Tiago Forte on how to use EverNote for your Creative Workflow in line with known neuroscience principles.

What the brain does best is thinking. Evernote is most valuable not as a remembering tool, but as a thinking tool.

If a tool like Evernote doesn’t add much value performing low-level tasks like “remembering things,” and it’s incapable of performing high-level creative thinking, what is it good for? Answer: Mid-level thinking that interfaces between low-level memory and high-level creativity, making the latter as easy, fast, and efficient as possible.

What exactly are the conditions required for high-performance creativity, and how can we use Evernote to create these conditions? I can think of 5.

1. Promoting unusual associations
2. Creating visual artifacts of ideas: Essentially, it’s easier for us to interact with physical objects in the environment than with abstract ideas in our heads... By externalizing your ideas in a variety of formats — text, sketches, photos, videos, documents, diagrams, webclips, hyperlinks — you create a system of distributed cognition across “artifacts” that can be moved, edited, rearranged, and combined.

3. Incubating ideas over long periods of time: I think one of the least appreciated methods for connecting ideas and producing breakthrough work is the “slow burn.” (Slow World) Too often, we force ourselves to take an idea from blue sky ideation to practical execution in 48 hours flat. We call it a “rapid prototyping sprint,” and pride ourselves on how little time was spent, as if a new idea is something to be excreted and moved on from as quickly as possible... Even when we do invest the time, we usually don’t create notes that can be re-used and recycled in other projects... Evernote provides much of the infrastructure for making the slow burn possible. It is durable, universal, centralized, and persistent, increasing the chance that your “dozen favorite problems” repeatedly see the light of day.

4. Providing the raw material for unique interpretations and perspectives: increasingly, it is not low-skilled and routine jobs that are being replaced, it is jobs requiring skill, advanced training, complexity, and even human contact... A big part of the problem is that, as Cal Newport says, “knowledge workers dedicate too much time to shallow work — tasks that almost anyone, with a minimum of training, could accomplish.”... His solution is straightforward, if not exactly actionable: “We need to spend more time engaged in DeepWork — cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results.”... In other words, the jobs that seem to best resist technological unemployment are those that involve building, maintaining, promoting, and defending a particular perspective (Point Of View)... And here’s where a tool like Evernote comes in. Because defending a perspective takes ammunition. And by ammunition, I mean examples, illustrations, stories, statistics, diagrams, analogies, metaphors, photos, mindmaps, conversation notes, quotes, book notes — these are the kinds of things you should be capturing.

5. Creating opportunities for resonance: ou should pick and choose what you capture very carefully... use resonance as your criteria, as in, “that resonates with me.”

Evernote is uniquely suited to the demands of creative knowledge work, and continues to be so beloved in tech and startup circles. It optimizes for the most important metric in the modern digital workplace: Return-on-Attention (ROA). What makes one note more valuable than another? No approach to organizing information can add value without answering this question... explicitly identifying a relationship of any kind, in reality has the potential of limiting how this information is used... These tags represent, by definition, pre-existing problem frames... The conclusion I came to was that there is no substitute for the deeply creative act of seeing two puzzle pieces, and applying focused attention to intuit how they fit together. No system can directly replace this kind of thinking through “hard links,” so the only option is to make the process of creating “soft links” on the fly as easy as possible... What then is the main cognitive barrier to comparing two ideas? It’s the process of “loading” an idea into your brain... Returning to Cal Newport: “…Unlike every other skilled labor class in the history of skilled labor, [knowledge workers] lack a culture of systematic improvement.”

This in turn suggests an entirely new purpose for EverNote: A system for tracking how much attention has been paid to a given note... My conclusion was that the global structure of Evernote’s notebooks and stacks is relatively unimportant. I keep notebooks just specific enough to make it obvious where a particular note belongs, mostly to satisfy my spatial itch. The most salient factor in making ideas accessible for day-to-day use is instead the design of individual notes.

He then describes his Iterat Ive process:

• clip the shopping page for a book he wants to read later

• buy and read the book, Highlighting And Annotating, copying his highlights to a note

• a few weeks later, re-reading his highlights, and bolding the most insightful and unique sections

• even later, reviews only the bold bits, and highlights (using EverNote yellow) the (15) most-important bits

• (it's key that he doesn't do this for every book/note, but just those that resonate)

The note-taking system we create should enable this type of thinking by exposing semantic triggers. (Wiki Word As Tag)

Compressing your notes in this way has an interesting effect: it makes them more valuable to you, but less valuable to others. In other words, this information is highly “situated” in your mental ConText.

People fail to be productive not because they lack a critical piece of information (LifeHack); they fail because they don’t see themselves as productive people. It is a self-reinforcing loop... if you start acting like you are creative, your body and mind will respond, and you will be. Start acting like every idea you come across or come up with has the potential for brilliance, and that potential is more likely to be realized.

