It doesn’t matter how you store things, only that you do. If I know that, somewhere, I know something… and I can find it… that’s success. There are two parts to remembering (aka storing in such a way that it can be later found and used) everything: First, capture it in some form and put it somewhere intentional. Second, when you go for something and it’s not in the first place you looked (it’s instead in the 3rd place you looked), move it to the first place you looked.
These books helped educated people cope with the “information explosion” unleashed by the printing press and industrialization. They were highly idiosyncratic, personalized texts used to make sense of a new world of intercontinental trade, long distance communication, and mass media. Commonplace books could contain recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas, notes from sermons, and remedies for common maladies, among many other things.
Of course, the hard part is getting in the habit of capturing things. Our minds are terrible at holding ideas. Our minds are for having ideas (and composition and creation and more.) The best day to begin capturing your knowledge was yesterday. If you missed that opportunity, today is also good.
Holding on to a lot of ideas takes a great deal of time and energy. If, like me, you’re a systems person you can make things much worse. I can build personal knowledge systems, slipboxes, databases, custom software and bend all sorts of technology into new shapes. It turns out—as I hope you’ve already guessed—that if you have too many ideas, and then build and deploy a bunch of clever tools and systems, you just end up with even more ideas. (There isn’t quite an XKCD for that, but number 927 is close.)
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.
Building tools and systems is also a terrific way to hide. It’s a variation of the old idea that I cannot start on the real work until I get all this other stuff organized and cleaned up and set up and just so.
Instead, I’m so much happier if I simply take something that brings me joy, and share it.
I’m trying to sort out a problem concerning my slipbox: It’s not quite working the way everyone else claims it should. I’ve written a lot about my slipbox. Over the past 2+ years it’s grown to be about 1,000 slips (aka 3×5 cards) Plus the 1,200+ slips containing my collection of quotes.
I occasionally get a flash of inspiration and I sense the awesome power . . . and then it doesn’t happen again regularly. The problem has to do with how I’m putting things into the slipbox. This is a crucial point and (as far as I can find) it’s not often mentioned nor clearly explained. Everyone—including me—goes off into the weeds talking about how slips each get a unique address, how the addresses are fractal, etc. That’s classic systems-building nerd digression.
No the problem I have is, holding a slip with some idea on it, where do I put it? Literally, where is the specific spot in the collection of slips? …between which two existing slips do I place it?
What’s happened to me, is my slipbox is like a lawn: It has a wide collection of short blades of grass. It has few tall plants. There’s an amazing index of people, but each person usually has just one connection to something else in the slipbox. (For example: A podcast guest is usually only connected to the one slip for that conversation’s recording.) While I have hundreds of slips for my recorded conversations, they have almost no connections leading off from them. Again, I’ve a collection of ~100 slips for essays, books and other things I’ve put “into” the slipbox, and those cards have no other connections.
What I’ve built is what I build best: A large categorical archive. A library organized by thinking like a librarian. I’ve organized by topic or category. Here again, there’s a systems-building nerd digression into how you do that. But alas, it’s all just navel gazing structure for structure’s sake. Building a library is not sufficient. A good slipbox can be my library and enable me to find specific things. But a good slipbox is supposed to also let me do more. (It’s supposed to let me have a conversation with my previous thinking. It’s supposed to let my brain have ideas, while the slipbox let’s me explore all the ideas I’ve had.)
Instead of organizing by topic and subtopic, it is much more effective to organize by context. Specifically, the context in which it will be used. The primary question when deciding where to put something becomes “In which context will I want to stumble upon this again?”
In other words, instead of filing things away according to where they came from, you file them according to where they’re going. This is the essential difference between organizing like a librarian and organizing like a writer.
[…]
A writer asks “In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note?” They will file it under a paper they are writing, a conference they are speaking at, or an ongoing collaboration with a colleague. These are concrete, near-term deliverables and not abstract categories.
