21: Lion Kimbro (1:07:59)

Date: October 20, 2015

By: Alex Strick van Linschoten and Matt Trevithick

Description: Our guest this week is someone who has done a lot of thinking about notes and note-taking. Lion Kimbro now works at Pokemon but he has written chapters in books on note-taking as well as his own book, entitled “How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think”. I first read his book a couple of years ago and think about it fairly regularly. I changed a number of things relating to how I take notes since reading it through and I thought getting him to come on the show would be a unique opportunity to talk through some of the practical implications of the various systems he describes as well as to see how his approach has evolved. Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Lion Kimbro 101:

Lion’s personal website

Kimbro’s Book - How To Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think

Show Notes:

Simple information architecture overview

14:15 - (on hypertext fiction) I think people want a sense of closure, like they know that they read the whole thing.

Overview of hypertext fiction

Amazon’s X-Ray feature for Kindle, a reference tool which functions as a concordance

17:34 - I have difficulty telling friends I’ve read books - what I’ve done is skimmed through to parts that were interesting to me and read them in detail, and that to me is sufficient to me to say I’ve read a book, though friends tell me that’s not enough, and yeah

18:59 - (my book) zooms in on creative thought. It’s focused on ideas. You can monitor your thinking in such - my thinking of thinking has expanded since then, but it focuses on creative thought and originality and ideas.

22:30 - when you look at something, we all think we just stare at things. But when scientists watch how we look at things, our eyes are moving all over the place, framing it. We do the same thing socially.

29:50 - There’s a big school of thought that says you need to write everything down and memorise it, but I’m a huge fan of forgetting the rules. Because when it comes, we can decide to do what’s best from here.

39:03 - A trick for reading and accessing information later: as you’re reading something, and you want to have it, or share it with a friend, just flip to the front of the book and write your friend’s name and the page number, or the idea and the page number, and you have an instant index. 48:54 - My biggest recommendation for people: use your computer to index things. It will save you an enormous amount of time.

51:55 - For collaborative note taking / sharing: Honestly, just text files and dropbox. It’s simple and you’ll get a little notification whenever it’s changed.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done

Kimbro’s preferred task management system: JIRAAnother recommendation: KanbanFlow