The Faithful Gardener
This article is the second in a series on working outside your brain. In the first article, I identified five cultural and technological factors that are pushing our brains to their limits. I also introduced the concept of the extended mind and four ways of working outside of your brain:
Using tools to offload information and make your thoughts visible
Using the body to integrate physical sensations into your thinking process
Using physical space to reorient your perspective
Using social interaction to diversify and strengthen your thinking processes
The article closed with a look at the central role writing and notes play in thinking outside the brain. Most of us don’t spend much time thinking about notes and note-taking—and why would you? Most notes we take are disposable: quick scratches meant to jog our memory. But notes serve a wide variety of purposes. Reminding is only one of them. Learning to distinguish between the types of notes you take and how to use your notes effectively is an essential part of thinking outside the brain.
Note-Taking and Productivity
The notes we take for ourselves usually fall into one of two broad categories: they are either meant to enhance our productivity or our creativity. My focus here is notes and creativity, but before we get to that subject we have to deal with the elephant in the room: the voluminous notes we make as we try to turn the dial on our productivity ”up to 11.”*
The chief architect of the modern productivity movement is David Allen. His book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (first published in 2001, significantly revised in 2015) introduced the organizational framework that has guided knowledge work for the last 20 years. Allen didn’t invent the concept of productivity, he updated it for the era of knowledge work.** Instead of focusing on the efficiency of the organization’s production of goods and services, Allen focused on personal productivity. His “do it, delegate it, defer it, or drop it” taxonomy is designed to improve the individual knowledge worker’s ability to take action.
Allen describes GTD*** (the widely used acronym for Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology) as “a personal productivity methodology that redefines how you approach your life and work.” The system is a based on five fundamental steps:
Capture everything in one place - Your ideas, appointments, tasks… Everything that already has or demands your attention. Don’t hold some things in your head and others in your capturing system. Build a system you can trust and use it—religiously.
Clarify the stuff you’ve captured - Decide if a note is actionable, meaning the next step you need to take to deal with the note is clear. (In some cases, the next action belongs to someone else, in which case you delegate it.)
If it is, and it will take less than two minutes to complete, do it!
If it will take longer than two minutes, determine whether it’s a project (something that requires multiple steps to complete) or related to a project, a standalone task, or a reference. Note the next action and move on.
If the note is not actionable and it’s a reference or idea, set it aside.
If the note is not actionable or important, and it’s not something you need to hold on to, delete it.
Organize your actionable items, references, ideas, and someday/maybe notes - Move your appointments to your calendar, tasks to your task list, project notes to their appropriate folders, and everything else (ideas, references, someday/maybe items) to their appropriate places.
Reflect on your to-do list - Update and review your to-do list, then prioritize the tasks on your list. Update your list on a regular basis and reprioritize as appropriate.
Engage - Get to work on what matters most: make decisions, take action.
As knowledge work gained traction in the economy, Allen’s system for working outside your brain also gained traction, to the point where many of the software tools we use on a daily basis are designed to facilitate Allen’s GTD workflow and focus on taking action.****
Whether you adopt GTD or another approach to personal productivity, you need a system for dealing with the never-ending stream of information that is the inescapable constant of modern life. A once small pile of casual notes can easily morph into an overwhelming mountain of unprocessed ideas, references, tasks, meeting requests, appointments, and other “stuff” that blocks our ability to get even the simplest things done. When you lose your handle on the demands of everyday life you often also lose the one thing that’s essential to your creative life: time.
Idea-Gardening
While a focus on getting things done is important, creativity requires a different mindset. As I wrote in my recent article “The Art of Time-Shifting:”
Creative work requires us to expand the moment, to slow down, step away from our everyday notions of productivity, and follow the ebb and flow of the wandering mind. Creativity begins in reverie—the relaxed, pleasant wandering of thought that is in fact the default state of our mind. Decoupling from the world of measured time and quantified productivity isn’t dropping out, it’s returning home to the relaxed, pleasant state of conscious curiosity that is in fact our default state of being.
In 2015, Mike Caulfield (currently the Director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University, Vancouver) delivered a technology conference keynote address titled “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.”**** In his talk Caulfield introduced the idea of “de-streaming”: pulling content that interests him out the info-stream and replanting it in his personal note system so he could mull over its meaning, add relevant commentary, and connect it to other related content he had also de-streamed or written. All of this takes place over a long period of time—a year in the example he used in the talk: a year of thinking, annotating, and linking. His goal was to get past “the sweet, salty fat of ‘the web as conversation’ and on to something more timeless, integrative, iterative; something less personal and less self-assertive, something more solitary yet more connected.” Put another way, he was “idea-gardening.”