There’s a last quality of self-organizing, adaptive systems, like the one we’re creating here, that I want to highlight: they have the tendency to coalesce around “attractors,” stable regimes of activity that seem to “pull” the actions of agents toward them. I’ve noticed this phenomenon as a sort of “EmergEnt intelligence” my notes exhibit... What’s most interesting about attractors is that they function identically to goals or intentions... In other words, don’t pursue goals (NoGoals); instead create systems that encourage attractors to emerge on their own.

May'2014: Darius Kazemi has shifted to keeping his Side Project-s small. It does not matter how or frivolous a project seems: everything you do adds to your body of work. I can’t stress this enough: you are not just creating a bunch of small things. You are creating an Eco System of projects... If you make lots of small projects, you can approach the same idea from many, many different angles. This can be really interesting... Making lots of small projects means you stay constantly excited. You literally cannot be bored with work if you stop working on it the moment become bored... Having lots of projects means you can watch your aesthetic develop over time very quickly... You make stuff, and you’re going to like certain things, but you can’t predict what other people will like. So even if you make something and you think it sucks, put it out there. Maybe people will hate it, maybe they’ll ignore it, or maybe they’ll like it. But just put it out there... Out of my 72 projects last year, I’d say 10 of them were successful in some substantial way. That’s 1 out of 7 projects. At that rate, if I made one project a year, it would take me SEVEN YEARS to make something that caught on with the public. By focusing on small projects, I can experience 10 major successes a year.

Sept24: Cal Newport is experimenting with a similar idea: What I’ve noticed in my thinking about this problem over the past week or two is that at the beginning of each DeepWork session, I’ll typically come up with a novel approach to attempt. As I persist in the session, however, the rate of novelty decreases. After thirty minutes or so of work I tend to devolve into a cycle where I’m rehashing the same old ideas again and again. I’m starting to wonder, therefore, if this specific type of deep work, where you’re trying to find a creative insight needed to unlock a problem, is best served by multiple small dashes of deep work as oppose to a small number of longer sessions. That is, given five free hours during a given week, it might be better to do ten 30-minute dashes as oppose to one 5 hour slog.

Venkatesh Rao and Gregory Rader have written a number of pieces over the past couple years about creating a Remarkable Life. I'm proposing using that term to contrast with Cal Newport's views: z2009-07-31-NewportRemarkableLife.

Jan19'2011: Rao thinks there are 2 kinds of people: Why can't you just stay on the straight-and-narrow, pay your dues, and live an honorable life?... The answer is a decision that JohnBoyd challenged each of his acolytes to make: in life you eventually have to decide whether to Be Somebody, or Do Something (Do Be Do Be Do)... Ask yourself what you want your life to have been like, when you are on your deathbed. If you instinctively come up with a vision of yourself in the future, at the peak of your life, you are a Be Somebody person. If you instinctively think of a vision of the impact you might have had, and are a little fuzzy on what you personally will be like, you are a Do Something type... If you converged on a "Be Somebody" answer like CEO, tenured professor, or simply rich and famous, you are in for some hard introspection, because Boyd had a definite "right answer" in mind: Do Something... Here's a curious paradox: the more you insist on sticking to a straight-and-narrow path defined by your own evolving principles, rather than the expedient one defined by current situation, the more you'll have to twist and turn in the real world. The straight path in your head turns into spaghetti in the real world. On the other hand, the more your path through the real world seems like a straight road, defined by something like a "standard" career path/script, the more you'll have to twist and turn philosophically to justify your life to yourself.

Mar09'2011: Rader notices a number of people (Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Guillebeau, Jason Shen, as well as Newport and Rao) demonstrating a sympathy towards bucking the conventional wisdom... For the past several hundred years human societies have endeavored to make the human world more systematic, predictable, manageable, and consistent... The emerging economy is a different beast entirely (Economic Transition). The foundations of the hierarchical institutions that imposed order on industrial society are crumbling. In their place is a wake of caprice and inconsistency... The conventional paths no longer reliably produce success. All the courses of action introduced at the beginning of this post are ultimately strategies for coping with and capitalizing on increasing uncertainty... (Rao's) Socio Path (Slightly Evil Reality Hacker) is the person who refuses to play by the established rules... who refuses to accept the conventional wisdom. In order to be a highly effective realist the sociopath must adopt responsibility for ‘stubborn individuality‘... You will either be one of the sociopaths capitalizing on the unpredictability of the emerging environment, or you will be a victim of that same unpredictability.

