(2015-10-04) Forte Evernote Creative Workflow

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 Iterative 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. (WikiWordAsTag)

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 (Life-Hack); 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 (No Goals); instead create systems that encourage attractors to emerge on their own. *