7 ms·

The Man Who Wrote Down Every Thought He Had

90 points by timtadh 16y ago

gruseom 16y ago
Since writing releases additional thoughts, that is impossible.
- olalonde 16y ago
  Right on. If someone really wrote everything that crossed its mind, that person would end up in some kind of infinite feedback loop: "I'm tired writing." (write it down) "Ok, now I gotta stop writing." (write it down) "I wish I could stop thinking so I could stop writing." (write it down) "Ok, I'm stopping now." (write it down) "Let's try to do something impulsive next time without thinking." (write it down) "Yea, it worked! I stopped thinking... Oh sh..." (write it down), etc.
- nirajr 16y ago
  Thats a theoretical question. Point is, writing down a very large part of what goes on in your mind, and then being able to mine it for stuff can be worked upon. I find the idea very interesting. I end up ignoring a lot of thoughts that come to my mind, and I usually get most of the ideas when I'm not working very hard. Probably it would be great to take 10 days off work, do nothing, and just write down whatever comes to mind. I'm going to try this.
- reeses 16y ago
  It's turtles all the way down.
- biotech 16y ago
  You have a point. It's the Heisenberg principle at play here. By making the observation, you change what you are observing.
kiba 16y ago
I am more interested in how his thought process change and help him solve problem than his notebook system.
staktrace 16y ago
The idea sounds kind of interesting, but I was a little underwhelmed by the "new ways" his experience allowed him to think in. "How do we communicate?" is hardly a novel question.
- alokm 16y ago
  I think it is a very important question. There are many advanced fields like linguistics, NLP etc studying communication. But the idea is to explore his understanding of communication from his perspective.
timtadh 16y ago
Two things fascinated me about the article: 1) the inability of computers to model his thought process and 2) the experience of thinking deeply. Computers are great writing aids but I am continuously frustrated by them for textual research purposes. They cannot model what occurs when I use pencil, paper, and write in the margins. The experience of Kimbro (the man in the article) reminded me a bit of Ted Nelson with his book Computer Lib. Ted couldn't write the book using a computer because it wasn't possible for computers at that time to layout such a complex book. I think this article raises similar issues. Second, thinking deeply is a challenging exercise which is often ignored for more pressing concerns. Thinking, writing, teaching, and asking questions are the basis of learning. Reading and listening can only take you so far. I often find I do not truly understand something until I can either write about it or teach it. For algorithms I experience this most acutely: I never understand them until I have implemented them.
- stevejohnson 16y ago
  I think that Ted Nelson's complaints about computerized layout processes are not quite relevant to Kimbro's situation. While it is true that Nelson could not effectively lay out Computer Lib digitally, it was more a problem of the layout systems' inability to support efficient editing of complex layouts and content rather than the computer's inability to capture his thought process, which was probably kept in separate notes. I haven't seen a good solution to the layout problem either, though my experience is limited to TeX and word processing applications.
jbellis 16y ago
Interesting, I thought this was going to be about Samuel Pepys. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys)
- gruseom 16y ago
  Pepys did write a lot of things down, but mostly not thoughts. Speaking of Pepys, here is a wonderful plaque that hangs on the "Hung, Drawn and Quartered" pub in London. I was wandering around the neighborhood and happened on it once: http://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/38/18/381862_cbced004.jpg http://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/38/18/381862_cbced004.jpg A perfect specimen of the British wit we can never, ever have enough of.
loboman 16y ago
His thoughts here: http://speakeasy.org/~lion/weird.html http://speakeasy.org/~lion/weird.html
- angusgr 16y ago
  Doesn't really seem like that many thoughts. In fact, it was only 11,156 words. I guess the emphasis is on quality rather than quantity, the specific quality being "writing everything down." I don't think that's especially uncommon, though. I often scribble ideas in notebooks. Or am I missing the point?
  - angusgr 16y ago
    OK, I see the point now is to have some structure around your stream of ideas (also, to get them out of the back of your mind.) FWIW, I really like drawing mind maps. Either on paper, or using a tool like FreeMind.[1] It doesn't scale to quite this level of inclusiveness, though. [1] http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ http://freemind.sourceforge.net/
    - reeses 16y ago
      TheBrain got close and then managed to stuff up the UI for the past 400 years or however long it has been around. FreeMind is nice but it starts getting ugly when linking between subtrees. I guess this is the spot where someone says,"semantic web!" and invokes Husserl.
- Robin_Message 16y ago
  That's not the thoughts the article was talking about. Those were written down on paper, with hand-drawn mind-maps for navigation, stored in binders.
- Deadsunrise 16y ago
  wow, you have flattr.com right there: "Economics Free CompensateArtists Voluntary Adjustable Background Tip Jar You say, "$20.00/month" on tips. You decide how much you want to tip on a given month. Each participating site that you go to gets a share of that tip jar, in direct proportion to the time you spend at that page. You can also make an extra to a particular site if you want, with a built in tip button of some sort. Before payments go out at the end of the month, you can adjust them as you like. "
mbrubeck 16y ago
