S5E1 Redefining Note-Taking and the Art of Knowledge Organization with Jorge Arango

Zohra Mutabanna: 0:04

Hello folks, Welcome to Season 5 of Inside Tech Calm with Zahra Mudabana. This season, we are focusing on tools, tips and strategies to elevate your craft. Let's dive right in, Folks. We are kicking off Season 5 with our interview with Jorge Arango. I'm sure you've heard about him. He's one of the authors who authored the book Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond. I have that copy. I've referred to it many, many times and over, so this is an absolute honor for me to be having this one-on-one conversation with Jorge. He's published another book titled Duly Noted, and that's what we're going to be having this one-on-one conversation with Jorge. He's published another book titled Duly Noted, and that's what we're going to be talking about. We are going to jump into all the juicy details of what the book is about and we're going to learn a lot of good stuff, but before that, I want to welcome Jorge. Jorge, welcome to my show.

Jorge Arango: 0:59

Thank you, zora, the pleasure is all mine.

Zohra Mutabanna: 1:01

Thank you. It is my pleasure too, and I'm really looking forward to this awesome conversation. So, jorge, you need no introduction, but for the benefit of my audience, please tell us as much or as little about yourself.

Jorge Arango: 1:14

Well, usually where I start. The story is that my background is in architecture, as in the design of buildings, but I pivoted around three decades ago into designing digital things websites, products, apps. I did that right around the time the World Wide Web came out. I basically left my career in architecture and started designing digital things. My focus has been on information architecture. You mentioned the O'Reilly book and I have to mention I helped co-author the fourth edition of that book. The first three were done by the original authors, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. I like to say that information architecture, my job as an information architect, is to design places made of language, which is, I think, appropriate for the subject of your show. Right, we might see how that fits in with this newer book that I just published.

Zohra Mutabanna: 2:10

Thank you, jorge. That's quite a leap from architecture into web design. I just want to dive a little bit into that. I mean, I can almost imagine how your background in architecture kind of connects you to information architecture, your background in architecture kind of connects you to information architecture. But for my benefit, can you share what commonalities have you found there?

Jorge Arango: 2:34

So one thing I should say is that before I ever studied architecture, I was into computers. I've been into computers since I was very young. I don't know where I heard this, but someone's heard someone say that Gen Xers like myself are the first generation that grew up with computers as playthings. That was very, very much my case. I grew up playing Atari and programming on early 8-bit computers, so that interest was with me all along along. And what happened to me is that I graduated and started my career as an architect right around the time when the internet started becoming more mainstream and breaking into popular consciousness. Essentially, at the point when I became aware of the World Wide Web, I had this very strong insight, I guess, is the best way to call it. It's kind of hard in retrospect, but I had this insight that this was a medium that would transform the world and, moreover and I don't think I could articulate it like this at the time- I had this feeling that my training as an architect would come in handy.

Jorge Arango: 3:41

Now, looking at it retrospectively, I think that it's because of a variety of factors. One is that in architecture, you are dealing with the design of very complex systems. A building is a collection of different systems that need to work together in order to accomplish particular goals, right, so there's a structural system that helps the thing withstand, you know, the forces of gravity, and so on. There are electrical systems that enable us to have conversations like the one we're having now. There's heating and air conditioning, there's plumbing, there's all these things, right. And then that needs to be put in service to human needs, right. So there's this whole human factors aspect to it and ergonomics, the psychology of designing spaces that people find usable and useful and beautiful, hopefully. So there's that aspect to it. And then there's a third stream there, which is architecture is a discipline that is a humanity in some ways. Right, like there's a cultural history to architecture. There's an artistic aspect to it. These are not just completely practical things. Buildings are not just completely practical things. They also express certain cultural and aesthetic preferences that in many ways define who we are, right. So, again, these are things that I have grown to understand over time at that.

Jorge Arango: 5:14

You know, when I made this decision, I think it was more of an instinctive leap. It actually proved to be a kind of valid response. Many of the things that I had learned in architecture school were transferable skills to this new field, and it so happened that, you know, it was a new medium, so there weren't that many people who were. There was no one trained to do it because it didn't exist right. So bringing things from other disciplines was the appropriate response, and in my case it was architecture. I know people who came to this from other backgrounds journalism, anthropology, etc. We all kind of brought skills from other disciplines as we saw fit.

Zohra Mutabanna: 5:51

Thank you for sharing that. That is definitely very insightful and I can see how it translated the skills that you had or the insights that you had from architecture, how they informed this relatively new, disruptive field called information architecture. If I may say so, I mean, I myself come from a different background. I didn't come into technical writing organically, it was by accident, a happy accident, and I have never known anybody who's come from an architectural background. So this is my first. But just learning how we can apply what we've learned in one discipline and how you can apply that to another is just fascinating, and especially to something like my field. It just makes it sound very cool to me.

