One of the biggest challenges faced by fans of personal knowledge management (PKM) is that their note-taking apps become choked with too many notes that they capture but never use again. Ideas get lost in notes and folders. Tagging and linking notes takes a major commitment of time – which most writers don’t have.
Their hope is that it will serve as a tool that helps them uncover fresh connections, insights and topics that power their writing. But more often than not, their carefully curated personal knowledgebase turns into a dense thicket of knowledge and ideas that are hard to sift through and benefit from.
One potential remedy to this challenge: Collections
One writer and PKM fan whose work I admire, Ev Chapman, recently shared a more useful metaphor for organizing your ideas and knowledge in an accessible and useful way: Collections.
Here’s how she defines them:
“Collections are active containers for your knowledge.
With collections, everything you capture has a purpose. It’s either helping you answer a question, shape a belief, build a concept or solve a real challenge you’re facing right now.
Rather than just being a place to file things away, they help you think, explore and take action.
Collections are alive and dynamic. They help you focus your attention and they grow and evolve with you.”
They “keep everything in context. Instead of having related notes scattered across different topic folders, everything lives where you need it, when you need it.”
6 types of collections
Chapman outlines six ways she uses collections as tools to empower her thinking and writing
- Concepts
- Questions
- Beliefs
- Lists
- Projects
- Challenges/bottlenecks
The shortcoming of collections in note-taking tools
What does this have to do with visual thinking? I’m glad you asked that question.
Collections are a potentially useful way to think about notes and personal knowledge management. But they’re still constrained by the architecture of note-taking apps, which only allow you to see and connect a few notes at a time. Their linear structure doesn’t provide a rich canvas for associative or generative thinking.
But what if you cultivated your collections in a more open, visual environment that makes it easier to see patterns and collections and cultvate your ideas with ease?
I believe mind mapping tools are the perfect “gardens” where you can capture, cultivate and grow collections of loosely related questions, beliefs, concepts and ideas.
Mind maps as a tool for building knowledge collections
What makes mind maps such a powerful tool for collections? Here are some of the key advantages they offer:
- Friction-free idea capture
- Add as much detail as you want – in any medium (topic notes, URL links, file attachments, images and videos, for example)
- Arrange and rearrange what you’ve captured with complete freedom.
- Use icons, color and other topic qualities to transform your collections into tools that help you take action on your ideas.
- The open, skeletal format of the mind map makes it easy to see connections between related ideas. You can either move them together within the structure of the mind map or make their relationships explicit by joining them with a relationship line.
- This same openness makes it easy to see what’s missing – which is very hard to discern in linear, text-based notes.
Here’s an idea map I created that gathers blog post ideas in one place – a perfect example of a project collection:
How can you use collections and mind maps to capture and develop knowledge and ideas?
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