Lion has more information about this on his own web site: Map of Every Thought you Think - http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/ http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/ Lion is also behind some other cool things like Saturday House, a (now defunct?) weekly hacker/tinkerer gathering in Seattle: http://www.saturdayhouse.org/ http://www.saturdayhouse.org/
- rkabir 16y ago
  The next off-shoot of Saturday House is Jigsaw Renaissance: http://www.jigsawrenaissance.org/ http://www.jigsawrenaissance.org/
addoway 16y ago
If I wrote down everything that came to mind I would have to hide the book so no one else could read it.
danielharan 16y ago
"Lion's system, painstakingly explained in his book (which can be downloaded for free from his website, see Internet links on the right)" Off-topic, but is anyone else bothered by this? They could simply use "his book" as the anchor text to the link, but that would be too... web-like?
- awesome123 16y ago
  This is from 2004; these web-like things we take for granted now weren't always so used.
  - ido 16y ago
    Pretty sure "HyperText-style" was already fairly widely used on the web in 2004 ;)
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  It's a combination of things. Primarily, it's part of the "House Style" or "House Design" to have the off-site links not in the main body, but to list them in a separate box so that people know they are taking you somewhere else, and an appropriate warning given. Without that warning people complain. Really, they do.
sliverstorm 16y ago
If time is precious and every moment is worth preserving, who is going to spend time reading these records?
- Raphael 16y ago
  That's the beauty of the web combined with search engines. An inbound link allows crawlers to find it and index it, then if it is needed in the future, it will show up in a search result.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    If you think of it as reference material, then sure. But if you think of it as art or history or philosophy, consider this example. If you record every minute of your life on video camera to preserve it so you can remember it all later, ... when exactly do you plan on watching the 80 years of footage?
stevejohnson 16y ago
It still bugs me that computers (and digital devices in general) are not good for taking notes. They work wonderfully for displaying information and entering raw text, but as soon as you want to do any kind of meaningful editing, markup, or diagramming, your hands are tied. One reason I got so excited about the iPad and get so frustrated at the people who claim it's "only for consumption" is that it helps break down the diagram barrier. However, it sacrifices text input, which again moves it away from an ideal note-taking environment. If I owned one, I could perhaps make some statement about its use in conjunction with a bluetooth keyboard, but that analysis is pending experimentation. I do think that the screen may be too small to provide an ideal note-taking experience. Does anyone else have tablet note-taking experience?
- Pyrodogg 16y ago
  I have experience, and it happened well before the iPad. I have a Lenovo X61 notebook/tablet w/Pen. Combined with Microsoft OneNote it allowed me to take notes on my computer, even in my engineering classes. For a while I had experimented with taking all of my notes with a plain laptop since I can type much faster than I can write with the added bonus of not having legibility issues. For some classes this worked just fine but being an engineering student, it ultimately proved impossible. Try taking physics notes, at speed, with Word and it's equation editor and you'll get it pretty quickly. Trying to keep a notebook of paper diagrams and typed notes on my computer synchronized was also proving to be a pain. Then my laptop died and I purchased a Lenovo X61 tablet. It changed everything. Being able to type notes in a lecture then flip the screen over and start copying over diagrams drastically increased my efficiency by reducing everything to one medium. I could now do typed notes, hand written notes, homework assignments completely on my computer and even in one program. The only paper I relied on was printing some assignments as needed. Conversion tablets have been around for a while and have both a touch screen and a keyboard, allowing for a very wide range of user input. Coupled with programs like OneNote and some diagramming/mind-mapping software I can quickly sketch out just about anything I can think of.
  - jacobolus 16y ago
    Trying to use word to do anything at speed is a bad idea. (Or frankly, to do anything at all with it – except perhaps exchange documents with other people who use word – is a bad idea.) With training though it is possible to TeX notes at the same speed as handwritten notes, including commutative diagrams and all kinds of complicated formulae. I know this because there was a guy in my math course 5 years ago who could TeX notes substantially faster than I could write them with a pen, when I was trying to hurry.
Anenome 16y ago
This guy's a light-weight :P Someone once told me "you don't own an idea until your write it down." I've written down every creative idea I've had for the past 18 years. It's now a collection of RTF documents that fills over 4 gigabytes. I don't think writing down literally every thought it particularly productive, I only keep the good ones :P
- aik 16y ago
  4gb worth of text? That sounds impossible. How many words/pages is that!? What are you going to do with all that? What's your plan? What types of creative ideas have you written down? How do you define creativity - "constructive original" thoughts, or "original" thoughts in general?
fuzzythinker 16y ago
Instead of using a loose binder, I would recommend Circa: http://www.levenger.com/PAGETEMPLATES/NAVIGATION/Products.asp?Params=category=326|level=2|pageid=1749 http://www.levenger.com/PAGETEMPLATES/NAVIGATION/Products.as... , or Staple store's rebranding of it - rolla (couldn't find in at staples.com, but they still have it in my local store few months ago). It's flexible like a binder, but easy-writable like a notebook. Comes in 2 sizes, 5.5x8, or 8.5x11, with leather feel cover (at least the rolla ones).