Jorge Arango: 6:34

I don't know a lot about technical writing, but I am an author as you mentioned. And I would imagine that there are many overlaps, and one that I would say might be something that technical writing shares with architecture is a concern for structure, right? I would imagine that structuring the way that you communicate very carefully is something that you must engage in as you think about how to explain something to somebody else through writing, in this case, right.

Zohra Mutabanna: 7:05

Absolutely. And I think another point that you made about the psychology of designing spaces that resonated with me. When I think about writing, I'm also thinking about user experience. I may not be thinking about physical space, but I'm definitely thinking about if you're reading it on paper, that is white space. If you're designing digital spaces, that is still space. So I do think in terms of spaces. So that resonated with me. And another one was the human factor. Again, you are writing for a human and you want to be human centric in your approach. So great points there, jorge. Thank you for sharing those.

Zohra Mutabanna: 7:43

I'm going to jump right into my next question, which is the book Duly Noted. I had a chance to read parts of it and it fascinated me. I never thought so highly about note-taking, but after reading your book I think it really informed how I should be approaching my own note-taking and I think there's a lot of value in note-taking and note-making that there is that distinction, which I will get to in one of my questions further. But I want you to tell me what prompted you to write a book on notes.

Jorge Arango: 8:17

I think that your listeners might be wondering here you're going to talk about the web and architecture and all this, and we switched to talking about notes. It's like what? Yeah, it's a book about notes. Well, I'll tell you where this came from.

Jorge Arango: 8:30

I had worked on the information architecture book and then, shortly after I worked on that project, I wrote another book called Living in Information, which is also about information architecture, called Living in Information, which is also about information architecture, and when I was coming off that project, I had a conversation with my publisher. That went something like this he asked do you have another book that you've been thinking about? And I said yeah, you know, all these things that I've been writing about in the information architecture books and the things that I've been practicing in the information architecture books and the things that I've been practicing. They also can apply to your own stuff, to your own personal information, right? When we talk about information architecture for the design of a website or a digital product or an app, you're talking about designing things that other people will use, right? So you're organizing information in ways that other people are going to find usable. They're going to be able to find them and understand them better, but many of the practices that we undertake when we're doing that work can also apply for our own stuff. So not for other people, but for us and most of us who are knowledge workers I would say all of us who are knowledge workers and that is many of us in our society are dealing with a lot of information in our lives. We are both having to consume a lot of information for our work and for our personal lives and we're also producing a lot of information right. In the case of your audience, you're very explicitly producing information, right. So we are not just consumers of this stuff, but we are also, in some ways, producers of this stuff, and many makes sense to develop skills to deal with that more successfully.

Jorge Arango: 10:31

And what I had observed is that in my time as an information architecture consultant, I produce a lot of information. For example, I write meeting minutes. When I'm in a meeting, I'm taking notes. Now you might see me looking down. It's because I have a notebook here. When I'm in a meeting, I'm taking notes. Now you might see me looking down. It's because I have a notebook here and I'm making notes right, and I had noticed over time that I could see in people around me that they were somewhat casual in their use of, in how they managed information. But I had kind of unconsciously, through my career as an information architect, been putting into place all these systems to help me deal with information. And I think that I deal with information in some ways more skillfully than other people because I'm an information architect.

Jorge Arango: 11:18

And when I had that conversation with my publisher I said you know, I think I would like to write a book that teaches people information architecture, but for their own stuff, not for designing things for others, but for their own information. There was a period of time when the scope for this book was a bit larger. I was thinking like let's organize everything. Let's show people how to organize their email and their appointments and their to-do lists and all this stuff. There are some technological advances I'm going to use that phrase kind of cautiously but there are some, let's say, new products that have entered the market over the last around three years or so. That led me to focus on note-taking as the primary subject and we can get into what those are. But I thought that there was a particular need at this point for a book on note-taking that taught people basically information architecture, but for your own notes.

Zohra Mutabanna: 12:14

If and when you do write a book on how to organize emails and to-do lists, I'll be your first purchaser. I need help there.

Jorge Arango: 12:23

Yeah, a lot of people suffer from that.

Zohra Mutabanna: 12:25

Yeah, of course, definitely, because there is this information overload and information is coming at us from every angle and it's so hard to keep track of that. But coming back to your book, like I said earlier and I think you made a point about you know we were being casual about it. You've noticed people being casual and I would count myself in that same group. I was being casual about it, but ever since I've read the book, I've become more intentional. In some cases I have been intentional, in some cases I haven't, but even now, I have a high regard for the sticky notes on which I write my notes, a high regard for the sticky notes on which I write my notes and even though it may be a temporary piece of record, I still hold it in high regard now because these are mental reminders and how you approach information management can really ease up your process, how you manage your information and knowledge. So, definitely, I think this would resonate with a lot of us, definitely for sure.