Caulfield then introduced two different ways of thinking about how we engage with ideas when we’re on the internet: The web as a garden and the web as a stream. Think of the web as an organically developing garden: a space in which there’s no predetermined order or relationship of things to one another. Caulfield writes, “Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings.” What came first in the garden doesn’t matter either. Each thing in the garden is related to the other things as it exists in the moment. Caulfield again:
In The Garden, to ask what happened first is trivial at best. The question “Did the bridge come after these trees” in a well-designed garden is meaningless historical trivia. The bridge doesn’t reply to the trees or the trees to the bridge. They are related to one another in a relatively timeless way.
This is true of everything in the garden. Each flower, tree, and vine is seen in relation to the whole by the gardener so that the visitors can have unique yet coherent experiences as they find their own paths through the garden. We create the garden as a sort of experience generator, capable of infinite expression and meaning.
The experience of exploring a physical garden is what Caulfield was striving for when he began “de-streaming” and cultivating his digital garden.
The Garden stands in contrast to The Stream: the never-ending “parade” of Twitter posts, news alerts, Facebook updates, newsletters, Instagram posts, and notifications we see when open our computers, tablets, and smartphones. Caulfield describes the experience of The Stream this way:
In the stream metaphor you don’t experience The Stream by walking around it and looking at it, or following it to its end. You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by.
The Garden is timeless; The Stream is a timeline—an ongoing narrative. “The Stream,” Caulfield writes, “replaces topology with serialization. Rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center.”
The Stream depends on context, on the narrative, on who said what. The Stream is about persuasion, argument, advocacy, rhetoric, and self-assertion. The Garden is about cultivation, iteration, exploration, shifting perspectives, connections, and self-discovery.
It’s exciting to dip into The Stream from time to time, but The Stream is tied to “clock-time,” the same sense of time we’re in when we’re focused on productivity. The space we create for the notes that are the seeds of our creative thought can’t be controlled by clock-time--it needs to be a place where we can slow down, disconnect from the never-ending flow of new information, and discover the deeper connections that give our ideas meaning.
The relationship between creativity and the garden is beautifully expressed by the former Poet Laureate of the United States Stanley Kunitz in his book The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects Back on a Century in the Garden:
Art conceals and reveals at the same time. Part of the concept of the garden is that you never see it all at once. This I got from my understanding of Japanese gardens, that the way to see a garden is by circling it, by walking through it.
You don’t see the garden as a whole from any point, but you begin to know it by making a tour around it. Then it becomes a garden in the mind, and you become the instrument that defines it, just as you have to create the wholeness of the poem in your mind. Though you learn the meaning of a poem, the sense of a poem, word by word, in the end what you have is a fusion.
Your creative notes are a tool for “de-streaming” ideas, nurturing them over time, cultivating connections to other relevant ideas, and envisioning the wholeness of the work you want to create.
In the next article in this series, we’ll begin looking at tools for capturing your notes and systems for structuring them.
Footnotes
* If you’re not familiar with this reference, check out this clip from the film rockumentary/documentary This is Spinal Tap
** The concept of productivity has been with us for a long, long time. God’s six-day world creation plan in the Book of Genesis is often humorously cited as the first appearance of the to-do list. In 1791, Ben Franklin published his autobiography and shared one the first examples of a formal to-do list
***GTD and Getting Things Done are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company
**** GTD is so dominant it’s sparked a backlash against the “cult of productivity.” Writers such asCal Newport (author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World), and others have written thoughtful critiques of the “cult of productivity.” Here are links to a few recent articles:
Christine Seifert, PhD, “Productivity Is a Cult.” Medium.com, January, 2020.
Emily Guy Birken, “Escaping the Cult of Productivity.” Author’s website, September, 2020.
Cal Newport, “The Frustration with Productivity Culture.” The New Yorker, September, 2021.
***** Caulfield’s talk helped launch the “digital gardens” movement. Digital gardens are publicly accessible collections of topic focused ideas. Maggie Appleton, an early digital gardener, describes a digital garden as:
... a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.
Visit her digital garden and read her article “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.”