- Luc 16y ago
  The European equivalent would be Atoma: http://www.atoma.be/en/ http://www.atoma.be/en/ They're good and I love them. While the rings sometimes get in the way of my hand when writing, it's still the best notebook for my uses.
jasonmoo 16y ago
Wow. Can't believe no one's mentioned Bucky Fuller yet. He documented his life every 15 minutes from 1920 to 1983.. It's archived at Stanford. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_Chronofile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_Chronofile http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/fuller/about.html http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/fuller/about.html
- lkozma 16y ago
  That's fascinating. If someone as accomplished as Fuller has done it and most people haven't heard of it, let alone read the archives themselves... it shows how vain it is to hope that anyone will be interested in the marks we leave behind.
  - kevinelliott 16y ago
    That's right. It is the sum of our life, or possibly only a few moments, that the world may remember. We may be known for a program we wrote, or how we treated our friends, or the three movies we acted in superbly. But the thoughts and daily gestures we make are largely unremembered. I think this might help make the case that we need to live for today.
joelmichael 16y ago
He seems to be a philosopher, which I encourage, although his method is a bit extreme. But I do something similar. Any time I have an insight that seems worth keeping, I type it into a text file. As I am prone to thinking about philosophical issues, this typically happens several times a day. If it's a particularly good one and meets other criteria (such as appropriateness), I write it into Twitter. I've been doing this for a long time and have many such files. I promote comparable behaviors as I believe most people live their lives without adequately philosophizing.
mgunes 16y ago
Longer interview: http://gilest.org/luvly/20040322-lion.html http://gilest.org/luvly/20040322-lion.html
LionKimbro 16y ago
I appreciate the attention. The way I keep notes has changed a lot since I wrote the book, and my experience of notes has changed a lot. The comments here that are most in line with my deeper experience: * [sliverstorm:] "If time is precious and every moment is worth preserving, who is going to spend time reading these records?" This is a very good question, and one that my notebook systems have pivoted around in their evolution. This is about the purpose of notes, and how that turns into their organization. I estimate that by my present notekeeping system, 1 in 15 pages of my notes are revisited even after 1-2 years time. I arrive at this figure by opening a notebook from 2 years ago, and asking myself, "How many of these pages do I still regularly revisit?" I think this is actually an unusually high value -- I'd put most notekeeping systems somewhere in the 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 100,000 range, if they have any pages at all that are regularly revisited after 2 years. The question is, "What are you keeping notes for?" And this is where the ethic of developing thought comes in. Which segues straight into these two comments: * [timtadh:] "Two things fascinated me about the article: 1) the inability of computers to model his thought process and 2) the experience of thinking deeply." * [kiba:] "I am more interested in how his thought process change and help him solve problem than his notebook system." I've taught several classes on keeping notes now, and I've found that the main distance between what I'm talking about, and where people are at, is in terms of the ethic of incubating thought. Our thoughts appear chaotic and unruly, going in all directions at first, but with time, themes and patterns emerge. A programming idea that fascinated you 7 years ago still continues to fascinate you, 3 years later, and then 4 years later again. Can you develop a thought across time? Everything works by accumulation. The answer to these questions is to prioritize the development of thought, to make space for additional thought, and to focus on editing and annotation, rather than the focus we see today on the ability to find what has already been written. That is, today we focus on the question, "Can I find a prior thought?" An important question, but I have solutions to that problem. The deeper question is, "How do I extend the prior thought?" And here is where user interface makes or breaks the experience. If you cannot layout the scene, if you cannot apply visual techniques transparently, if you cannot position your thoughts, -- you're dead in the water. Editing ASCII text files definitely does not function here. There is no annotation capacity. You cannot write "in the margins." You cannot diagram. You cannot vary your font with ease. There are so many ways in which our user interface fails us. Yes, yes, -- we can make up stopgap "fixes" to these problems, but the problem remains: it's nowhere good as what we have with a pen and paper, even given the capacity to erase, copy, transfer, etc. If a stellar page is revisited only 100 times in its life, (whether computer paper or real paper,) then you really aren't getting much of an advantage from all these sophisticated computer capacities. But the difference in "user interface" is extremely relevant. * [naner:] "Taking a stylus to a screen feels a little like trying to take a sports car on a frozen lake to me." I love my computers and my iPhone, but touch, mouse, keyboard, and (today's) pen computer are still no match for a pen and paper. More recent thoughts on notebooks that I've written online are at: http://lion.posterous.com/tag/notekeeping http://lion.posterous.com/tag/notekeeping

