I’ve just finished renovating my kitchen. (This, by the way, is the reason for the blog radio silence.) As I settle into actually using my new kitchen, a challenge has been finding where on earth I’ve put things.
You see, when I organised the storage, I designed it in a way that made objective, logical sense. Why would I store the scissors with the teaspoons? That makes no sense – store the scissors with the other kitchen utensils.
Yet I keep looking for the scissors with the teaspoons.
I recently came across the line: “If you are looking for something in your house and you finally find it, when you are done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.”
This applies to personal knowledge management as much as it applies to organising your home. We can talk a lot about linking and clustering notes, taxonomies and structures, building intricate architectures within our workflows, and other such considerations, but the point is to make it easier to manage information – not more complicated. (I’ve written before about the importance of keeping it simple.)
The thing is, sometimes our brains are glitchy and place information in locations that make no sense. Your metaphorical scissors with the teaspoons. Don’t fight it, embrace it – place things where you first looked for them, sensible or not.
Nobody else needs to navigate your system. Maybe you fantasise about one day somebody nosing through your archived brilliance – your thousands of notes, somehow still functional in digital form. (Another blog post incoming about that.) Maybe you already publish your digital garden on the internet, and maybe there’s even a steady stream of traffic, curious visitors flicking through the pages.
When you start designing your system for them, however, you start to diminish the usefulness for yourself. If I designed my kitchen for a theoretical ‘average kitchen user’, it would likely look very different. It would then be harder for me to navigate, as I would first have to ask myself, “Where would the theoretical average kitchen user look for this item?” It would slow everything down and I would end up jumbling things up regardless.
Sometimes it’s the less obvious connections you make, the ‘strange’ places you store notes in amongst others, that produce the greatest insight – or, at least, help you remember the information more effectively.
Put things where you first looked for them, even if it makes no logical sense.