You may or may not have noticed my absence. Well, I am happy to report that I ended up taking time off from my life sabbatical – the pause inspired by the “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” that challenged my thinking around time management systems and my priorities. After reading the book, I realized that I wasn’t clear on my life vision, so I stepped aside to examine my current situation from a safe distance. Since the blog fell under the “doing” and not the “staying still” category, I also put it on hold. After celebrating both, regular and lunar 2022, I am back, hopefully with a semi-regular consistency.
During the reflective break, I really missed my blog posts and illustrations, not only because I had too much fun creating content but also because it helped me to make sense of my evanescence experiences, behavioral and thinking patterns. Another unexpected advantage of blogging was readable record keeping. While I love analog journals with their numerous ball-penned entries, I find them impossible to decipher. My handwriting is a mixture of fancy Russian cursive optimized for speed to catch my popcorn thoughts. When applied to a Latin-based alphabet, it becomes a hodgepodge of lines, circles, dots, and connective elements. Like the Rorschach test, everything you see is open to your unique interpretation.
Anyway, so what am I up to these days? Vaguely, a themed month with 2-3 projects carefully selected from a long Idea list. Having a few things to focus on is uncomfortable. Moreover, patrolling the borders of deep work requires a lot of mindfulness, time, and effort. I know it is worth it because I see this strategy paying off with the progress coins. If you are curious, the February theme is writing (Surprise!) longer articles built on extensive research and unfamiliar concepts. Dealing with new information is exciting partially because it connects me to the topic of my long-lasting interest – Personal Knowledge Management System (PKM).
If you are a learner, like me, who sees the knowledge as an overpowerful, unruly, and demanding critter residing in your brain, PKM is a magical tool to manage it. First, PKM allows you to capture and sort through your daily portion of data. Then it stores filtered information and provides a convenient place where you go to make sense of your learnings and/or to form an educated opinion. Finally, PKM enables you to share with others your discoveries and perspectives. Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? If this is the case, then why do I keep talking about PKMs for the past 5 years instead of having a stable and reliable system?
Well, it is not that simple. I have read about PKMs, researched how to get started, made a few attempts to establish a routine, and then gave up. Reason? Because PKM is a lifelong practice based on intentionality, effort, discipline, and commitment, not in this particular order. In addition, PKM also requires a clear purpose uncovered by a question: “What’s the meaning behind having such a system?” For years, I intuited the need for organized knowledge, but I didn’t know why. This need frequently surfaced when I felt:
- Overwhelmed with new information;
- Shocked by misremembering and forgetting foundational knowledge;
- Stressed by failing to find resources that I thought were at my fingertips, or
- Embarrassed by my inability to clearly explain a concept or express an opinion ( I promise I thought I had it all figured out in my head).
At those moments, I was motivated enough to start a PKM, which, you could probably guess, was abandoned as soon as I felt better or moved on to the next big thing.
What’s different now? For a change, I don’t feel stressed or overwhelmed. I am more grounded, intentional, and ready. I also have a why – the hope of liberating my mind from excessive information in order to think about new areas of interest and their connection to my old knowledge. One of my mid-term goals is to share ideas and best practices in a simple, preferable visual form, and the only way to reach it is by taming my knowledge so it will work with me, not against me. I know it sounds ambitious and, surely, the process will be discouraging at first. However, thinking about my 2000 weeks or less left on this planet, I am willing to try.
Until later,
Irina, the Tamer
Further Investigation:
- “Personal Knowledge Mastery” by Harold Jarche
- “Building a Second Brain: an Overview” by ForterLabs
- “Building a Second Brain: The Illustrated Notes” by Maggie Appleton