90 points by timtadh 16y ago

gruseom 16y ago

Since writing releases additional thoughts, that is impossible.

olalonde 16y ago
Right on. If someone really wrote everything that crossed its mind, that person would end up in some kind of infinite feedback loop: "I'm tired writing." (write it down) "Ok, now I gotta stop writing." (write it down) "I wish I could stop thinking so I could stop writing." (write it down) "Ok, I'm stopping now." (write it down) "Let's try to do something impulsive next time without thinking." (write it down) "Yea, it worked! I stopped thinking... Oh sh..." (write it down), etc.
nirajr 16y ago
Thats a theoretical question. Point is, writing down a very large part of what goes on in your mind, and then being able to mine it for stuff can be worked upon. I find the idea very interesting. I end up ignoring a lot of thoughts that come to my mind, and I usually get most of the ideas when I'm not working very hard. Probably it would be great to take 10 days off work, do nothing, and just write down whatever comes to mind. I'm going to try this.
reeses 16y ago
It's turtles all the way down.
biotech 16y ago
You have a point. It's the Heisenberg principle at play here. By making the observation, you change what you are observing.

kiba 16y ago

I am more interested in how his thought process change and help him solve problem than his notebook system.

staktrace 16y ago

The idea sounds kind of interesting, but I was a little underwhelmed by the "new ways" his experience allowed him to think in. "How do we communicate?" is hardly a novel question.

alokm 16y ago
I think it is a very important question. There are many advanced fields like linguistics, NLP etc studying communication. But the idea is to explore his understanding of communication from his perspective.

timtadh 16y ago

Two things fascinated me about the article: 1) the inability of computers to model his thought process and 2) the experience of thinking deeply. Computers are great writing aids but I am continuously frustrated by them for textual research purposes. They cannot model what occurs when I use pencil, paper, and write in the margins. The experience of Kimbro (the man in the article) reminded me a bit of Ted Nelson with his book Computer Lib. Ted couldn't write the book using a computer because it wasn't possible for computers at that time to layout such a complex book. I think this article raises similar issues. Second, thinking deeply is a challenging exercise which is often ignored for more pressing concerns. Thinking, writing, teaching, and asking questions are the basis of learning. Reading and listening can only take you so far. I often find I do not truly understand something until I can either write about it or teach it. For algorithms I experience this most acutely: I never understand them until I have implemented them.

