my password management system has been a piece of paper in my desk drawer where I wrote down all the passwords to my different accounts.  Well, almost.  It seemed I never had them all in one place and was always having to reset one or another password because I had forgotten it.  Or I was at work or someplace else and didn't have access to my piece of paper.

Not anymore.  A couple of weeks ago I installed a software package called 1Password that allows me to keep all my passwords and related identity and account information in one file, protected with a single master password.  Forget or lose this password and the system fails, but in every other respect it seems a good solution. Not only does it let me store all my passwords and login information, but it lets me store all my account numbers, frequent flier numbers, software license keys, and even secure notes, so that I can remember what my "secret questions" and answers are that some sites require.  It is integrated with my browser so that I can capture and store logins whenever I access a system, and then it provides an easy way to generate strong passwords so that I can start using different passwords and strong passwords for every system I have access to, something that wasn't the case before.  

I had been thinking of getting such a tool for a while and was finally spurred on by a fascinating article about how a security firm was brutally hacked because the CEO was careless in the way he managed his passwords (among other things).  Like me he used the same password for multiple systems and in some cases used passwords that were weak and easily cracked.  With a tool like 1Password, there is no excuse for doing such a thing.  

The encrypted file sits in my Dropbox folder, which means it is synchronized across all my devices.  There is also an iPhone app that has access to this information.  So whether I need to remember the password to my wireless router or whether I need to get my frequent flier number, it's available from any of my devices.  I just need to remember the one password.  To me this is a key piece of my personal information management (PIM) puzzle and I'm glad I've got it under control.

   One password to rule them all

Letting go is hard: the challenges of weeding our collections

This week I put my comic book collection up for sale. Started in my boyhood, it was taken over by my brother and hugely expanded. When he died in 1993, it came back into my hands and it has followed me ever since.  2300 in total, the core collection included Thor, Dr. Strange, Master of Kung Fu, and Conan the Barbarian. The Archie and Richie Rich comics were taken by nieces and nephews a long time ago, along with a few X-Men.  But other strange titles remain, including Ren and Stimpy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and various "mature" comic books from Neal Gaiman, Clive Barker and others. Three moves later I have decided it's time to say goodbye. I haven't read one in over 10 years and I need the space because my girlfriend just moved in. 

A few weeks later... 

Now that they're gone I feel better.  I've got more space for things that are part of my future, and am relieved that a decision much delayed has finally been made.  But letting go was hard. Hard because so much effort had gone into creating and caring for the collection; hard because the dreams of my collecting past had not been allowed to die, or at the very least been given a proper burial; hard also, because the task of getting rid of them was a time consuming chore.

I work for a startup that is developing tools to help academic libraries weed their print monograph collections and I can see a similar dynamic at work. There are lots of rational reasons for these libraries to substantially reduce their print collections: huge numbers of titles that aren't being used, an increasing shift to electronic resources, and space and budget pressures that compel action.  Yet here, too, letting go is hard. It takes time for people to let go of existing investments, both emotional and financial.  Helping libraries do this will be part of our work.

  Here are a few old Thor titles, part of the "crown jewels" of the collection

In search of the right notebook and notetaking system

In my last post, I wondered about whether the commonplace book is a good model for personal knowledge management or,  to put it more plainly, whether it is a good tool for capturing and remembering key ideas and concepts.  This has increased my interest in good examples of notebooks in use. This past week the VizThink blog posted an interesting 7 minute video of a designer discussing his notebooks, mostly filled with sketches and how they figure in his creative process.  I have also come across the blog Taking Note, "a blog on the nature of note-taking" which discusses notetaking tools and systems.  The most recent post discusses the diary entries of an Austrian writer concerning his system of notetaking:

Musil tried to make the vast material accessible to himself by assigning to entries a sequence of numerals and letters. Apparently, there are 100,000 of them. This system of reference is, however, very opaque to outsiders. In any case, his approach is not too dissimilar from the way in which other authors and thinkers tried to master the results of their note-taking and thinking. Whether Musil's system was more effective than that of others may be doubted.

