If you get value out of this newsletter consider supporting it by becoming a member. You can either get my weekly thoughts or all my courses and my weekly thoughts. You could also purchase a course if that fits your needs better. Members also get all my book notes.

You can get this in your inbox by signing up.

Is the Knowledge Graph Useful?

I fall into the camp that feels the knowledge graphs that people show off are mostly about showing off because the knowledge graphs look cool, but Mark McElroy disagrees with me. In fact Mark highlights my skeptic argument above as false in the article.

The issue I’ve had with the graph view of note connections is that it’s a jumbled mess and has no meaning to it. I’ve used it once to see that I had a node sitting off on its own with only a single connection to the rest of my notes. This single node was one book I read about racism that had no other connections into my notes. Once I identified this I read more about racism in law, real estate, and politics so that the node had many more connections into the rest of my graph.

I believe that Mark says my use was what the graph view is for, but he also says that you should be looking at the connections that are larger to see what topics you continue to come back to so that you understand where your interests are. He also seems to recommend “clicking around” your graph view to see where serendipity leads you.

I still remain unconvinced that most people, most of the time, get more out of their graph view than a pretty image to share in Discord or on social media as some type of bragging rights for how many notes they have.

What about you, do you find utility in the graph view? How does it materially help you regularly to interrogate your notes?

The Power of Ignoring

This is one of my working notes for an upcoming book on how to think better. Keep following PKM weekly to keep track of that project.

Years ago I was under the gun to provide some video training to Asian Efficiency, and I had a bunch of programming clients that wanted work done, and I had some coaching prospects around that needed following up on. We had a fairly new baby, had recently moved, and life overall was hard.

Years later I was managing a small team of web developers who always had questions for me about how to get their jobs done. I was being asked to vet code, and for ways to accomplish tasks, and how to talk with a customer.

The best decision I made in both of those scenarios was to start ignoring all the incoming flood of tasks and pick one task to do it to completion. Me running myself ragged to answer all the questions and deal with all the things was in part a way of proving to myself that I was important.

In the first scenario I focused on my course for Asian Efficiency and ignored everything else for a week. Some of the coaching customers decided to book sessions without me getting back to them to prompt them a few times in a week, and when I looked back it was the same amount of customers as normal. My income wasn’t affected and I saved myself work, so I adopted a much lighter touch with any coaching prospects.

When I was managing a small team, deadlines still happened so the employees I was in charge of had to make decisions when I didn’t provide input. For questions I really had to answer I set up an hour a week where anyone in the company could come ask me questions. This alleviated most of my emails that were simply about quickly checking in because someone either made the decision or they waited till my office hours.

When you’re looking for more time to think, you need to start by saying no and setting boundaries as far as possible because you need space and uninterrupted time to be able to think. Often all those super important things that you have to deal with are more about you proving that you’re important than they are real things that need to be done by you.

Something Interesting

After 34 Years, Someone Finally Beat Tetris. Yup, they didn’t line out, they made the game stop. This is a feat that no one thought was humanly possible just a few years ago.

Yup I use affiliate links sometimes to support the newsletter. If it’s on Amazon, it’s an affiliate link for sure.