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\begin{document}
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\frontmatter
\title{How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think}
\author{Lion Kimbro}
\date{2003}
\maketitle

\tableofcontents

\chapter{License}
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit
\mbox{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/} or send a letter to...\\
Creative Commons,\\
559 Nathan Abbott Way,\\
Stanford, California 94305, \\
USA.

\chapter{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 \emph{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.)

For all of this immobility, this freezing, for all of these negative
effects, \emph{why on Earth} would anyone want to do this?

Because of the INCREDIBLE CLARITY that comes with it. It may feel
like, doing this, that for the first time in your life, you REALLY
have a CLEAR IDEA of what kinds of thoughts are going through your
head. You'll really understand your ideas. And you'll also see
connections that you were never consciously aware of before. You'll
see a structure and a pattern in your life. You're goals and
psychology will become clearer to you. You'll be clearer too about
what you do NOT understand.

It is like taking a microscope to your brain. You'll see the little
thoughts moving around, \emph{literally}, as you walk them through the maps
you discover within yourself.

You'll see what you care about, quite clearly. You'll be familiar with
your mental terrain. Incredible clarity. Addictive clarity. Vast
clarity. Extraordinary clarity.

You will Love it, if you are anything like me. It will feel natural
and free; There will be a freedom within your mind. You'll create
astonishing things, and you'll find great tools that will help you in
your life after you are immobilized.

Or at least, \emph{it will seem that way}.

Time will tell whether such an experience has been useful to me or
not. I still do not know, and will not know for some time now.

The experience is very much a modern version of the
``walkabout''. Except for instead of going out there somewhere in the
world, you hole up in your mind.

Is it useful? I still don't know.

Thus it is with great hesitation that I present for the public this
work on notebooks. (That is, my notebook technique.)

I want to digress and say something here as well:

I am astonished that there isn't a field of study of notebooks. I have
searched on the net, and while I have found a page here and there on
some type of notebook method, it is almost ALWAYS one of the following
two things:

\begin{description}
\item[The Diary]
   A bunch of entrees, chronologically based, maybe with a TOC, in
   which a person keeps a record of their thoughts.
   AKA ``The Journal''.

\item[The Category Bins]
   A bunch of notes, stuffed into category bins, maybe 2 or 3 levels
   deep.
\end{description}

That's IT. In all the world, people have only been putting their notes
in the above two ways.

Sure, there are a few others, but people aren't comparing notes,
talking about such things.
\footnote{Ted Nelson in a very special case 
and deserves particular comment.  Sadly, he seems a bit unhinged, and doesn't 
write much about the topic of keeping notes openly on the web.}
\footnote
{Note 
added Later: David Allen's ``Getting Things Done'' system is
actually pretty cool. Sadly, it does not appear on the Internet. But
it's a cheap book. If you are interested in contributing to a study of
notebook systems, this is a must read.}
I would think that something like
intelligence augmentation through notebook study would be one of the
first things that people talk about on the Internet! I would think
that one of the first things we would be greeted with on the Internet
would be, ``Did you know how to use Notebooks to be smarter?'' At the
very least, it would be accessible.

Instead, there is a vast desert.

My solution to understanding this lack is my faith in what I call ``The
Anarchist Principle'': If there is something \emph{really cool}, and you
can't understand why somebody hasn't don it before, it's because \emph{you
haven't done it yourself}. That's DIY for those in the know: Do It Yourself.

Now I have a third thing I want to talk about, before getting on with
the text.
\footnote
{First, I wrote about the things that my notebook system will do to
you, then I wrote about the dearth of notebook study on the Web, and
now I'm writing about this third thing.}

I am just SPITTING THIS TEXT OUT. I know that my understanding of
personal projects and getting them completed is low. I know my
weaknesses- that I am bad at getting huge projects done. So what I'm
doing is just SPITTING THIS TEXT OUT.

I figure that if you are reading this, you'd much rather have this
than nothing at all. And that's what's out there, if you aren't
reading this- NOTHING AT ALL. I mean, you can always keep a diary or a
bunch of category bins, if you like. That's a real no brainer. But
besides those two, and treatises on Ted Nelson's madness, you won't
find a whole lot.