stevejohnson 16y ago
I think that Ted Nelson's complaints about computerized layout processes are not quite relevant to Kimbro's situation. While it is true that Nelson could not effectively lay out Computer Lib digitally, it was more a problem of the layout systems' inability to support efficient editing of complex layouts and content rather than the computer's inability to capture his thought process, which was probably kept in separate notes. I haven't seen a good solution to the layout problem either, though my experience is limited to TeX and word processing applications.

jbellis 16y ago

Interesting, I thought this was going to be about Samuel Pepys. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys)

gruseom 16y ago
Pepys did write a lot of things down, but mostly not thoughts. Speaking of Pepys, here is a wonderful plaque that hangs on the "Hung, Drawn and Quartered" pub in London. I was wandering around the neighborhood and happened on it once: http://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/38/18/381862_cbced004.jpg http://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/38/18/381862_cbced004.jpg A perfect specimen of the British wit we can never, ever have enough of.

loboman 16y ago

His thoughts here: http://speakeasy.org/~lion/weird.html http://speakeasy.org/~lion/weird.html

angusgr 16y ago
Doesn't really seem like that many thoughts. In fact, it was only 11,156 words. I guess the emphasis is on quality rather than quantity, the specific quality being "writing everything down." I don't think that's especially uncommon, though. I often scribble ideas in notebooks. Or am I missing the point?
- angusgr 16y ago
  OK, I see the point now is to have some structure around your stream of ideas (also, to get them out of the back of your mind.) FWIW, I really like drawing mind maps. Either on paper, or using a tool like FreeMind.[1] It doesn't scale to quite this level of inclusiveness, though. [1] http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ http://freemind.sourceforge.net/
  - reeses 16y ago
    TheBrain got close and then managed to stuff up the UI for the past 400 years or however long it has been around. FreeMind is nice but it starts getting ugly when linking between subtrees. I guess this is the spot where someone says,"semantic web!" and invokes Husserl.
Robin_Message 16y ago
That's not the thoughts the article was talking about. Those were written down on paper, with hand-drawn mind-maps for navigation, stored in binders.
Deadsunrise 16y ago
wow, you have flattr.com right there: "Economics Free CompensateArtists Voluntary Adjustable Background Tip Jar You say, "$20.00/month" on tips. You decide how much you want to tip on a given month. Each participating site that you go to gets a share of that tip jar, in direct proportion to the time you spend at that page. You can also make an extra to a particular site if you want, with a built in tip button of some sort. Before payments go out at the end of the month, you can adjust them as you like. "

mbrubeck 16y ago

Lion has more information about this on his own web site: Map of Every Thought you Think - http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/ http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/ Lion is also behind some other cool things like Saturday House, a (now defunct?) weekly hacker/tinkerer gathering in Seattle: http://www.saturdayhouse.org/ http://www.saturdayhouse.org/

rkabir 16y ago
The next off-shoot of Saturday House is Jigsaw Renaissance: http://www.jigsawrenaissance.org/ http://www.jigsawrenaissance.org/

addoway 16y ago

If I wrote down everything that came to mind I would have to hide the book so no one else could read it.

danielharan 16y ago

"Lion's system, painstakingly explained in his book (which can be downloaded for free from his website, see Internet links on the right)" Off-topic, but is anyone else bothered by this? They could simply use "his book" as the anchor text to the link, but that would be too... web-like?

awesome123 16y ago
This is from 2004; these web-like things we take for granted now weren't always so used.
- ido 16y ago
  Pretty sure "HyperText-style" was already fairly widely used on the web in 2004 ;)
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
It's a combination of things. Primarily, it's part of the "House Style" or "House Design" to have the off-site links not in the main body, but to list them in a separate box so that people know they are taking you somewhere else, and an appropriate warning given. Without that warning people complain. Really, they do.

sliverstorm 16y ago

If time is precious and every moment is worth preserving, who is going to spend time reading these records?

