Insights
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Desiderius Erasmus, Adagia
I was asked a few years ago to name my favorite superhero. I picked Aquaman. I recalled enjoying the comic books in which he was featured when I was in my early teen years. I fantasized about having the ability to breathe underwater. Alas, I never developed this power and, to be truthful, am not a very good swimmer.
If I were asked today to identify my superpower, I would say it is synthesis, the bringing together of varied concepts into something new and useful.
Like the ancient natural philosophers, I have spent a lifetime observing the world around me, trying to make sense of it. Exploring the true nature of reality has provided the knowledge and skills, much of the time, to comprehend what works and why, but that is an analytical process, one that must precede synthesis. Having a grasp of disparate elements enables reassembling them, making the parts fit together, often times in a novel way, to reveal truth that had been hidden previously. This is the realm of insights, a place where one can see both forests and trees.
In the previous edition of Field Notes, I described taking handwritten notes and coding them to highlight ideas and themes. Over the last year, I have conducted several series of interviews with public officials and employees in different organizations as part of planning exercises with which I was involved. I used the same process for each: developing an interview protocol; taking detailed hand-written notes during telephone interviews; and coding interviewees’ remarks with key words after the interview concluded. In a less formal way, I also kept notes for the many meetings I attended while serving in an interim management capacity for other clients.
These note-taking practices provided me valuable information for the work that I was performing, but it was fragmented, with the concepts emerging from the notes connected only in my brain. Managing multiple projects for multiple clients added to the complexity of utilizing what I was learning. I required a better tool than long-hand notes and my memory.
Over the last few years, note-taking software has been developed to address this shortcoming. These programs are referred to as personal knowledge management applications and are available both for the desktop and smartphones. Some are cloud-based; others can be downloaded and used with local storage. After reviewing their respective attributes, I settled on Notion.
(This is probably a good point at which to insert a disclaimer. I am not compensated by Notion in any way. In fact, I pay for the plan that I use. There are other similar applications on the market that might prove to be a better choices for others depending on their needs and how they perform their work.)
Despite its minimalist appearance, Notion is a feature-rich application that functions much like a wiki website. Each document lives on its own page and can take the form of text, database, table and the like. One can create templates or use those designed by the large community of users. Databases can be viewed as kanban boards, calendars, timelines and galleries. A Chrome extension is available that easily saves hyperlinks to internet sites to be saved for future reference. Notion can be operated from the desktop or smartphone.
There is one danger to all this capability and flexibility: the temptation to spend a lot of time organizing one’s content. A quick review of the subreddit r/Notion will yield a number of examples of home page dashboard designs that looked as though they consumed a lot of valuable hours. I have avoided this trap.
How pages are organized is up to the user. I group my pages under two distinct categories: personal and work. Each of these is then divided by project with subpages under each. In truth, the menu of pages does not look much different than the way that I organize word processing documents on a computer drive. I do not need a dashboard. I can easily find what I am seeking.
What makes converting my hand-written notes to Notion pages worthwhile is what I can then do with that content. As one might expect, there is a search feature available. Of far greater use is the ability to create links and backlinks among pages. The utility of this feature becomes apparent in situations in which I am looking for common themes in documents. For example, my initial coding of interview notes might use a keyword such as “teamwork.” As I am transcribing my notes, I can add a link in the text that creates a new page entitled “Teamwork.” I can link to this new page in other interviews when teamwork is referenced. The Teamwork page in turn displays links that take me back to the original content. This permits much easier review and analysis of the information as I determine how prevalent a theme is across multiple interviews.
Notion’s functionality extends beyond this level of qualitative data analysis. Conversations that I document might include requests and promises. I document each note in a database for that client with links back to the transcribed note pages. I can easily call up the original page to see the context of the action described. The table I create includes columns for due dates, status, and comments. For a given client, then, I can quickly determine what matters require my attention.
What I have described — and this is only a brief glance at how I use Notion — requires an investment of time. The value to me, the reason I am willing to make this investment, is found in having ready access to the information that I collected. I am no longer rummaging through stacks of paper, hoping to find a note that I made about a topic of interest. I am no longer maintaining different to-do lists with tasks to which I need to attend. What I need is, quite literally, at my fingertips when I need it.
What is more significant even than this time-savings, however, is the disciplined approach it affords to discovering connections in the information that I have gathered together. This is where insights lie, in the concepts and themes that emerge across notes that I have taken.
The organizing principle I use for my note-taking I have described. There is information that falls outside such easy categorization, however, that holds interest for me. There are free-floating ideas, knowledge that interests me but for which I have no immediate use, that I want to harvest for possible future use. For all of Notion’s utility for project-based information, it currently lacks a feature essential to the way in which I want to reference these ideas: tags. Another application is required for this work. I will describe this in the final installment of this Field Notes series.
This is the third of four articles on the subject of note-taking. The previous articles were Notes and Information.