Zohra Mutabanna: 13:26

Now, your book we all, right now, at this point in time, I have. I'm also one who takes notes with a pen and paper, but your book focuses on digital note-taking and that's something I wanted you to share a little bit more about what made you decide to focus on digital note-taking. To share a little bit more about what made you decide to focus on digital note-taking Right.

Jorge Arango: 13:45

Well, and the first thing I must say here is that I too take a lot of notes using, let's say, handwritten notes and I'm going to use that phrase instead of paper, because I increasingly take handwritten notes using an iPad with an Apple Pencil right. But the point stands that there is some kind of difference between the sort of notes that you tap, tap, tap into your phone screen and the type of notes that you write down with some kind of stylus. This circles back to what I mentioned earlier about there being interesting new products that have come in the market. What's happened? There is something really interesting that happens every once in a while in the computer industry, which is the mainstream tools that we use for the most part rely on metaphors to make them familiar to us. The native language that computers speak is binary code ones and zeros right. That's something that we humans struggle with. We can't really interact with computers very easily in their native tongue. So over the many decades, people have layered, basically, metaphors on top of this experience to make it more accessible to us. So, if you use a desktop computer, the window, icon, pointer, interface that you deal with with file folders and documents and all these things. That's a metaphor that's been layered on top of the computing experience, because folders and documents and trash cans are things that we understand from the real world.

Jorge Arango: 15:25

And what's happened with note-taking is that the way that most of us take digital notes is predicated on a metaphor that comes from paper notebooks. So until fairly recently, the most popular note-taking apps on phones and computers relied very heavily on metaphors that made them familiar, you know, and metaphors coming from the physical world. For example, a lot of people use OneNote right, Microsoft's OneNote application and OneNote explicitly tries to mimic the interface of a binder with section dividers and pages, and it does some quirky things. Like you can have pages that stand in a hierarchical relationship with other pages, right which real-world paper does not do. But the primary metaphor is that of some kind of binder, An app like the Notes app on the iPhone or Google Keep on Android phones.

Jorge Arango: 16:26

In many ways they mimic something like a pocket notebook where, basically, you have a you can think of it as a page or a new note where you're writing down ideas, right, and again, they employ at least the Apple Notes app employs the folder metaphor where you can store these little notes in these folders. That is a very useful interface to bring you in, to bring in new users, right. But it's not the only metaphor or the only interface that you could use when saving notes digitally. There's nothing about computers that says these things need to be in folders or in individual notes, that mimic paper. There's a lot of things that you could do with computers.

Jorge Arango: 17:14

And over the last, I would say, three years, there are new products that have been coming on the market that basically break free of the metaphors used by traditional note-taking apps and allow you to create sets of notes that link to each other in much the same way that pages in large collection of articles about all sorts of different things, and they have links in them that point to other articles. These newfangled note-taking apps allow you to do with your notes something that is very similar to the way that Wikipedia works, where you can create arbitrary links between them. Now, this capability I have to emphasize this, this is not new stuff. People have been thinking about this since at least the 1960s, and there have been experiments and even commercial products that allow you to do this for many, many decades. The thing is that over the last three years, there have started to become available more mainstream products that make these capabilities very easily accessible to people.

Jorge Arango: 18:29

In the book, I talk a lot about Obsidian, which is one of these products, but it's not the only one. There's a product called Roam Research. One that a lot of people will have heard of is Notion, which has some of these characteristics as well, and the idea there is again, you don't approach these tools with a traditional note-taking mindset. You approach them with the idea that you're going to be capturing thoughts in a network. That's a very different metaphor than the notebook metaphor that we grew up with, right?

Jorge Arango: 19:03

That's why I am focusing this book on digital, because with computers, all of a sudden, we have capabilities that have never been available to us before, and so far most of us have been using them as though they are glorified paper notebooks, but they can be so much more, and I want to show people how to take advantage of that.

Zohra Mutabanna: 19:28

Awesome, yeah, I never thought of it that way. I have used Keep and I use OneNote, but I haven't used Obsidian. Or I've heard of Notion, but I haven't used it To think of these nodes that are networked and that have these abstract connections and how you can organize it. That is different from your physical world. I think that makes sense. So, yeah, and I did take that away from the book. I think you talked about hypertext note-taking. My apologies if I'm not remembering the exact term, but I remember you talking about that in your book and it immediately made sense to me that, yeah, when I'm taking notes as a side project, I published a book last year and I ended up applying some of these strategies, just not realizing that I was implicitly doing something that you were talking about in the book. So I think probably a lot of the audience might be able to relate to what you're talking or sharing in your book, just that they haven't thought about it intentionally.

Jorge Arango: 20:26

You know, that is my experience as well. When people hear about this stuff, they're like oh, there's this recognition that I understand what you're saying here. I didn't realize that there were practices that you could put in place to do it better. That's a common reaction I'm getting with this book.