Raphael 16y ago
That's the beauty of the web combined with search engines. An inbound link allows crawlers to find it and index it, then if it is needed in the future, it will show up in a search result.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  If you think of it as reference material, then sure. But if you think of it as art or history or philosophy, consider this example. If you record every minute of your life on video camera to preserve it so you can remember it all later, ... when exactly do you plan on watching the 80 years of footage?

stevejohnson 16y ago

It still bugs me that computers (and digital devices in general) are not good for taking notes. They work wonderfully for displaying information and entering raw text, but as soon as you want to do any kind of meaningful editing, markup, or diagramming, your hands are tied. One reason I got so excited about the iPad and get so frustrated at the people who claim it's "only for consumption" is that it helps break down the diagram barrier. However, it sacrifices text input, which again moves it away from an ideal note-taking environment. If I owned one, I could perhaps make some statement about its use in conjunction with a bluetooth keyboard, but that analysis is pending experimentation. I do think that the screen may be too small to provide an ideal note-taking experience. Does anyone else have tablet note-taking experience?

Pyrodogg 16y ago
I have experience, and it happened well before the iPad. I have a Lenovo X61 notebook/tablet w/Pen. Combined with Microsoft OneNote it allowed me to take notes on my computer, even in my engineering classes. For a while I had experimented with taking all of my notes with a plain laptop since I can type much faster than I can write with the added bonus of not having legibility issues. For some classes this worked just fine but being an engineering student, it ultimately proved impossible. Try taking physics notes, at speed, with Word and it's equation editor and you'll get it pretty quickly. Trying to keep a notebook of paper diagrams and typed notes on my computer synchronized was also proving to be a pain. Then my laptop died and I purchased a Lenovo X61 tablet. It changed everything. Being able to type notes in a lecture then flip the screen over and start copying over diagrams drastically increased my efficiency by reducing everything to one medium. I could now do typed notes, hand written notes, homework assignments completely on my computer and even in one program. The only paper I relied on was printing some assignments as needed. Conversion tablets have been around for a while and have both a touch screen and a keyboard, allowing for a very wide range of user input. Coupled with programs like OneNote and some diagramming/mind-mapping software I can quickly sketch out just about anything I can think of.
- jacobolus 16y ago
  Trying to use word to do anything at speed is a bad idea. (Or frankly, to do anything at all with it – except perhaps exchange documents with other people who use word – is a bad idea.) With training though it is possible to TeX notes at the same speed as handwritten notes, including commutative diagrams and all kinds of complicated formulae. I know this because there was a guy in my math course 5 years ago who could TeX notes substantially faster than I could write them with a pen, when I was trying to hurry.

Anenome 16y ago

This guy's a light-weight :P Someone once told me "you don't own an idea until your write it down." I've written down every creative idea I've had for the past 18 years. It's now a collection of RTF documents that fills over 4 gigabytes. I don't think writing down literally every thought it particularly productive, I only keep the good ones :P

aik 16y ago
4gb worth of text? That sounds impossible. How many words/pages is that!? What are you going to do with all that? What's your plan? What types of creative ideas have you written down? How do you define creativity - "constructive original" thoughts, or "original" thoughts in general?

fuzzythinker 16y ago

Instead of using a loose binder, I would recommend Circa: http://www.levenger.com/PAGETEMPLATES/NAVIGATION/Products.asp?Params=category=326|level=2|pageid=1749 http://www.levenger.com/PAGETEMPLATES/NAVIGATION/Products.as... , or Staple store's rebranding of it - rolla (couldn't find in at staples.com, but they still have it in my local store few months ago). It's flexible like a binder, but easy-writable like a notebook. Comes in 2 sizes, 5.5x8, or 8.5x11, with leather feel cover (at least the rolla ones).