After much thought—weeks of thinking, finding the above article, reading, more thinking… I’ve decided I have two problems. The second problem is the one I mentioned at the top: Where exactly do I put this specific slip? I’ve been fixated on this problem for a while, and the solution is above.
But the first problem is that I’m not generating enough slips. (Yes, I have 2,000+ slips in the slipbox. Yes, I’m serious about not generating enough slips.) I’m not capturing what slipbox builders call “literature notes” or “reading notes.” I’m not grabbing my pen and writing stuff down, right in the moment, as I’m thinking about something. I believe this started on day one, when I felt like I didn’t know where I would put such a slip (ie, the second problem) and off I went not making enough notes.
So my new focus is to jot stuff down more. Generate more literature or reading notes. At which point I should quickly get comfortable figuring out where to put stuff into the slipbox.
In the past couple weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not to keep my slipbox physical or if I should switch to a digital system. There are specific reasons for having it be physical:
Physical “viewing” is vastly better. I can do countless things with markings, colored sticky notes, standing cards up/on-angles, pulling cards out and spreading them on my desk, it’s faster to make a few marks on paper than it is on digital. Some of that can be done with vastly complicated systems (always a bad idea to build those), but physical is simply better.
The small size of each paper slip (I’m using 3″x5″ cards) is a feature. Any digital system is going to let me put way too much on each digital slip. There’s value gained by forcing myself to think about just what to put on a slip.
It’s not digital. Any time I have to use a digital device, I’m that much closer to the things which cause me problems. Any time I can avoid digital systems, that’s a Good Thing™.
I knew all that when I started. That’s why I created a physical slipbox. But lately, the following things have become a problem, and led me to reconsider going fully digital:
I have a fairly small collection of things I refer to that I want to be able to find quickly when I have computers handy. Where’s that awesome grammar and punctuation site that I love? What’s that odd–ball command to do that thing I have to do only rarely? It’s all stuff that I could figure out again by searching the Internet, but if I just had a little digital note, I’d be moving forward again in an instant. For this type of lookup, the computer is faster than the physical slipbox.
Sometimes I really do want to put a lot of content “on” one slip. For example, I have these fairly large digital files of research on people that I’d like to be able to connect to people who are in the slipbox. If I’m working with the slipbox, and I find Jane Doe, then I want to know that I have a digital file for that person.
For those larger digital files, I want to be able to write a URL which instantly takes me to viewing them.
It’s that last item which is really a big deal for me. To solve those three issues I was considering changing the entire slipbox to be digital (and giving up all the other positives of a physical slipbox.)
Fortunately, I kept thinking, reading and experimenting and I figured out I can have both worlds.
I eventually realized that I already have really large “slips” in the slipbox. I already have a collection of digital books, essays, and articles that are in PDF format. For those digital files, their corresponding physical slip has a doodle (it looks like a piece of paper with one corner turned down) that reminds me there’s also a digital file. All of those files are currently “on” slips below the “2” address in the slipbox. (e.g.: The “2tu3” slip has a digital file doodle, and there’s a “2tu3 – Whatever the Title Is.pdf” file.)
For my item 2 above (big digital files of research on people) I just do the same thing for those people. “Jane Doe” would already be on slip “4c1do” (which is a listing of “Doe”, “Donatta”, “Droge”, etc.) I can simply toss in a slip “4c2do1” with a digital-file mark (and name the digital file “4c2do1 – Jane Doe”.) The next person on “4c2do” who needs a digital file gets to be “4c1do2”, and so on.
For item 1 in my list, there’s no reason I can’t have a bunch of files where I keep little “remember this” notes. So I added physical slip “4c3”, and then every slip that might ever go under that address is a digital file. For example, my grammar web site is on “4c3wi1a”. But I never have to know or remember that. I just search for “grammar” and I land on that digital file.
It was item 3 from my list that had me stumped until I remembered Obsidian!