Zohra Mutabanna: 20:41

Yeah, definitely. Now, another thing that connected with me was when you're taking notes, you're sort of it's a means for extending your mind, but the medium matters. That was another takeaway from the book for me, and that's when you start thinking about how you are taking handwritten notes. Now, somewhere I read I don't know where that handwritten notes help you with memory retention. Aware that handwritten notes help you with memory retention, In your opinion, does digital note taking provide that same benefit, that same advantage?

Jorge Arango: 21:15

I think I've read the articles that you're referring to. I have to say I've also experienced it firsthand. I do take handwritten notes. I'm taking handwritten notes now. I think it's worth pinching and zooming into this idea of notes as a way of extending your mind, because I think that that is the actually that is the core idea behind this book and it's something that I think, yet again, it's one of these things that a lot of us might have understood intuitively but haven't maybe thought about in an organized or systematic way. But I think that notes have something of a PR problem in that.

Jorge Arango: 21:56

When I was writing the book and I told people I'm working on a book about notes, I found that I got one of two reactions One reaction I got was some people would say, oh, I need that, I need a book to take better notes. And some people would say, oh, I need that. You know, I need a book to take better notes. And some people would ask something like really notes, why do I need a whole book about notes? Yeah, I can take notes, right, and I think that that reaction to me is particularly interesting because it stems from the realization that notes is something that I think all of us do. All of us take notes to some degree. The thing is that and there's a language thing here which is, I think, your audience, you know, we are talking in a wordy context, right. So there's a language issue here, which is the word note connotes a lot of things that are, in fact, kind of different, right. So we use the word note to talk about the thing that we write when we are in our kitchen looking through the refrigerator to see what we need to buy at the grocery store, right, and then when we're in the aisle at the grocery store buying our groceries, we can remember what we needed to buy. That is one use for note, for a note, right. And then when we're reading a book on Kindle, for example, and you're highlighting and the thing that you write alongside with your highlight, we call that a note too. But if you think about it, those two actions are very different and they have very different purposes. They're done in a very different context, in a very different mindset, using very different media. And those are just two of them. Think of all the others. When you sit down to plan a project, you might outline, you might start writing an outline of the things or maybe a sequence of steps that you need to undertake. That is a kind of note too. And that's yet a different use for notes, right. The thing that they all have in common. And I think, by the way, I think that when I say notes, most people think of the supermarket list and they think of a note as something that you make to augment your memory. It's like I want to remember to bring home the milk, that kind of thing, right. But if you think about the three cases that I've mentioned here the grocery list, the Kindle highlights and the outline or project plan that you're writing on a piece of paper. The thing that they have in common is that all of them are extending your cognitive abilities. They are helping you think more effectively. In one case, the thinking is about remembering. In another case, it's about planning. In the Kindle case, it might be something like internalizing what you're reading, or maybe reminding you later of what was most important about a particular book or a particular chapter. All of these are extensions of your mind. Another easy way to visualize this is whenever you solve a math problem using a piece of paper or a pencil. It's much easier to do that than to just do it using your brain, you know, on its own.

Jorge Arango: 24:57

Notes, in all of their guises, are a technology for cognitive augmentation, and what I'm trying to do is show people a way or ways in which computers can be tools for cognitive augmentation. Primarily, but to your point, handwritten notes are a technology for cognitive augmentation and, yes, there are studies that say that you retain things better when you write by hand. This is my understanding. Now I would have to revisit some of those papers, but those often tend to be in the context of things like capturing lecture notes, which, again, if you think about it, that's a different use for note-taking than something like planning. In planning, you're not trying to capture what you're hearing, you're trying to somehow think on the page, which are different things. That this has been proven, but the hypothesis I've heard is that because we are slower when writing by hand, you are forced to not capture things verbatim and therefore you are kind of listening for the most important things. So basically, because we have slower bandwidth, you have to really focus on what it is that you're writing down.

Jorge Arango: 26:22

I also heard something interesting when I was doing research for the book. I asked folks why they took notes and most people said you know, to remember things or to think about what I'm doing or whatever. But a few folks answered with something that I thought was really intriguing. They said you know, if I don't keep my hands busy, I don't pay attention. Well, and that's something that I can relate to as well. You know, sometimes like maybe not even writing, but just like doodling, it helps you somehow kind of tame the monkey mind right and it helps you kind of be more present. So that might be yet another reason why taking notes by hand might help you remember things better. So yeah, all our different media and one of the tricks I don't want to be overly prescriptive one of the tricks is finding what works for you and leaning into that.

Zohra Mutabanna: 27:14

As I was listening to you, you shared that you are taking notes using a Kindle. Is that right?

Jorge Arango: 27:22

I'm using an iPad An iPad.

Zohra Mutabanna: 27:24

Now I'm using the traditional paper and pen. However, these are handwritten notes. In your opinion, is there any difference in using although it is handwritten notes, using these different media? Does it matter? Or I think you probably answered that by saying you know, just use whatever you can lean into, but was that a transition for you?