So please excuse the poor formatting of this. It's raw, coercive,
straight text. It's unorganized. It's terrible.

Maybe one day I will improve this. But that day is not today. Today is
a day for spitting text out. With God's mercy, I will learn how to
finish big projects. I pray for that ability frequently. If you can
mentor me in the subject, I will happily hear you out. But I have not
learned it yet.
\footnote{I actually believe that we should all communicating with
what Robert Horn calls ``Visual Verbal Language''. The problem is that
we don't have good tools to do so. Damn. It's a shame. When the tools
come, there will be a revolution in communication just as big, if not
bigger, than the revolutionary introduction of the Internet. So:
Double Apologies for swabbing a mass of text at you.}

Let's see: We've talked about:
\begin{enumerate}
\item The Terrible Things this notebook system will Do to you.
\item The Nonexistence of an Internet field of Notebook study.
\item How I am just spitting this text out into the world.
\end{enumerate}

Lastly, I want to briefly introduce some of the unique features of my
notebook system. Things that my notebook system does that NO OTHER
NOTEBOOK SYSTEM that I have ever seen does. These are the results of
years of keeping different types of notebook systems, and taking the
best ideas from each.

1) Strategy.

This notebook system allows you to STRATEGIZE. Very few notebooks do
that. I mean, sure, you can start some pages on, ``what will my
strategy be now?'', but then you have to figure out what all your
options are. The notebook system I describe has built in strategy
management. You will always know what your options and priorities are
in notebook management.

It does this with the aid of maps...

2) Maps.

Tables of Contents (TOCs) are TERRIBLE. TERRIBLE TERRIBLE
TERRIBLE. Their main utility is in providing you the next number to
number something.

You want MAPS of Contents, or what I call ``MOCs''. This is like a table
of contents, but far more dynamic. Is an entry really important? Make
it's MOC entry really big. Unimportant? Make it small. Or even pull
out the name, and just surround the page number in parenthesis. If you
are ever investigating that area, you can look it up to see what it
is.

You can put related concepts close to each other, REGARDLESS of the
actual physical position of the pages.

You can move things around. Trace paths of connection through. Make
non-ordinal order apparent. All with Maps.

So don't keep a TOC, unless the material is intrinsically linear (a
chronology, without episode tracking.) Keep a MOC!

More in the text on this subject. This is just a brief introduction
for the sake of introducing some major concepts from my notebook
system.

3) Color and Glyph Management

Abbreviations/Shorthand, and Color. You MUST use a 4color pen. (I
mean, you don't NEED one, but it's so amazingly helpful, that once you
start using it, you'll NEVER want to go back.)

You'll develop shorthands, and you'll want to trust that you can
decipher them later. You'll thus need systems for cataloging your
shorthands, and there is such a system in the notebook system I am
describing.

4) Speed Lists

You will be capturing EVERY SINGLE THOUGHT. Well, every thought that
is more interesting than ``I need to go to the bathroom'', or ''I need to
take the trash out''.

(Actually, needing to take the trash out may enter, as per the Getting
Things Done system. SHOULD you decide to integrate my system with the
GTD system. More later on the subject.)

Speed lists are the answer to the demand. Speed lists are vast lists
of simple thoughts- about 1-50 words. Generally around one line.

There are two types of speed lists- pan-subject and
subject. Pan-subject speed lists are for all thoughts, you take a
pan-subj speed list out with you to work or to wherever you are
going. Subject lists you keep in a cache notebook, and you have one
per subject. You'd prefer to just use your subject lists, but
sometimes you have to make do with a pan-subject speed list, and then
transfer out from there to the individual speed lists. More on all of
this later.

In particular: You do NOT want to be just scribbling thoughts out on a
piece of any old paper. You want at least a pan-subj speed, with a few
exceptions. (If you are having a thought-attack, you may need to make
do w/ just any old piece of paper, and then go from there to the
subject pages.)

Okay: I'm getting too much into details.

