How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think by Lion Kimbro.
From the introduction:
This book is about how to make a complete map of everything you think for as long as you like.
Whether that’s good or not, I don’t know- keeping a map of all your thoughts has a “freezing” effect on the mind. It takes a lot of (albeit pleasurable) work, but produces nothing but SIGHT.
If you do the things described in this book, you will be IMMOBILIZED for the duration of your commitment.The immobilization will come on gradually, but steadily. In the end, you will be incapable of going somewhere without your cache of notes, and will always want a pen and paper w/ you. When you do not have pen and paper, you will rely on complex memory pegging devices, described in “The Memory Book”. You will NEVER BE WITHOUT RECORD, and you will ALWAYS RECORD.
YOU MAY ALSO ARTICULATE. Your thoughts will be clearer to you than they have ever been before. You will see things you have never seen before. When someone shows you one corner, you’ll have the other 3 in mind. This is both good and bad. It means you will have the right information at the right time in the right place. It also means you may have trouble shutting up. Your mileage may vary.
You will not only be immobilized in the arena of action, but you will also be immobilized in the arena of thought. This appears to be contradictory, but it’s not really. When you are writing down your thoughts, you are making them clear to yourself, but when you revise your thoughts, it requires a lot of work- you have to update old ideas to point to new ideas. This discourages a lot of new thinking. There is also a “structural integrity” to your old thoughts that will resist change. You may actively not-think certain things, because it would demand a lot of note keeping work. (Thus the notion that notebooks are best applied to things that are not changing.)
….
Sounds bizarre. Yes?
Here is how the BBC’s Giles Turnbull summarized the system:
The system breaks down into simple jottings made during the day – what he calls “speeds”. These can be made on sheets of paper set aside for multiple subjects, or added directly to sheets dedicated to a specific subject. Speeds are made on the fly, as they happen, and it’s up to the writer to transcribe these into another section of the notebook system later on.
Lion suggests using large binders full of loose sheets of paper so that individual sheets can be added, removed and moved from one place to another. Notes can be given subjects and context hints as they are made, to help the writer file them into larger, archived binders when the time comes to organise their thoughts.
Even so, the writer is expected to carry one binder around with them at all times, and add new notes as often as possible, augmented with diagrams, arrows and maps.
With that summary description, it becomes apparent that Lion has reinvented the commonplace book, this one limited to your own thoughts.
Have you thought any more about how to create a digital commonbook interface?