A year ago I wanted a better way to outline books for review purposes, and wrote about The Fast Book Outliner (FBO). I used it on a few book outlining projects, and while it was an improvement I still found that it still felt physically awkward to use. If I’m reading a book, the note-taking [...]
There are a LOT of books I have been meaning to review or otherwise deconstruct into happy nuggets of insight, but the process of doing a comprehensive review takes me many hours. Most of those hours, I find, is taken up in the reading and re-reading of the material, noting where key phrases appear and [...]
SUMMARY: The hard, demoralizing work that goes into doing necessary chores drains me of energy faster than I can replenish it. This essay examines the factors that are behind the drudgery, and postulates how to integrate the fun of learning the right way back into the work. This is based on the experience of mentoring [...]
Hung Up on Purpose
Thinking about Posco’s comment about the usefulness of knowing origin in tool use, when abstraction is ultimately more powerful. I tend to lock-up when I don’t know the originating context and ultimate application of an abstraction; a good chunk of my process is devoted to ferreting out that information before I start. Without this grounding, [...]
Primitive Notions
From Wikipedia’s article on Axioms: A lesson learned by mathematics in the last 150 years is that it is useful to strip the meaning away from the mathematical assertions (axioms, postulates, propositions, theorems) and definitions. — that might explain why nothing made sense to me in math class. They could have told me why. Apparently, [...]
SUMMARY: I write about the experience of unintentional, high-quality collaboration leading to insights of how I know more than I knew, and that I should apply GUESSING more frequently because it actually works well as a starting point.
My learning process is one of mining words for insights that I can structure into a form that my brain can understand. I revisit my outlining process to try to find a way to make it more efficient.
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Recent Comments
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Dani said
on May 23, 2013 Notebook Update: Getting Ready to Ship Please David! I'm from Canada and bought the download able version and it would cost me over $100... -
Michael Madsen said
on May 21, 2013 Production Prototypes: Emergent Task Planner Mini Notebook Coming Soon Hi Great - when will they be available on amazon.co.uk kind regards -
Frank Magnotti said
on May 21, 2013 A Day Grid Balancer Customization by Frank Magnotti You're all welcome. Here's a newer version - the only change is that the PDF is now vertical: ht... -
Dave Seah said
on May 21, 2013 Shades of Structure Nancy: Just checked out GQueues, and it looks pretty slick! I am tempted to give it a try because...
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