So four advantages are:
\begin{itemize}
\item Strategy
\item Mapping
\item Color/Glyph
\item Speeds
\end{itemize}

They work together marvelously. In particular, Strategy, Mapping, and
Speeds all directly affect and rely on one another.

So there we have it.

\begin{enumerate}
\item What this system will do to you. (EXPECT IT.)
\item The nonexistence (to date!) of an Internet study of Notebooks.
\item How I am spitting this text out.
\item The advantages of my system.
\end{enumerate}

The Introduction is over.

\chapter{System Overview}
I will be talking about the following things:

\begin{itemize}
\item Intra-Subject Architecture
\item Extra-Subject Architecture
\item Materials
\item The Question of Computers - don't get all excited now.
\item Theory of Notebooks
\item General Principles
\end{itemize}

Let me talk at a high level about what this is all about.


The notebook system roughly divides all of your thoughts into
``Subjects''. What subjects? Depends on your thought patterns. In the
Subjects section, we'll talk about how to divide your thoughts amongst
subjects.

Now, there are two domains: ``Extra-subject'' and ``Intra-subject'': that
is, outside and inside of your subjects.

\emph{Intra-subject}: Within a particular subject, you'll have an
organization. You'll have your speed thoughts for that subject, you'll
have your maps, you'll have your big dissertations (``Point of
Interest'', or ``POI''), you'll have your cheat sheets, your
abbreviations/shorthands (``A/S'') particular to that subject, all sorts
of wonderful things. Most important though, are your speeds and your
maps.


Now, beyond the subject, there is a whole field of all your
subjects. You'll have the ``GSMOC''- the ``Grand Subject Map of
Contents'', whereon you'll see a gigantic map of EVERY THING THAT YOU
THINK ABOUT. Just imagine that right now: \emph{Wouldn't you be interested
in seeing such a thing?} When I think about my GSMOC, I see a mirror
of my mind, for the 3-5 months that I kept my notebooks. (The borders
are fuzzy, because I gradually evolved into the notebook system I am
describing to you.)

I mean, that, right there, is worth the price of admission. The GSMOC
is a pretty impressive thing. \verb| =^_^= |

Okay. So there are steps and promises that apply beyond the field of a
single subject, and there are steps and promises that apply within the
field of a single subject.

Now extra-subject and intra-subject \emph{float on top of} your
\emph{MATERIALS}. We're talking about pen and paper and your binders. And
some other things: You'll need those little donut holes things to
protect your paper, and you'll need little stickies to put onto your
paper, your maps. This will help with strategy and other map
management functions. So I have a section on materials and all that
stuff. Great stuff. What to look for in picking a binder. Wonderful.

There: We've knocked off the first three:
\begin{itemize}
\item Intra-subj
\item Extra-subj
\item Materials
\end{itemize}

Three more to go:
\begin{itemize}
\item The ? of Computers
\item Theory of Notebooks
\item General Principles
\end{itemize}

Okay, I'll take the ? of Computers last. General principles first,
then Theory, then ?'s of Computers.

\emph{General Principles}:
There are many patterns common in the steps and promises of the
notebook. Things such as ``How do I lay out a page?'', the concept of
``Late Binding'' and how it applies to the notebooks. ``Out cards.'' The
use of color. Partitioning strategy. Writing
quality. Psychology. General mapping principles. Important stuff, but
not specific to a particular position in the hierarchy.

\emph{Theory of Notebooks}:
Why use notebooks at all? (Partly talked about in the introduction.)
How does this work? Observations about how subjects gestate. How
information flows, becomes knowledge, then becomes wisdom as it
integrates into our life. How thoughts integrate. How the speeds
grow. And a theory of (conscious) thinking. Many things to talk about.

Finally, the \emph{Question of Computers}. My least favorite subject, because
people can get so damn irrational about computers.

I don't know HOW many times I've seen people twiddling about with
their little palm pilots, convinced that because they have
``technology'' on ``their side'', that they are being more effective than
a man holding a piece of paper and a pen. The absurdity of these
devices is astounding.