I simply have a folder full of folders and text files in the same organizational structure as my physical slipbox. Where I once had a bunch of digital books, essays, and articles tossed in one folder; those are now all stored under “2”. And there’s a now a “4” folder, with a “4c1” for people’s digital files, and a “4c3” for those “remember this” items. Back over in the physical slipbox, any slip that has a digital-file mark, I’ll find the digital file in the parallel universe of this tree of folders.
Finally, I pointed Obsidian at the outermost folder. Voila! For anything in this tree of folders, in the Obsidian app I can click “copy Obsidian URL…” and I get a URL like this one which I paste anywhere I want:
I have the Obsidian app installed on all my devices. Any time I try to navigate to an obsidian:// method URL, it open the app, and Obsidian opens that file.
Physical? Digital? I can’t choose… How about: Mostly physical, but digital when it needs to be? Nice.
I hear a rumbling sound coming from my slipbox. It’s a rumbling sound like that of a distant summer thunderstorm, after dark. It’s the sound of a giant, grumbling in the next valley over. It works fine. I’ve simply had an idea for something that I can only do, if the slipbox were digital. I’m tinkering with some tools to see how exactly I want to set things up if I switch to digital. Interesting times!
Granted, cultivating a slipbox is a lot of work. This morning, as I regularly do, I was rereading journal entries. A year ago I had made note of a book, Trust Yourself, and how it had spurred some specific thinking. Finding mention of the book in my journal caused me to reflect on what I had written: Was it still accurate? Journaling for the win.
I had also made a little note, “(2tu1)” of the book’s slip in the slipbox. It took only a moment to flip there… and to discover I had written out 9 slips under the book with some take-aways and key learnings from the book. A crash refresher on the book, completely unbidden; A gift from my self-from years past.
Spaced repetition comes up in discussions of optimal learning. Once one learns something, it’s best to review it after a period of time, then a second review, third, etc.. with the time between the reviews increasing. There are class structures and software packages which implement this. (Randomly over the years I’ve even considered dumping everything I ever wanted to learn into such a system.)
Part of the power of the spacing is that you don’t come to expect when a particular bit of information will be reviewed. “Oh! I need that knowledge, I guess it is important.” It all apparently causes the brain to not allow the knowledge to expire and be lost. I’ve discovered that my regular usage of the slipbox is randomly, (in the sense that I have no sense of what or when to expect to bump into an idea again,) reminding me of things.
For example, I had a slip, “4c2se1j” with an idea for a blog post on it. As I was writing the post, which involved Sönke Ahrens, I flipped to her name in the slipbox to add this slip’s address to things related to her. She’s on the slip at “4c1ae(3)”. (Because “4c1ae” overflowed to a second “4c1ae(2)” and then third slip “4c1ae(3)”.) Next to her name I added “4c2se1j”. Your eyes may have glassed over, but that’s just another random moment in my using the slipbox—nothing particularly interesting there.
While doing that, my eyes flashed across two addresses already on Ahren’s line…
First, “2ho1”. Just four characters, but I instantly recognized the “2” as a book reference, and Ahren’s book is “HOw to take smart notes.” Several of the ideas from the book flashed through my mind.
Second, “4c2ko1a”. That looks gnarly, but “4c2” is themes. “4c2ko” then must be a word with first-letter K, and first-vowel O, and it has to be related to Ahrens? …that’s easy. That would be the slip for “KnOwledge systems”. I don’t know for sure (without looking) what’s on “4c2ko1a” but lots of ideas related to knowledge systems popped into my mind.
Don’t be distracted by my insane, paper-slips in physical-boxes system. There are countless ways to take notes. (Ahrens has a lot of great stuff to say about that, and I’d argue she has The stuff to say about it.) My point here is that by taking notes into a system that is designed to help me think—not tell me how to think—it does in fact help me think and helps me learn and remember.