Jorge Arango: 27:48

Different people work differently and my first thing would be to say if you have found something that works for you, lean into it. I recently saw a movie called Turn Every Page, which, given that our audience includes people who write for a living, I would assume this movie might be interesting to them. It's about the relationship between the author, robert Caro, and his editor, robert Gottlieb. Caro is the author of books like the Power Broker, and they show both of them working. Caro writes using a Smith-Corona typewriter and takes notes using a kind of regular yellow pencil on a pad of paper right, and Gottlieb printed manuscripts with a pencil. And it was clear in watching this movie that these folks had been working like that for a very long time. They were very comfortable doing that and I think that I would suspect that for someone like Caro, moving to a computer would be disruptive of his workflows and his mental pattern. So I would say go with what works for you.

Jorge Arango: 28:52

I do think that computers bring capabilities that you cannot get with paper. I'll mention a few of them. One capability is computers have vastly more storage than paper. I have used paper notebooks for a long time. I have shelves worth of notebooks. I like Leuchtturm notebooks. Some people like Moleskines, some people don't use fancy notebooks, just legal pads or whatever. But I have these long-term notebooks and they have shells filled with these things, right, and they take up a lot of space, and those notebooks are currently in storage very far from where I am right now. I cannot access anything in them.

Jorge Arango: 29:45

My digital notes are here with me and that is a big difference, and I would also note here that even my physical paper-based notes are here with me in a sense, in that I have very, in a very disciplined way, scanned my paper notebooks over many years and at this point, very rarely use paper. Now I use mostly an iPad and I have my handwritten notes also in digital format. The other advantage that I would say that digital has over paper is that you can search digital notes right. So even my handwritten notes are searchable because they are now digitized and in my computer. So, even if it's just those two things, I think that those two are pretty important because if you are doing research, for example, and need to revisit stuff that you read three or four years ago, you're going to find it much easier to do if you have a search capabilities b if you have them scanned and organized in digital form. I'm saying that as though it's universally true.

Zohra Mutabanna: 30:55

It's true for me and I think it's true for a lot of people uh, that resonates with me because as I plan for my next season, every time I have a folder on my desktop which is in the cloud and I can access it anywhere, and the folder is called ideation corner, where I just add all the ideas that come to me. Now I've maintained this folder over four years. I started off as just simple notes bulletized list, but over time I've added seasons, then I have added themes and what you shared it's portable. These notes are retrievable, the digitized notes. They are findable, they're easy to store, they're scannable and they're easy to update, just easy to interact with.

Zohra Mutabanna: 31:43

There are instances when I would not choose pen and paper. I would prefer to have my laptop, because actually sometimes just having pen and paper can be a limitation to me because the speed with which I type I've learned how to type, probably and this may not apply to everybody, but this has been an advantage for me I'm able to dump my thoughts faster when I'm on a computer versus using pen and paper. So, definitely, I think, lean into what works for you, but also experiment and see if something else can work better, because if I had confined myself to pen and paper, I would have never had access to this new medium online, and the things that you talk about in your book hypertexting, linking abstract ideas, that link into each other just this whole web of notes that I have created somehow start making sense because I start seeing patterns emerge. And that's how I came up with themes and whatnot for my podcast. That's why I mean this book resonated so much with me, because I was doing some things, just not being present and intentional with them.

Jorge Arango: 32:46

What you mentioned there brings up what I think is perhaps the greatest difference between digital notes and handwritten notes and now I am talking about the sort of digital notes that you type in as opposed to write by hand which is that if you are taking digital notes of that kind, if you are taking digital notes of that kind, you now have your thoughts in text form in your computer, and when you have them in text form, you can do things that you are unable to do with paper. In particular, we now have access to generative AI, right, and large language models and all this stuff. If you have a large corpus of ideas and it might be that they're your ideas, it might be that they include highlights of books that you've read, annotations that you've made, marginalia right, like annotations that you've made in books All of a sudden, you have access to essentially a research assistant that can help you summarize, synthesize, find patterns, categorize right, and these are things that, yes, you could do them with paper. People used to right.

Jorge Arango: 34:02

In the book I write about early modern scholars and how they would bring people into their households to help them do all of these things, but that's pretty expensive, right, and most of us cannot afford to have a live-in assistant who is reading through our stuff, translating text from other languages, synthesizing, indexing things. And now we have tools that let us do that right. And if we have our thinking already in text form in our computers, we have a huge advantage because all of a sudden we can use these things to help us in our writing planning work. The potential is tremendous.

Zohra Mutabanna: 34:45

The potential is tremendous. Now that brings me to asking the one thing that has intrigued me note taking versus note making. Can you please shed some light on that?