• Oct'2011: Rader sees this as a transition from BigWorld to Small World. Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum make the facepalm even more explicit. John Hagel reviews their new book That Used To Be Us, applauding their analysis while impugning their conclusions: "At the very same time that Friedman and Mandelbaum make such a compelling case that we are in the midst of a profound global shift in terms of how we work and live, they fall back on traditional pillars as the answer to drive America’s success in the future."... If the problem we face today is a “crisis of bigness” then the solution must come from smallness. To the anachronistic progressive, embracing smallness sounds like doing nothing. Embracing smallness would take us further away from the anachronistic ideal they seek to preserve, while doing little to assure solutions to the specified challenges... Anachronistic progress is an idealized dead end. It is a shallow and futile vision of the future.

• Dec'2011: Rader reiterates that Economic Transition means that lots of old jobs aren't coming back (so we shouldn't be setting Public Policy to try and push that), and that we can't easily even anticipate what the new jobs will be. For the 19th century factory worker predictions of this impending shift would have sounded absurd. People will be paid to sit in comfortable offices and push paper around all day?

Mar12'2011: Rader on Newport's attitude toward PassIon. Is Cal correct that passion is developed through HardWork rather than introspection into innate personality traits? Does this necessarily entail developing a “foundation of ability gained through unabashedly conformist means” in order to earn autonomy later in life? There is much truth in Cal’s arguments, but unfortunately he is forced into a false dichotomy by the ConText he intends his arguments to be applied to. Study Hacks, as the name implies, is primarily written for students and recent graduates entering their initial years in the workforce. Cal’s arguments therefore are addressed to the students who change majors repeatedly or the grads who desperately search for the ideal job in the expectation that everything will be effortless once they find the perfect fit. In that context I have a lot of sympathy for the Cal’s position, however presuming that context introduces a flawed premise... How are you supposed to know what you want to be when you haven’t been allowed the opportunity to discover what you want to do? Allowing students to explore by doing is a task at which traditional education systems (Educating Kids) fails miserably... Now what? Start exploring! Absolutely do not make big decisions like committing to a major or a new career before you have done a lot of self-directed exploring. Whatever you like to do, try it on for size... Don’t waste time developing fragile capabilities... The passion you are searching for is to be found in the process, not in the academic credentials or the job titles. If you develop the skills that you are intrinsically driven towards by actually doing things (Do Something) in the Real World, then the opportunities that demand those skills will present themselves, and the titles will be irrelevant.

Jan30'2012: Rader argues against Newport's focus on diligence. He (Newport) suggests that Steve Martin, in a different environment, might have been just as successful as a Rocket Scientist. Really?... There is a huge difference between focusing on developing comedic capabilities and focusing on being a stand-up comedian. Both involve Deliberate Practice. Only the latter prematurely reduces options... Surely the ability to engage in deliberate practice is a critical factor in career success, but so is a certain degree of compatibility with your chosen pursuit. This might not be obvious if you restrict your case studies to individuals whose careers followed a straight line from novice to initial success. However, numerous others have achieved success only later in life after bouncing around from one dead end to another. It would be foolish to assume that these people achieved success because they suddenly learned how to focus diligently. It would be just as reasonable to argue that such people finally learned how to focus because they discovered something worth focusing on.

Feb17'2012: Rader thinks Newport has a Cognitive Bias. Cal persistently seeks out universal principles that can be applied independent of ConText. He attempts to distill literal cause-effect relationships from complex contextual information. He is attracted to external/social motivators, as evidenced by his primary theme: “being so good they can’t ignore you“. In contrast, several of my past posts demonstrate an almost pathological aversion to Extrins Ic motivators. I am also highly allergic to formulaic thinking, tending instead to construct elaborate mental models even when I would be better served by simply following instructions. In an IQ test I will easily ace all the spatial/pattern-recognition questions and struggle with the word associations. The point here is not that one approach is better than the other.

Feb20'2012: Venkatesh Rao warns against various Logical Fallacy-s that detour you from Authentic Happiness. So clearly, expecting nothing to change when you undergo a major transformation is as silly as expecting everything to be perfect. So what can you reasonably expect? You can expect to become either a more complex person or a more confused person... The arrival fallacy is a fallacy because it predicts the exact opposite of what actually happens: that life will get simpler... To operate with the expectation that things will get more complex with every transformation is to live life. To operate with the expectation that things will get simpler with every transformation is to live a series of unsatisfying projects. Unless you are one of the lucky minority... American culture strongly conflates success and Simplic Ity on the one hand, and FailUre and Complex Ity on the other. A life that gets progressively more complex takes a good deal more philosophy and reflection to navigate. Success and failure become matters of perspective and interpretation rather than simple arrival. You may even find that the categories become less relevant to you with each arrival. If I had to boil all this down to a bumper sticker, it would be the title of the post: live life, not ProJect-s.