
The Man Who Wrote Down Every Thought He Had - timtadh
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3857621.stm
======
stevejohnson
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
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
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>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

I knew a guy who could juggle 7 balls in cascade.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Yes. And if you thought you needed to juggle seven balls, you could also
learn to do it.

I can juggle 3 balls. However, I think even if my life depended on it I
couldn't possibly do 7, my reaction times are too long and my coordination is
too poor.

My point, in case anyone missed it is that this looks like an edge case to me.

------
jasonmoo
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://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/fuller/about.html>

~~~
lkozma
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
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.

------
mbrubeck
Lion has more information about this on his own web site: Map of Every Thought
you Think - <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/>

~~~
rkabir
The next off-shoot of Saturday House is Jigsaw Renaissance:
<http://www.jigsawrenaissance.org/>

------
danielharan
"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
This is from 2004; these web-like things we take for granted now weren't
always so used.

~~~
ido
Pretty sure "HyperText-style" was already fairly widely used on the web in
2004 ;)

------
gruseom
Since writing releases additional thoughts, that is impossible.

~~~
nirajr
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.

------
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.

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

~~~
gruseom
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>

A perfect specimen of the British wit we can never, ever have enough of.

------
fuzzythinker
Instead of using a loose binder, I would recommend Circa:
[http://www.levenger.com/PAGETEMPLATES/NAVIGATION/Products.as...](http://www.levenger.com/PAGETEMPLATES/NAVIGATION/Products.asp?Params=category=326|level=2|pageid=1749)
, 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
The European equivalent would be Atoma: <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.

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

------
loboman
His thoughts here: <http://speakeasy.org/~lion/weird.html>

~~~
angusgr
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
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/>

~~~
reeses
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.

------
Anenome
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
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?

------
mgunes
Longer interview:

<http://gilest.org/luvly/20040322-lion.html>

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

~~~
Raphael
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
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?

------
joelmichael
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.

------
staktrace
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
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.

------
LionKimbro
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>