I know that there are legitimate uses for these things. I see doctors
carrying them around with up-to-date info dictionaries and what not, I
know that they use them, yadda yadda yadda. And yet the simple fact
is, 99% of the general public using these devices have no need for
them. They'd be much better served with a small pad of paper that they
keep with them, and a pen.

There are exceptions to this: You can argue a good case for using them
to play games (though I'd rather use a Game Boy Advance), or for using
them to use as an address book. Great. I love it.

But for the Love Of God, if you live within the time period of
2003-2005 at the very least, do NOT try to use one of these devices to
keep your notes!

This extends further to computers.

Now: All this will change. IN THE FUTURE, computers will be the way to
go. But we are not there yet, NOR will we be there in the next 3-5
years. Remember: Even if the computer is fast, you still need software
that won't get in your way.

I will address this subject again, later in the book. Feel free to
skip it, if you plan to use paper. But if you are one of the ``I paid
big money for this thing, and it's high tech, and it's sooo cyber,
that it must be better than anything pen and paper can give me,''
please give serious thought to what I have to say.

I'm positioning it later in the book, so that you can have already
have read about maps. I mean, maps right there- these little devices,
and even my big computer, doesn't get maps right. But you'll see how
this works as we read- no need for me to go off the deep end now.

SO.

In Summary:

\begin{itemize}
\item Intra-subj
\item Extra-subj
\item Materials
\item The ? of Computers
\item Theory of Notebooks
\item General Principles
\end{itemize}

That's what I'm going to be talking about now.

Here, let's put that in order:

\begin{enumerate}
\item Materials
\item General Principles
\item Intra-subj
\item Extra-subj
\item Theory of Notebooks
\item The Question of Computers
\end{enumerate}

By the way- in case I hurt your feelings about computers- I want to
add two things:

\begin{enumerate}
\item 
I am an experienced programmer. I've been programming computers
since I was 7 years old, typing in BASICA programs by hand on my
mom's COMPAQ 8088. I formatted her hard drive by accidentally going
into low level format instructions using ``debug'', experimenting
with assembly language, when I was about 10. I am now 25. I love
computers. I just happen to recognize the limitations of where
we are at right now, that's all.
\item Computers will be the SALVATION of this whole system I am
describing right now. So if you feel offended knowing that I am
dumping on them right now, know that that's not going to be the
case for long. Paper is unwieldy, large, requires storage, and a
host of other ills. Copying from page to page to page is just a
nightmare. It is a necessary nightmare, right now, but it is a
nightmare. Computers will save us from it.
\item Hah! I'm sneaking in a \#3. (Part of my ``no-edit policy'' when
spitting stuff out. Apologies.) I WILL DESCRIBE, if I DO
NOT FORGET, just WHAT steps you can take NOW, IF YOU ARE
INTERESTED, to ``get the ball rolling''. There are some easy
programs that you can make right now that would make this system
AWESOME. I just don't have the time to code them up right now. But
I will describe them, and if you like, you can code them up.
Hell, I'll even throw in a description of the ideal computer
notebook system- assuming I have ``magic paper''- and how it will
dramatically increase our intelligence, provided that we
can solve the versioning problem as well. (Note: Ted Nelson and
Company went pretty batty WRT the versioning problem. Did
they solve it? I don't know. I have heard rumors that some of
Ted's protege's work for the CIA now, though.)
\end{enumerate}

Speaking of the CIA- I want to include in this book somewhere (right
here I guess) a comparison between this notebook system, and an
Intelligence Agency. INTELLIGENCE is having Good Information available
at the Right Time at the Right Place. Notebooks help with that by
moving information to a place where it will be seen at the right time-
when you access the notebook. There are a lot of similarities there
with an Intelligence Agency. Okay. I'm done. Interlude out.\footnote{Yes, I do
recognize the irony. I'm just spitting this out with poor
organization. But damn it, I'm not a skilled writer, and I have SO MUCH
I want to express, so you'll just have to make do for now. Sorry.}

Where were we?

\begin{enumerate}
\item Materials
\item General Principles
\item Intra-subj
\item Extra-subj
\item Theory of Notebooks
\item The Question of Computers
\item Getting Started
\end{enumerate}

Okay. And be aware I'll probably need to skip back and forth a little
bit. Sorry, just one of the problems of having a straight linear text,
rather than a fully mapped out domain.