Sometimes some small little niggling piece-of-sand-in-my-oyster gets resolved, and all is right in the world. This is one of those cases. This is a tiny, but irrelevant if you don’t have a slipbox, little thing that was bothering me…
Crash-course/reminder:
Every “slip” (which for my slipbox is a 3×5 card, but one could use anything) has a single address.
If a slip’s address is “address31” (that is NOT actually an address) it must be unique, because I’m going to note that address on other slips, as a way of saying “see also the slip at address31”.
There are two competing needs: The need to be able to infinitely insert slips between existing slips, and the fact that one cannot know the structure of the final assembly of slips. (Both because the assembly is never technically finished, and because you don’t know what you’ll assemble.)
The solution is a hierarchic address system. The address of my first slip is, literally, “1” then “2” then “3”. When I need a slip between 2 and 3, I go “down” a level: The address “2a” is between 2 and 3. I have slips with address like 4a800 — literally the 800th slip between 4a and 4b. I also have addresses like 4c1fi.
“4c1fi” is interesting. “4” is my commonplace book. “4c” is for slipbox indices. “4c1” is for people. (There’s a 4c2 for themes, like “farming” — I just stuck my finger in there now, and was surprised to find “farming”.) But what is going on with that “fi” part?
I mentioned above that “4a800” is the 800th slip under “4a”. Does that mean “4c1fy” is the fy-th slip between “4c1” and “4c2”? Yes, sort of.
Sorry, did I lose you with “counting with letters?” On the slip addresses, I’m alternating letters and numbers as the addresses go down in layers. So in the letter-based levels of an address, I’m using: a, b, c, d, e … y, z, aa, ab, ac, ad, … fg, fh, and finally fi. This is counting in base-26, using roman letters as the glyphs. “fi” is 159 in the more common base-10. So is “4c1fi” the 159th slip between “4c1” and “4c2”? Yes, sort of. It’s actually about the 20th slip between “4c1” and “4c2”.
There’s no reason I have to use all the addresses. Sometimes I want to pack some meaning into the address itself. That’s what’s going on with the slips under “4c1”. That “fi” in the address tells me the card contains {people whose name,} (that much I know, because I know “4c1” is an index of people,) starts with an “F” and whose next vowel is an “i”. That sounds nuts, I know. Let it go for today, because I’m about to get to the point of my title about the “/” in addresses.
Suppose I want to have the address on a slip tell me something, like a date?
Slips have a date on them— the date I created the slip and put it in the box. But what if I want to see, on the slip for farming (!) a reference to another slip… and I want to know something interesting about that referenced slip? What if I wanted to put the date in the slip address? October 4, 2021, for example, could be written as “211004”. (I’ll be long dead before 991231 rolls over to 000101 in the year 2100.)
One day, I decided to keep a slip for every recorded conversation I’ve done. That’s another blog post. That happened to be slip “3”. The slips under “3”—the ones for each recording—would then be “3a”, “3b”, “3c” and so on. But I wanted to somehow put “211004” in the address. :(
That’s what the slash if for.
Farming has a reference to “3/211004b” because “3211004b” would suggest I have 3+ million top-level slips. The slash makes it clear the address is “3”, then down a level to “211004”. (Then down a level to “b”, because this was the second recording on that day.)
So, I randomly grabbed “4c2fa”, which I discovered has “farming” on it, and which mentions the {second audio recording I made on Oct 4, 2021} (I can see that from “3/211004b”. flip flip flip Ah, yes, I now remember this conversation with Kate…
Apertif: Here’s one way the slipbox grows. I was looking at the “4c2fa” card with “farming” on it, and another conversation popped into my head… with Chris Moran. There’s a slip for that recording — flip flip flip find Moran, who I can tell would be on “4c1mo” just based on his name, that mentions “3/181125a”, and I can see without even looking at that slip, that’s a recording from November 2018. And I just added “3/181125a” to the slip with “farming.”
