And why we need a map of the thinking tool landscape.
This is one in a series of posts derived from my upcoming book chapter on Personal Knowledge Graphs, with some of the ideas and side-avenues I discovered along the way that I couldn’t fit in. You can find all related posts (indeed, all related content) on my Hub.
The Fellowship of the Link is running a pilot project to develop a map of the thinking tool / productivity technique landscape using decentralised collective intelligence techniques.
But we could have picked any knowledge domain. Why this one?
If you’re familiar with thinking tools, you can skip to the next section.
If you’re not, suffice to say: thinking tools promise to help you take and organise your notes to get the most out of them. Most claim to mimic how the mind works, with every note linked to many others without hierarchy, woven together into a personal knowledge graph using tags, bidirectional (wiki)links and many other clever tricks.
There are as many thinking tools (Obsidian, LogSeq, Roam Research, Athens Research) as there are names for this software class: what I call thinking tools Tiago Forte calls Second Brains, Cory Doctorow prefers Memex, others digital gardens or simply note-taking apps.
While thinking tools play a central role in many thinkers’ productivity, they are rarely enough: most people using thinking tools are also productivity geeks, and spend a lot of time integrating their thinking tool(s) with tools for bookmarking, writing, ToDo and calendar apps, bullet journals and many more. It gets complicated fast.
most people using thinking tools are also productivity geeks… many seem to spend more time tweaking their productivity system than actually using it
This is unsurprising: it’s a new field, so these tools are aimed at early adopters, and so are generally highly customisable and often open-source, allowing these early adopters to experiment and extend the tool.
As in many sectors, these early adopters are technology-oriented. In the thinking tool space, moreover, many seem to spend more time tweaking their productivity system than actually using it. Inevitably, some of them fine-tuned their personal system so well that they managed to monetise it in the form of books and courses.
That’s no bad thing, but the landscape today is forbidding to newcomers. Much of the software is still aimed at early adopters, while the subculture is full of competing visions advanced by people vying for clicks, book and course sales.
Moreover, those books and courses describe systems which have been obsessively fine-tuned to one particular user’s needs and tastes over several years. The newcomer is not only asked to learn a new software, they are asked to change the way they work and think.
The newcomer is not only asked to learn a new software, they are asked to change the way they work and think.
This is unlikely to be “off the shelf useful” to them, as to reach mass adoption productivity software must obey the Pareto Principle: the first 20% of the effort should yield 80% of the benefits. Pareto-friendly software allows all users to reach a lot of low-hanging fruit fast, with only some users choosing to spend the remaining 80% effort to customise the tool and gain the last 20% of the benefit.
A pre-cooked system developed over years by a single early adopter, by contrast, has reached the 100/100 point… but only for that user.
A map of this landscape would help newcomers identify which combination of tool and technique would help them reach 80% of the benefits with only 20% of the effort. They can then customise to their heart’s content if they wish.
Hence the presence in the map of the spidergraph, which will allow users to quickly identify the tools matching their personal priorities, and the People Profiles, which show them how other people more familiar with these tools actually combine them together.
To stay up to date or — even better — get involved, join us on the [ogm] Town Square Mattermost channel.
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