\mainmatter
\chapter{Materials}

Some topics for ``Materials'':

\begin{itemize}
\item Paper
\item Pen
\item Binders
\item 3-hole punch
\item donut rings
\item stickies (NOT yellow sticky tabs!)
\item tab dividers
\item pockets
\end{itemize}

And associated issues:

\begin{itemize}
\item Storage
\item Carrying
\item Archival
\item Handling Optimizations
\end{itemize}

So lets start with the materials- what you need to have with you.

\subsection*{PEN}

You need a pen. Actually, you need three. And they need to have little
four color clippies- Red, Green, Blue, and Black.

Theoretically, you can do this all with a black pen, but TRUST ME, you
don't want it. Your ability to very rapidly switch colors will way
more than make up for the nicer line that the G2 gel pens give
you. Really.

You need one to carry with you, you need one for backup, placed in a
trusted place, and you need one to be a backup to the backup. YES, you
really need this. If you are wasting time looking for a pen that you
lost, you are just wasting time. The pen will come back. In the mean
time, you need to write, so you've got to fetch your backup. You have
a backup to the backup. If you have ready access to a store, you need
to buy another pen, should you not find your first pen by then.

These 4-color pens are expensive. Remember: Buy 3. \emph{Your pen is your 
life - don't lose it}.  But when you do, don't hesitate to start in with
the backup.

Next: You want to have a list in your notes of the locations to search
for your pen. Mine looked like this:

\begin{enumerate}
\item Jacket 
\item Pockets 
\item Pants 
\item Pockets 
\item Buried 
\item Inside Notebooks.
\end{enumerate}

Re: the last: ``Buried Inside Notebooks.'' IF YOU DO THIS SYSTEM, that
will actually be a VERY common occurrence. Because you'll have 2-3
inches of paper. Those 4-color pens are BIIIIG and FAT. But they
aren't so big that they can't get completely lost amidst a big fat
chunk of paper. Trust me. So actually open up the book and flip
through sections,looking for your pen.

I'm not going to talk about this much; This is just something you'll
find with experience.

So that's the deal with the pen. I'll talk more about what the colors
are for in the ``General Principles'' section.

Next.

\subsection*{PAPER}

You want lots of it. Always have at least 2 reams unopened, of about
150 sheets each.

Get COLLEGE RULE. You want as many lines on these as you can, because
information density is the name of the game. 3 holes, of course, so
it'll go in your binder.

8 1/2" x 11", or the new 8" x 10 1/2"?

Don't laugh- it's a serious question.

There are trade offs to both.

I used 8``x10 1/2'' for most of my notes. It was good because they fit
within the larger tab dividers. Yeah. 8x10.5 is also a lot
cheaper. With the volume of paper that you will purchase, price can
become an issue.

But if I were to do this again (and I intend to- I intend to do this
once, for three months, once every 3-5 years, to gain a ``situation
awareness'' I would use full 8.5x11".

Why? It's not really the ``extra bit of page'' that is important (it
isn't- having a better rule is far more important), but rather that
your paper conforms to the global standard for paper.

You are invariably going to want to include leafs from outside your
notebook system. And you should eventually make your own templated
papers: You'll make standard form sheets, print them onto printer
paper, and include it in your notebook.

Printer paper doesn't come in 8.5``x11''. So you have some big pages and
some little pages. Yuck! When it comes to quickly flipping through
pages to find a particular page number- yuck! It gets difficult.

So get 8.5x11" college ruled 3-hole-punch paper.

\subsection*{BINDERS}

Major important.

First, let me dispel notebooks:
Don't use them. I'm talking about spiral bound notebooks.

I used to use them. I have a huge collection of spiral bound notebooks
in my closet. I love them, they are so cute and self-contained. And
partitioning them is kind of fun, even.

But the binder system just so completely blows them out of the water,
that I will just never go back to those things.

This isn't to say that notebooks don't have a place- THEY DO! Just not
in this system.

