Massimo Curatella

Tag: personal knowledge management

  • Creating Choice by Managing your Personal Knowledge

    If I’m lucky I can choose. Otherwise I need to work to create choices. There’s a gap between the moment when I come up with a need and when I need to explore options. It requires slowing down and thinking to understand what to do to create the choices I will need in the future.

    One year ago I ate a beautiful dish but then I was sick with a stomach ache. I am going to go exactly in the same place, one year later: will I eat the same juicy dish?

    Recording the events, in this case, helped me in understanding possible connections between causes and effects. I am more informed. Definitely I would have not been able to realize this context if I didn’t write it down in my journal. 

    To create choices I need information and the capability of making connections between them. That’s a useful outcome of curating my personal knowledge.

    This is my 295 daily blog post in a row.

  • Plan For Happiness

    There are some things which make us happy. When we feel sad we should remember what those things are and plan to get them. When experiences are responsible for our mood then we need to plan for them to emerge. Remembering what made us happy means being self-aware. Writing down our mood in different contexts would represent the base research for us to understand better what we should aim to. Writing, daily journaling, reporting on experiences that had contributed to that self-awareness. Here is another scope where PKM can have a positive contribution to our mood and to make us happy. Keep track of places, people, tastes, happenings, events that left a positive mark on your memories and store them safely as the most precious ingredients for happiness recipes.

  • Connect Simple Ideas To Create Elaborate Thoughts

    I should not worry too much about what I want to write or what I need to write. I just need to do it. In addition to that, I need to organize my thoughts, my questions. My research into clusters aggregates. When I review the connection between the different pieces, I am able to find longer and more elaborate threads.

    I am doing it wrong by thinking that each time that I am on a blank page, I have to write my daily journal, or my daily article, that I need to be exhaustive about a grand topic. I should write about the smallest topic I can think of. A small idea to reflect upon. And I should use it as a magnet to attract somebody else’s ideas or notes I wrote about, things I’ve read in the past from other books.

    The real creativity is in composing those ideas into a bigger one. Not in having brilliant, big and exhaustive treatments of ideas, impromptu, of the day . I have been saying these things forever. I really don’t want to learn it. I am relearning it every time. I’m doing it. I just need to keep it present. So the daily effort of creating something that will remain is not to write something memorable. But it’s to create a small contribution, even insignificant, that put together with all the others you have been writing for hundreds of days. So that together, connected, revised, and even rewritten, they will become something really worthwhile.

  • Speculation on the Future of Personal Knowledge Management

    While I developed a good habit of writing daily I am still lacking at the review and connection activities. I am using and paying for different online and offline services to store my notes. Why don’t Knowledge Management tools suggest connections and insights to me, instead?

    Something is moving on this front thanks to the increasing development speed of PKM tools. Those ones based on knowledge graph technologies are more prone to extract meaningful connections and insights from the content you put in.

    Machine learning is improving in checking spelling and writing styles, I think it’s just a matter of time to reach a sophistication level where the meaningful correlated knowledge is presented to me, while I am writing, without too much effort.

  • Adding Review and Revision to your Creative Process

    In your deliberate practice of daily creative habit building you cannot skip the review and revision phases. Exercising your kick 10’000 times without feedback and correction would have a pale comparison against a complete feedback loop.

    When you write daily only the check boxes, that’s what you risk. A stale routine of boring activities carried on just for the sake of them.

    If you are serious about improving, then, reviewing your past performances becomes essential in your habit-forming practice.

    Where should you start? From the beginning, take your oldest artifact and put it in your review queue. If it is old enough there will be a good chance you will look at it as something sufficiently new for you. That’s a good application of the future self approach. If you put enough time between your creative production and the review you are multiply yourself into: past, present and future selves.

    Second order thinking would help in your metacognition. How are you reviewing your past creations? What can you learn from them? How will the learning affect your future creations?