I doubt my system needs to be terribly complex but it does need to be electronic. When I used a Windows machine I used Microsoft OneNote  and liked it, but now that I am using a Mac I am looking at tools like Devonnote, Scrivener, and OmniOutliner.  The solution has to have the ability to quickly organize and reorganize my notes and to create links between them which show the relationship of one idea or note to the other.  Thus, outlining capabilities are important as are linking capabilities. Otherwise I would like to keep it simple. One possibility: Mindmanager has the ability to switch between mindmap and outline view modes.  If each topic in a mindmap linked to a file containing a document or note that might work.

 Charles Darwin's first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837)

Old wine in new bottles: the commonplace book as model for personal knowledge management

The ability to keep key information close at hand and easily accessible is a function of personal knowledge management. But in centuries past people didn't have iPads or PCs.

"Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it . . .They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality."

Robert Darnton,"Extraordinary Commonplaces," The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2000

I like this idea of taking the best of what I read, write, or see and putting it someplace close, where I can repeatedly read it, organize it, and shape it to match my evolving understanding. By keeping it close, I would make sure that I didn't lose it amid the distractions of everyday life. And through repetition I would make sure that I mastered this content and could speak to it at anytime with ease and with facility.

The closest I come to this now is a series of online mindmaps that I use to capture key ideas, goals, and readings that have intrigued me.  As a tool, my Mindmeister account meets many of the criteria I would have for my commonplace book: the maps are easy to add to, edit, and reorganize. They let me link to related information and I can access them from most any electronic device, though for now I only use them from my PC or laptop.  But they don't resemble a book and they don't follow me around like a commonplace book might if it was in my vest pocket.  It has to be easy to enter new thoughts and to make changes on the go, so the iPhone I carry won't cut it.  Likewise it has to be easy to grab snippets of content from other electronic sources. Outlining software seems like it would be  helpful.  Pen based input would be nice, too, though not strictly required. Right now I'm thinking the iPad might be the right size for this sort of thing. 

Yes, Virginia, you can take your data with you

As more and more of my digital life takes place in the cloud I have much to be happy about.  I can access my information through services like Google Docs, Flickr, and Facebook from any computer and even from my iPhone.  I can easily share this information and collaborate with others secure in the knowledge that my information is backed up in professionally managed data centers.  Yet I wonder—will all this information be around in 5, 10, or 20 years?  Will Google and Flickr still exist?  Or will they pursue new business models that don't leave room for my data?  As new data formats come on the scene, will my stuff make the leap?  Or will it fall into the chasm of rotting data, and lie withering alongside the 8-track tapes and Betamax videocassettes.  In yet another scenario, what if I run afoul of Google's "terms of use" agreement and they delete my Gmail account?  You know, those pages of tiny print that we agree to and rarely read and which can change at any time?  If I didn't have a local copy of my emails, I would be out of luck.

These questions have prompted me to consider the question: can I take my data with me?  If not into the next life, at least into the next decade.  Thus I have looked at how the popular cloud-based services let me do this. Those of you who are Facebook users may be aware that they have recently announced a bulk download capability that lets you save your Facebook data offline.  I have tried it and it works quite well, providing a directory containing all the posts, messages, and photos that I had uploaded to Facebook as of that day. There is an HTML index file that lets me browse this content using my web browser.  So now, regardless of what Facebook does in the future—whether they go out of business or shutoff my account—I have a copy of this data. 

Google Docs has also done a good job with this, providing you the option of bulk downloading your documents (up to 2 GB at a time) and even giving you the opportunity of converting your files to a different format.  If you are using the Google Docs formats you have the option of converting your files to MS-Office, Open Office, Adobe PDF, plain text, and RTF formats.  Bravo Google!

Google Docs Export Screen

My chosen photo-sharing service, Flickr, on the other hand, is not as helpful.  I have a "Pro" account and have uploaded thousands of pictures, yet Flickr provides no bulk download option. I can download one photo at a time and even then, I won't get the captions, tags, or other metadata that I have added to my pictures.  Luckily, there are third party applications that have been created to do this. The most promising one is called Bulkr.  

I never thought about this issue when I signed up for these services but now see that the question of data portability is an important one.  Is the vendor locking up your data?  Do they let you easily export your files in industry standard formats that increase its likelihood of surviving into the next decade? But the responsibility isn't just theirs.  If the services offer these features you should use them, and periodically export your data and back it up using your own back-up system.  That is if you want to take it with you...