Notebooks are great when you are doing a straight chronology. Or you
are keeping JUST RECORDS. Not a big fat intricate
total-thought-keeping system that I am describing here, but rather,
I'm talking about- you have a business, and you are keeping records
for it, and so you buy a notebook because it's nice and self contained
and stuff like that. Another nice thing is that you know the pages
aren't going anywhere. There are times where that's not what you
want. And you can turn pages easier. It's just easier.

But this system that I am describing:

Impossible. You cannot do it like that.

In this system I am describing, you MUST be able to insert pages
between pages. And it's so incredibly useful to be able to lift 50
sheets and put them in another binder entirely.

Okay, so, please don't use notebooks. You will die. Quickly.


Now, on to Binders.

What you want to look for:

\begin{itemize}
\item Inside Pockets
\item Transparent Outside Pockets
\item Obstructions on the Outside Spine
\item Sheet lifters
\item Ring Type
\item Width/Size
\item Durable vs. Sucky
\end{itemize}

So, let me start with the last one. I forget what they call the
``non-durable'' ones. They cost less. Maybe ``Economy'' or something like
that. DON'T GET THEM! YES, they are CHEAPER. BUT, even on the budget
that I'm on, you do NOT want them. Because they are going to snap open
when they shouldn't. Believe me, there's nothing worse than being on
the bus, hitting the notebook the wrong way, and suddenly WHAM- 100
pages on the floor. Luckily they are numbered and you can put them all
back in the original order, but-

\emph{Trust} me- Go with Durable.

You'll have to unchink both sides to open the ring, but you'll do so
with the knowledge that it's keeping your data safe!

DURABLE! All the way!

Okay, next, we'll talk about width/size and the ring type.

If you are getting, say, a 1``-1.5'' notebook (my carry-about notebook is
somewhere in there), then just get the normal rings. They are three
loops, bound to a metal binding, blah blah blah.

But if you are getting anything larger (and you should have at least
one of these, for your common store- it's going to be BIG), then you
want to get what I call a ``half-loop''. I'm sure there's formal names
for this stuff, but I don't care. These things look like one half is a
loop (as normal), but the other half is straight, and has a 90 degree
crook at the end. ALSO, it's not attached to the binding of the
binder..! It's attached to THE BACK SIDE of the binder.

These things are SO great. It costs more, but GET IT.


What it does is it keeps your papers from flying out all over the
place when you open your deeply packed notebook. That little 90 degree
crook stops the pages. It's great. You'll have to see it to believe
it, but do. It's wonderful.

So: Big Notebook, get the half-loop. Small notebook, I think they are
all just normal full-loops. Never seen a small notebook with a half
loop.

Sheet lifters. If your binder has a sheet lifter, Awesome. I like
these. I'm not sure why. They just seem to help. This is more of a
spiritual belief on my part; I'm not really sure. But I leave them
there and they seem to be useful.

Now I'll talk about inside and outside pockets, and then the possible
obstructions on the outer spine. Then we'll be done talking about
binders. (It's a fetish thing, I guess.)

The inside pockets are really useful. I use them to store tabs in when
they aren't in use.

Oh- REMEMBER that you (if you could) bought those pockets, right?
Stick one at the front of every binder. Store donut holes and stickies
in them. That's just the place to do it. And you'll store the tabs'
``guts'' in there too. You know, these long sheets of 1" wide paper,
perforated at about 1/6" in height. You write whatever the tab's name
is on them, tear them off, and put them in the tab page, right? And
then you put the tab page into your notes, and you can quickly flip to
them. Tab page guts- you know what I'm talking about, right?

Good. (One day, I may, or someone may, put pictures in this
description. Then those of you who don't get ``tab guts'' can see what I
mean.)

In the inside pockets, you'll store larger things like your tab pages
themselves. And when people give you stuff, and of course they didn't
triple hole punch it, you'll put it in there until you get home and
punch it yourself.

Outside pockets. This is really important.

