You will now find me on substack - https://thoughtfulatlas.substack.com/ Hi! I’m Atlas, and this is my blog relating to all things personal knowledge mana...
This morning my copy of The Footnote: A Curious History by Anthony Grafton fell through my letterbox. It's secondhand, as are all of my books. I buy ones marked as ‘good’ or ‘very good’, sometimes ‘ex library copy’; there’s the odd pencil mark at worst, but usually there’s just a scruffy cover saving me a few quid. This one, however, was different. Every single page is like this - slathered with…
I’ve written before about how I worry I’m beginning to over-complicate my notetaking set-up just because I see something shiny. It’s still a worry of mine and one I battle with constantly – dramatic as that sounds. I see this question as a grid, with pros and cons in each box. From this, I think the best place to sit is somewhere between simple/fluidity and complex/fluidity – now and then dipping…
I intend to update this as I go, arranged by topic as best I can. The texts are arranged in roughly descending order of importance i.e. how strongly I would recommend them to somebody new to the subject. All articles will be open-source and/or can be found on academia.edu. If you can’t find a text you’re interested in, DM me on twitter and I’ll point you in the right direction. Books listed are…
There’s a pressure to produce in the Personal Knowledge Management / Tools for Thought field. For example, Tiago Forte’s ‘CODE’ structure – Capture, Organise, Distill, Express – emphasises the importance of producing as an end goal. He writes in Building a Second Brain , “What is the point of knowledge if it doesn’t help anyone or produce anything?” 1 Similarly, Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart…
Literate people have long relied on some sort of portable writing tools to enable them to jot down quick notes on the go. The stereotypical image of this is a pocket notebook and pencil, now replaced by notes apps on phones. Yet prior to that, people had ways of making notes as they went about their lives. The Romans famously had wax tablets ( tabula ), which were also used throughout the Middle…
Ever heard of Leonardo Syndrome? If you’ve read Peter Burke’s excellent book, The Polymath , 1 then you will have done, but if not: Leonardo Syndrome is where the drive to learn more and more results in beginning many projects but actually finishing few. 2 It’s named ‘Leonardo Syndrome’ after Leonardo da Vinci himself. Despite being one of the most famous polymaths and creators in history - who…
Richard Feynman famously said (somewhere, since I can’t find the original source): “You have to keep a dozen of your favourite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people…
Yesterday and today I’ve been fiddling around with various different apps and workflows - mymind, raindrop.io, and readwise, to name but a few. It’s easy to get sucked into the app and website rabbit hole, especially if you’re somebody with a short attention span who suffers from shiny object syndrome . (If you’ve not heard this song - listen, and enjoy the earworm for days.) I’m constantly…
In a letter to Alex Barris in 1949, Raymond Chandler wrote: “When you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.” (Chandler, 1997, p. 79) 1 He was talking about authors who, rather than manually write a book themselves, would dictate it and have a scribe copy it out for them; in his opinion, they were prone to “logorrhea”. I’m not sure I entirely agree on…
Pliny the Elder would, I have no doubt, have loved everything about the information age and the PKM options available to us now. I’ll let you look up the details about who Pliny the Elder is, but what you need to know for this post is that he was a Roman polymath who lived in the 1st century AD, known for his prolific writing - in particular, his Naturalis Historia (Natural History) - and his…