How do you get your brain to be consistent with your slipbox? I’m thinking it would be an excellent thing to do/have, but I also know that if I was filing thoughts under a tab where I thought it should go, there’s a good chance that when I look for it later, a different tab is where I’m going to think it should be.
The short answer is: I don’t get them consistent; I don’t actually want them to be consistent. That’s not what the slipbox is for.
And then a two-part longer answer:
First: It is vastly better than my brain at keeping track of things. For example, if I have a name, I can find entry points into the slipbox by using the index of people. That’s at “4c1”. “4” is the common place book. “4c” is slipbox indices. “4c1” is for people. It’s a visually easy to spot section of the cards though. I use 3×5 tabbed dividers to find the main letters. Grabbing a random card— “4c1lo” (that’s four-C-one-L-O) has people whose last name starts with “L” then first vowel of “O”. The card has “London, John”, “London, Jack”, “Lombardi, Vince”, “Loomis, Carol”. In this case names that actually start “LO…” but that is not usually the situation. Next to “Low, Steven” is a reference “3/211027a” … and I know what the “3” section of the slipbox is: recorded conversations. So that’s a conversation I had with the person on 21-10-07. To summarize: Given any name, I can find them in the slipbox; or I can tell they’re not in the slipbox. In other situations, I can go into the box: “what were my notes on that book?” I can find books (digital, physical, essays and papers too) are in the “2” section of the slipbox.
Second: The slipbox is not meant ONLY to be a card catalog system. It’s not ONLY a giant index of things. It’s primary goal is to have a conversation with the entire collection [whatever I’ve put in the slipbox so far] of my thinking. It’s not a database of bits of information (“Harrisburd is the capital of Pennsylvania”) but rather a database of thoughts about things.
I admit it’s all very obtuse. After a year of fiddling with it, I’m convinced that it’s adding value to my life, but I still find it very hard to explain. One parting thought from a book about note taking is that one needs a context and system within which to think. Not a strict plan for how to think. The context and the system need to be as UNstructured as possible to enable the flexible thinking.
Finally, there’s a tag for all the slipbox posts, that might yield additional breadcrumbs if you flip through them, https://constantine.name/tag/slipbox/
I was leisurely tinkering my way through my morning, and my mind kicked out a few ideas. It always does that. Yes, I talk about my mind in the third person, because sometimes I think I have a Tulpa.
The first idea that popped up was about sending a message to someone to wish them a Happy New Year. At the time, I had not yet awakened the sleeping dragon—my computer. (I could say: My personal Eye of Sauron was still closed.) Things change for me once I awaken the dragon each day. But I have this idea to send a message, and it’s important, but I don’t dare awaken the dragon to ask if I can just send this one quick message. I’ll look up again and it’ll be 4 in the afternoon. Instead, I grabbed one of my precious slips and jotted a note.
Holding the slip I realized this was brilliant. I recently bought a brick of 1,000 3×5 cards because the slipbox is voracious. I have plenty of these little slips. So why hadn’t I done this for the past year that I’ve been keeping a slipbox? Why did it happen for the first time today? It happened because I used to see the slips as precious; They were nice, heavy, beautiful 3×5 cards that sit close at hand and are supposedly waiting to become immortal slips in the slipbox. Just the other day, I used the last one of my original stash, and I broke open that new brick… and realized I’d bought cheap-ass crappy Amazon knock-off 3×5 cards. (I had only spent $13 for 1,000 so I wasn’t too upset.) When that idea to send a message popped into my brain, I thought: “well, I have 1,000 crappy slips to use up . . .” and this little queue of individual ideas quickly appeared on my desk.
No, the coffee mug does not currently contain rum.
The lesson I re-learned this morning is that even a slight change of context can have an outsized affect on something. (In this case, my “precious” slips [you’re hearing Gollum aren’t you?] had become “crappy” slips.)
Setting aside what you think of my specific anecdote here, where might you make a small change and discover some surprising benefit?