Jorge Arango: 34:55

Yeah, that distinction is. That was also very illuminating for me. It's not something I originated. I picked that up from a book by I think the author is Fiona McPherson, and this goes back to this idea that we use notes as a way to augment our cognitive abilities. And the way that I understood the distinction from Dr McPherson is that note-taking is the kind of notes that we take when we are doing things like listening to a lecture. Right, what we're trying to do is we're trying to capture something so that we can remember it later, versus note-making, which is the more generative use for notes. It's a sort of note that you make when you are planning a project or outlining a text that you're going to write.

Jorge Arango: 35:45

There are different modalities for thinking. In the book I cover both, but I think that the more valuable one, or the one where most of us could lean into and develop greater abilities, is the note-making one, Because I think at this point it's almost like a cliche to say that writing is thinking, but we do think. When we're writing, we are thinking, and the thinking is not happening in the meat computer that we have here over our shoulders. It's happening somewhere between our nervous system and the screen or the nervous system and the page. You know that where we're writing. Let's put it this way I am very excited about anything that promises to help me think better, because thinking better is at the core, it's foundational to being better in every regard, right like if you want to be a better parent, a better teacher, a better worker, a better writer. All of these things entail thinking better, developing your cognitive abilities and anything that you know.

Jorge Arango: 36:52

Whenever I hear of anything that promises to give me better thinking skills, I get excited about that and having the realization that we think with things. You know. We think with a pencil and a piece of paper. We think with an outliner on your computer. We think with, you know, a plain text editor.

Jorge Arango: 37:13

When you understand that what you're doing there is we call it taking notes, but really what you're doing there is your thinking, and that these tools are augmenting your abilities to think, then you can improve your thinking. You can improve your cognitive abilities by developing a few skills and a few practices. And again, I think that a lot of us know the note-taking stuff. It's how we, you know. I went to school and had to take notes during lectures and that's how I learned a lot of what I learned in school. So I think a lot of us have the note-taking stuff down, but it's the note-making, the more generative stuff, the thinking on the page where there's a lot of value to be unlocked. I cover both of them in the book, but I'm particularly excited about the latter.

Zohra Mutabanna: 38:05

Another thing that resonated or that I could connect to. There were several, but some of the insights that I took away were when you're taking notes or making notes, start small, keep it short, think about the audience, and the most fascinating thing for me was think about your future self. Thinking of myself as the audience was another aha moment for me, creating templates. And then, of course, for me, another thing personally that resonated was the mind maps, because, as a writer, I think about the user journey using mind maps. All these things it was easy for me to grasp and understand as a writer, as somebody who is a knowledge worker, somebody who is, I mean, I think, like you said, all of us are knowledge workers. But a lot of what you talk about in the book made sense to me as a writer. For somebody who is not familiar with these terms or somebody who doesn't think of it in that manner, what would your suggestion be when they approach your book?

Jorge Arango: 39:11

Well, I don't think that the book is for everyone, right, in the sense that implicit in everything that we've been talking about is the idea that you are dealing with a lot of information, that you want to learn to think better.

Jorge Arango: 39:26

I know that I am talking to an audience of people who write, you know. So, by definition, you're dealing with a lot of stuff, right? That's not true of everyone, right? So we can start there and, like I said, I think that everyone takes notes. Not everyone has the need to build an elaborate note-taking system with templates and all these things that we've been talking about. I think that the people who are called to do this are people who A either have to deal with a lot of information because of work, you know that might include professional writers, it might include teachers, it might be students or, b it might be people who have a lifelong passion for learning, and there are a lot of people like that. I mean, I don't think it's the majority. I think yeah, I wish it was more, there were more people like that and hopefully, if I can help anyone develop a passion for learning, that would be great, but if you do have a passion for learning, I think it behooves you to think about how you're going to be going about that project, right, and this is something that I learned firsthand because I like to read and I have been reading since I was very young, and I came to the realization that if I didn't write down what I was reading, even if it was just a few sentences about the book I had just finished or whatever, then I would move on to the next book, and two, three years down the line I might remember that I read the book, but I wouldn't be able to remember what it was about or not in detail, right Like I would have like a very vague idea about what the thing was. I decided at one point that whenever I finished a book, I would start writing down what the book was about, and I've been doing that now for long enough that I have well over a decade's worth of little book summaries, and the more recent ones are not so little. Now, if I read a book that I consider important for my learning, I will spend an additional few hours, you know, synthesizing my thoughts and capturing them in a way that I can revisit them later, because at this point I have been burned, I have gone back and I go, oh no, I read that book, what was it about? Like, I know I read this somewhere, right, like what was this about? I have a terrible memory and I've learned that if I don't do something about that, then the time that I spent with the book I may internalize some of the ideas, right, but there's a lot of stuff that might be valuable for me that will be lost. So if you are one of these people who reads, likes to read or pleasure or just to grow as an individual, it behooves you to do something about that right, to have a way to capture those ideas, work with them, nurture them, grow them, right. This is the other thing. I have read books about subjects that are important to me and then, six months later, I will maybe read another book that touches on similar subjects. I would love to have a way to write about those ideas in a centralized way, and that's yet another skill that I teach in this book how to deal with that in a centralized way. And that's yet another skill that I teach in this book how to deal with that Notes.