  • Incremental, Iterative, Collaborative Book Reading and Note-taking

    I had a satisfying experience in annotating a book. Although it’s not the first time I am following this process I feel I am, finally, onto something.
    I’ve read the first two parts, about 80 pages, in one week, three times.
    The first time I quickly made sense of the book’s topic, its structure, the premise and the author’s stance. The second time I highlighted the interesting parts in Google Play Books and I’ve added, not for all notes, a brief statement about their sense. Since the author hints the content of the chapters ahead I make connections between the initial parts and I can see their pespective.
    The third time I get my automatically created Google Doc with with all notes exported and I do a summary reading. This time I copy each note and I paste it into a Mural Canvas.
    By positioning each note in cluster and connecting them I started to build a concept map of the book enriched by keywords and comments.

    The first reading was quick, the second took me the longest, while the third iteration was very fast and I felt like moving a familiar ground. The highest point of this learning experience was sharing my notes in a call with another person reading the same pages. In less than one hour we had a stellar co-learning sessions, we exchanged notes, considerations connections with adjacent topics. I’ve annotated and integrated in real-time the concep map and we got really excited about the amount of information we were able to do in such short time.

    I adore this format, I want to read book in his way in the future. It’s fun, engaging, active and It makes me learn, connect and remember more.

  • Time To Take Smarter Notes

    Time To Take Smarter Notes

    I’ve completed a third reading of “How To Take Smart Notes”, by Sönke Ahrens. I have no more excuses to start my Zettelkasten (or slip-box if you want). The author says it very clearly, although many times, in the book, following the method is straightforward: read with a pen in hand. That’s it. Now, I have no problem taking notes. Historically my issue is with avoiding hoarding notes and making something out of them. My challenge will be to explore the adventure of rereading what I wrote and evolve it compared to my current approach which is nothing more than improvising and writing what passes through my mind at the moment.

    So, welcome new challenges!

  • For whom are you writing?

    For whom are you writing?

    There are different audiences for your writing.

    Your present self trying to understand something new.

    Your future self to whom you want to transfer the knowledge you acquired today.

    Your future self needing to combine your notes into a draft and revise it into the final copy.

    The receiver of your piece, in a personal or professional context. They will read it and interpret it.

    The public finding your article online or on any other publication. They will have to reconstruct the context you set and make sense of your written thoughts.

    All of those audiences require a different attitude and intention in your communication that are reflected in your writing and publishing workflow.

  • The First Iteration of My First Note.

    The First Iteration of My First Note.

    This is my first note. The first one going into my slip-box, my note archive. It might not be perfect but it’s my note. Here is where I think, I am not just transcribing my thoughts, these are my thoughts. I accept working with temporary outcomes. I accept the partial value I can produce out of an effort stolen from today. This note is a testament to my effort. Nothing more.

  • Making Permanent Notes

    Making Permanent Notes

    A permanent note is kept for a long time. It’s easy to retrieve and provides value each time you read it. You take permanent notes to grow your knowledge, reduce its fragmentation, and have more ideas by combining notes. An effective approach to take permanent notes is to make them atomic. One note contains one concept, briefly and exhaustively explained. It has all relevant references but, first of all, there are your thoughts and inspiration about it. In its atomic format, a permanent note allows you to quickly remember the context and the ideas you had about it. It shows connections with other notes you have taken. It includes questions and prompts to make further research and connection. You can grow a digital garden of permanent notes by continuously refining them. Your slip-box, your note archive, is the place where you think, and you rearrange and refine your notes during your thinking. The paper is the thought. You need to follow a few rules strictly but without exception: all notes go in your inbox, and every day you must process them. Fleeting notes are taken to capture the inspiration of the moment. They have to be thrown away as soon as you have transformed them into permanent notes. You can take quick notes anytime you find something resonating with your interests and curiosity. There is no specific time. Permanent notes are part of your learning ritual. You make them when you stop to learn the content of your notes and deepen your research about the topic. While pen and paper are always working and frequently suitable for fleeting notes, your note archive should be digital. Always available, anytime, anyplace. Why not?

    You create your permanent notes as a space to think, learn and ideate. There are exciting perspectives in opening your external brain to collective intelligence. How would you like to think with peers?