Over the past year or so I’ve been thinking a lot about personal information management, knowledge work and processes, and in particular, asking myself what a serious approach to academic productivity might look like. If you think of knowledge work as the process of turning information into something valuable then it would be reasonable to think of information as the raw material of the work I do as an academic. And yet I realised that I had no framework for managing information in a way that might help me create value for myself and others.
If you think about athletes, musicians, or pilots, they have very clear routines that they use to improve their output in measurable steps. They have relatively clear milestones that anyone can see have been reached. They have training sessions with a single-minded focus on getting better, and objective assessments that clearly allow them to demonstrate achievement. And it dawned on me that I had no real equivalent in my own work. I had no framework for getting better as an academic. No milestones that would signal an improvement in my process. No training routine that would provide clear feedback on my development. I’ve basically been relying on an ad hoc approach to knowledge work that I hoped was moving me forward as an academic.
So at about that time I started paying attention to how I pay attention. I started reading about personal information management, commonplace books, second brains, academic productivity, and note-taking. Lots and lots (and lots) about note-taking. And through that research I’ve been tinkering with my own academic workflow; experimenting with different tools and systems, developing a set of principles, and ultimately trying to figure out what it is that I actually do.
A few months ago I started creating a series of videos that I’ve been posting to a YouTube channel where I talk about how I’m adapting my personal learning environment in response to what I was learning. The channel isn’t a linear course that you can progress through and the episodes aren’t a set of How To videos (even though I am sharing how I work). I called the channel Thinking in public because that’s pretty much what I’m doing; explaining how I think about knowledge work and sharing some of my own practices, both as a way to help me understand how I work and on the off chance that it might be useful for others.
I also wanted to work on a real project that would help me to develop a skill-set around video production. I think that remote teaching is likely going to be around for a while longer and thought that teaching myself how to create and publish videos would be useful in the long term. So I’m also trying to learn different techniques that might be useful for creating more interesting content for my students.
So that’s my new project. A YouTube channel called Thinking in public, where I try to articulate my thoughts on knowledge work and information management. I’ve been enjoying it so far and will keep doing it for as long as it feels useful. I noticed that, in the first few videos I was asking viewers to like and subscribe but have since realised that I was simply repeating the mantra that you hear at the end of every other video on YouTube. I don’t actually care about any of that as I’m not doing this to build a following or to sell ads. However, I am really interested in learning more about how others think about their own knowledge work, so comments on different approaches would be awesome.
Here’s the latest video where I talk about managing information by filtering, capturing, processing, and then re-sharing it. I recorded it in two sessions and ended up having to do quite a bit of editing, although this may also be because I’m starting to feel more comfortable with video production in general and so was more comfortable cutting stuff out and moving it around. I’d love to hear what you think, either here or on the channel.