Luc 16y ago
The European equivalent would be Atoma: http://www.atoma.be/en/ http://www.atoma.be/en/ They're good and I love them. While the rings sometimes get in the way of my hand when writing, it's still the best notebook for my uses.

jasonmoo 16y ago

Wow. Can't believe no one's mentioned Bucky Fuller yet. He documented his life every 15 minutes from 1920 to 1983.. It's archived at Stanford. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_Chronofile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_Chronofile http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/fuller/about.html http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/fuller/about.html

lkozma 16y ago
That's fascinating. If someone as accomplished as Fuller has done it and most people haven't heard of it, let alone read the archives themselves... it shows how vain it is to hope that anyone will be interested in the marks we leave behind.
- kevinelliott 16y ago
  That's right. It is the sum of our life, or possibly only a few moments, that the world may remember. We may be known for a program we wrote, or how we treated our friends, or the three movies we acted in superbly. But the thoughts and daily gestures we make are largely unremembered. I think this might help make the case that we need to live for today.

joelmichael 16y ago

He seems to be a philosopher, which I encourage, although his method is a bit extreme. But I do something similar. Any time I have an insight that seems worth keeping, I type it into a text file. As I am prone to thinking about philosophical issues, this typically happens several times a day. If it's a particularly good one and meets other criteria (such as appropriateness), I write it into Twitter. I've been doing this for a long time and have many such files. I promote comparable behaviors as I believe most people live their lives without adequately philosophizing.

mgunes 16y ago

Longer interview: http://gilest.org/luvly/20040322-lion.html http://gilest.org/luvly/20040322-lion.html

LionKimbro 16y ago

I appreciate the attention. The way I keep notes has changed a lot since I wrote the book, and my experience of notes has changed a lot. The comments here that are most in line with my deeper experience: * [sliverstorm:] "If time is precious and every moment is worth preserving, who is going to spend time reading these records?" This is a very good question, and one that my notebook systems have pivoted around in their evolution. This is about the purpose of notes, and how that turns into their organization. I estimate that by my present notekeeping system, 1 in 15 pages of my notes are revisited even after 1-2 years time. I arrive at this figure by opening a notebook from 2 years ago, and asking myself, "How many of these pages do I still regularly revisit?" I think this is actually an unusually high value -- I'd put most notekeeping systems somewhere in the 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 100,000 range, if they have any pages at all that are regularly revisited after 2 years. The question is, "What are you keeping notes for?" And this is where the ethic of developing thought comes in. Which segues straight into these two comments: * [timtadh:] "Two things fascinated me about the article: 1) the inability of computers to model his thought process and 2) the experience of thinking deeply." * [kiba:] "I am more interested in how his thought process change and help him solve problem than his notebook system." I've taught several classes on keeping notes now, and I've found that the main distance between what I'm talking about, and where people are at, is in terms of the ethic of incubating thought. Our thoughts appear chaotic and unruly, going in all directions at first, but with time, themes and patterns emerge. A programming idea that fascinated you 7 years ago still continues to fascinate you, 3 years later, and then 4 years later again. Can you develop a thought across time? Everything works by accumulation. The answer to these questions is to prioritize the development of thought, to make space for additional thought, and to focus on editing and annotation, rather than the focus we see today on the ability to find what has already been written. That is, today we focus on the question, "Can I find a prior thought?" An important question, but I have solutions to that problem. The deeper question is, "How do I extend the prior thought?" And here is where user interface makes or breaks the experience. If you cannot layout the scene, if you cannot apply visual techniques transparently, if you cannot position your thoughts, -- you're dead in the water. Editing ASCII text files definitely does not function here. There is no annotation capacity. You cannot write "in the margins." You cannot diagram. You cannot vary your font with ease. There are so many ways in which our user interface fails us. Yes, yes, -- we can make up stopgap "fixes" to these problems, but the problem remains: it's nowhere good as what we have with a pen and paper, even given the capacity to erase, copy, transfer, etc. If a stellar page is revisited only 100 times in its life, (whether computer paper or real paper,) then you really aren't getting much of an advantage from all these sophisticated computer capacities. But the difference in "user interface" is extremely relevant. * [naner:] "Taking a stylus to a screen feels a little like trying to take a sports car on a frozen lake to me." I love my computers and my iPhone, but touch, mouse, keyboard, and (today's) pen computer are still no match for a pen and paper. More recent thoughts on notebooks that I've written online are at: http://lion.posterous.com/tag/notekeeping http://lion.posterous.com/tag/notekeeping