Jorge Arango: 42:47

The sort of notes that I'm describing in the book are not the sort of notes that you take and forget. They're the sort of notes that you will hopefully revisit throughout your life. Not all of them, right. There's a lot that you won't ever come back to, but there are some ideas in there that will catch you and, if they do, you will probably work with them. If you're going to be writing a blog or a YouTube channel or a book, you might come back to them, and you should have systems to manage that. They will augment your abilities in ways that you can't do just with the meat computer.

Zohra Mutabanna: 43:17

This dovetails into my next question beautifully. We've talked about note-taking and your point is more about the note-making where you're talking about planning, outlining, making notes of those type. Note-keeping is what I'm going to call it. It plays a crucial role in organizing your thoughts and ideas. How do you suggest our listeners integrate modern note-keeping tools with traditional methods to enhance their workflow and creativity? I think you touched upon it a little bit, but is there anything more you'd like to add?

Jorge Arango: 43:50

I will say this. I was talking earlier about metaphors, and there's a metaphor at the core of this book, which is the idea that what you are doing here is you are building what I call a knowledge garden and the idea of the garden again, this is not original to me. Thinking of gardens, botanical metaphors for information management, there's a metaphor that has a long history in the field. It's been used at least since the 1970s in Xerox PARC and I think pardon the pun I think it's a fruitful metaphor because I think people understand what gardens are. Gardens are things that we make for various reasons. The most superficial reason might be something like well, you know, it provides nourishment, like literal nourishment, right, I grow tomatoes or parsley or what have you. But gardens also provide nourishment at another level, right. People who garden find the activity to be one that connects them to reality, to the world.

Jorge Arango: 44:55

I think Thomas Jefferson had a phrase about putting your hands in the soil. Right, like this notion that it grounds you somehow. And gardening is a practice that entails work. It's not something that happens on its own. If you don't tend the garden, it's overgrown with weeds, the plants die, you have to water the plants, you have to prune the branches and stuff. You have to till the soil. There's stuff that you have to do, and the whole point of it is the work. This is not the sort of thing that you would want to automate away. So I find gardening to be a beautiful metaphor for what we're doing here.

Jorge Arango: 45:37

What I would like for folks to do, what I would like for folks to take away from the book and hopefully from this conversation, is that if you work with ideas because you're a writer or because you're a reader, you know you love to learn through books, or maybe not even reading.

Jorge Arango: 45:55

It could be like YouTube videos, right. But if you're someone who likes to learn and work with ideas, you can develop something akin to a garden that lets you work with those ideas over the course of your life, much like a botanical garden. This is not going to be something that is going to make you rich. Probably, you know, it's not something that is going to provide all the nutrients you need, but it's going to provide solace, beauty, refuge, a place to think, a place to think. We need that more than ever. We are beset with stuff claiming our attention, and this is an opportunity for you to take these tools, these very same tools that can be used to grab your attention and snatch it from you and turn them into something where you can have the space to become better, and that, to me, is really really exciting and really powerful.

Zohra Mutabanna: 46:58

That was, at a deep philosophical level, very satisfying to hear for me personally. In your book you talk about nurturing, and I'm glad we had this opportunity to touch upon the knowledge garden metaphor, because as I was reading the book I had that front and center and it started making so much more sense to me, and everything that you just articulated on brings it all together beautifully. I have a couple more questions, and I think you probably answered my second to last question on why one should consider this. This is going to be a major pivot from the deep philosophical conversation that we just had too. As we look towards the future, how do you see the evolution of note-taking, note-making, note-keeping technologies being affected by the emerging AI tools?

Jorge Arango: 47:49

Well, we talked about it a little bit right.

Zohra Mutabanna: 47:51

Yes, we did.

Jorge Arango: 47:52

Generative AI, particularly things like large language models, offer a great opportunity to work with these ideas in different ways. I haven't tried this myself, but I heard recently an interview with somebody who was saying that they've been journaling, like you know, taking daily, making morning notes, taking morning notes on their days and how they were feeling and all that stuff, and they had been doing it for years and they had started using ChatGPT to go through their journals and do things like summarize the year. For them it's like what did I do well this year? What could I do better? The thing was some kind of therapist. I haven't tried it myself because, a I don't know that I would want to upload my personal stuff to OpenAI or any provider, frankly, but there are open source models that you can run on your computer, right, and this idea that well, and I'll say this, even though I haven't done it for things like my journal, I have done it for things that I'm thinking about and that I'm writing, right, like a lot of folks listening in might have had the experience of asking one of these LLMs to summarize something or synthesize something in bullet points, and they are really good at this, right, like for doing searches and stuff like that.

Jorge Arango: 49:16

There are problems with hallucinations, but for things like have a text, here's a text. Summarize this and give me back a few bullet points, I have found it to be really good and really consistent at doing that kind of thing. These are incredible pattern matching tools, right Synthesis tools, summarization tools, translation tools, tools, summarization tools, translation tools. And if you've been doing your thinking in text form, digital text form, for a while, as I have, you're sitting on a corpus that you can work with using AIs. I think the possibilities are tremendous. I'm thinking that I'll give you an example. I've been taking notes on the things that I write about and read about for a long time and at this point I have a fairly sizable set of notes about these things, finding new connections between ideas that I've been working with. That might lead to new books, new workshops, youtube videos, I mean. The possibilities are just tremendous Right.

Zohra Mutabanna: 50:32

To some extent, I have already been doing that with the content that I have. From all the interviews and all the insights that I have got, I see patterns, but then the AI takes it to a whole nother level. So the possibilities are tremendous. I urge my audience to explore, because the community that I work with many writers are averse to trying out AI, and what you just shared, I think, would probably help them in being a little more open to experimenting with AI.

Jorge Arango: 51:06

I will say this I think that any writer, any professional writers today are probably justified in feeling anxious about AI, right, because one of the ways in which this technology has been framed this as a tool that will write for you, right? And teachers have you know. Teachers are having the challenge of having students turn in AI-written essays and all this stuff, and there's a bunch of books on Amazon already that are kind of AI-written right, and I think it's very fair to be anxious about that. It's very obvious, to me at least, that writing is going to change significantly as a result of this thing existing. It's hard for me to say this because I don't write for a living, but I think it's also true of my profession. I think that AI is transforming that as well, and there I see people in my field who are anxious about the change. I am one of the people who is leaning into the change and trying to create the very tools that you could claim will replace me, because I want to do the work better and I want to do the work faster, and I think of these tools as ways to help me do that.

Jorge Arango: 52:20

I saw a movie a few months ago an old movie, I think it was a Buster Keaton movie and it was a movie in which he played a smith, someone who worked with iron I've forgotten the name of it now and this was a movie made in the early days of cinema, right Like it's one of these silent movies, black and white. The interesting thing about watching this is that in this movie he plays a you know, a smith someone, an iron worker. The humor in part of it revolves around his struggles to put shoes on a horse, so he's like shooing a horse. You know. Put shoes on a horse, so he's like shooing a horse, you know.

Jorge Arango: 53:02

The realization I had while watching this was that at the time when that movie came out, that was still a profession that people had because horses were a primary means of transportation.

Jorge Arango: 53:12

Still at the time, right, or maybe, you know, maybe first or second decade of the 20th century, cars were already a thing, but they weren't as widespread as they are now.

Jorge Arango: 53:23

Watching him struggle with the things entailed by that profession and just knowing what happened afterwards, you know, in a few decades there weren't many blacksmiths practicing in the way that is shown in that movie, because the internal combustion engine basically did away with horses and there was no longer a need for that kind of thing. I think that we are dealing with technologies that have the potential I'm not going to be categorical about it, but they have the potential to be as transformative to creative disciplines, especially knowledge management disciplines, as the internal combustion engine was to someone who was shooing horses. Basically, the question is how are you going to react to this? Are you going to hold on to the practices that have brought you where you are, or are you going to be one of the people who starts looking into the internal combustion engine and seeing what its potential is and how it might transform society. I am firmly in the camp that if you can see it coming, it behooves you to check it out at least right.

Zohra Mutabanna: 54:35

Yeah.

Jorge Arango: 54:35

And see what it's about and see how it can help you and on that note, jorge.

Zohra Mutabanna: 54:42

I think it's a wrap. We've covered a lot of good content. I could dive much deeper and I know we are over the top of the hour, so I appreciate your time. Just before I hit stop, is there anything else you would like to add?

Jorge Arango: 54:56

just as a last note, no, it's just been such a treat talking with you, sora, thank you so much for inviting me, and to everyone listening, I feel like we ended on what might be kind of a scary note, I would say you know, we live in a time of change. There are ways to deal with change so that it doesn't make you super anxious, and I just want to wish everyone listening in the best of luck. Learn new things, build a knowledge garden, and we have amazing tools to help us do it. So, again, best of luck to everyone.

Zohra Mutabanna: 55:31

Thank you, Jorge, and listeners definitely go buy that book. You will be walking away with such amazing insights where you can tend to your knowledge garden and just learn more from it and improve your life in some easy ways. Thank you, Jorge. This has been great talking to you and it's been an honor for me too.

Jorge Arango: 55:52

Thank you.

Zohra Mutabanna: 55:53

Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite app, such as Apple, Spotify or YouTube Music. For the latest on my show, follow me on LinkedIn or visit me at wwwinsidetechcomshow. Catch you soon on another episode.