You're going to identify your notebooks quickly by the outside
pockets. You can get away with not doing this, but it's a pain in the
butt. Pay the extra money (this is becoming a theme, is it not? trust
me, I'm not rich, if you haven't picked up by reading this yet- [HEY,
I'm a PROGRAMMER, and it's the year 2003] but pay the extra money
nonetheless) and get the pockets.

Here's what I do with them:

For archive notebooks, I put the letters that are archived. For
example, ``A-M'' and ``N-Z''.

My common-access notebook (a big fat one) doesn't have covers. I think
that's because I got it for free at a college giveaway, and wasn't
being picky. No matter, it is jet black, and none of the others are,
so I can easily identify it.

My carry-about notebook has, ``default'', two pictures of Lions on
it. My name is Lion, so I put Lions in there, and people are able to
put it together that it's mine. The Lions are smiling, and it
communicates something of my nature to people. I think.

But usually the ``default'' isn't there. I keep a variant of the GTD
system running (``Getting Things Done'' by David Allen), and so I
generally have my day's alerts, options, and chores on the very
front. (Not that this is strictly defined in GTD, but I've adapted it
a bit.)

And I usually have on the back cover, covering a Lion, a general plan
for how my day will go out and bus trips (http://transit.metrokc.gov)
for the day. It is very, very useful.

Finally, you want to look at the spine, if you have outside pockets,
and make sure it is not obstructed. Frequently there are three ``bolts''
on the outer spine, and they sometimes pass it through the transparent
pocket on the spine. NOOOOOOOO! We don't want that!

That means you can't stick an identifying paper back there! Or if you
can, you can only dig it in half an inch. No, that's not for you! You
want to be able to put a paper in there that has the name of the
binder on it, so you can quickly ID it when a bunch of binders are
stacked in a row.

There. I am done dissecting binders. If I omitted something, mail me
at lion@speakeasy.org

3-hole punch

Again- you're going to want to print out sheets, and then include
them. Or you're going to want to include things that people give
you. Very well then, you're going to need to x3 hole punch it. It's a
wonderful tool to have, and it will go a long way. I absolutely adore
mine.

Lets go through these small items quickly:

\begin{itemize}
\item Donut Rings

I don't know what the official name is for these things. They are
flat, round, have a hole in the middle, and they reinforce paper.

When you have a lot of papers in your notebook, they will eventually
start to rip at the holes. The rip will grow, and grow, and the next
thing you know, your paper doesn't stay inside your notebook. The
solution is to, when one hole tears, immediately reinforce all three
with these donut rings. I don't know if you need to, but to be safe, I
put 6 O-rings to a page. Three on the front of the holes, and three on
the back.

I've never had a problem since. I've never seen a donut tear.

\item Stickies

Okay- these are NOT yellow sticky tabs!

What these are, are these little tiny stickers that look like small
rectangles. They are about .5" wide, if that. You can stick and
unstick and restick them to paper, AND THE PAPER DOES NOT TEAR OR DROP
INK AS YOU DO SO.

These are AMAZINGLY useful.

You will use these extensively as you STRATEGIZE over your notebook.

A brief explanation for now:

Strategy is ultra-time-sensitive. It also involves a lot of
prioritizing, and the priorities will change- rapidly.

You don't want to mix up your rapid-change stuff with your low-change
stuff. That is, you don't want permanent marks on your pages for
things that are changing rapidly. So you use these stickies.

On your GSMOC (Grand Subject Map of Contents), you'll have stickies
pointing you to major important areas of work or thought. You'll take
them off when they cease to be important, or when you fulfill
them. The same goes for the subject maps within each subject.

That's basically it. Small idea, but EXTREMELY useful. I'll write more
about it when it comes time to talk about it.

\item tab dividers

You will use these to keep your subjects apart, and a few other
things.

\item pockets

Now I REALLY don't know what these things are called. My girlfriend
got them for me by stealing a few from work. When I saw them, I
understood why.

These are little pockets, that you can stick ANYWHERE. They have a
plastic white back, and a transparent front. The back and front form
the pocket, which opens from above, and is sealed around the edge. But
the back ALSO has a sticky thing. You peel off a layer, and you can
stick the whole pocket ANYWHERE. This is VERY useful.

I use the pocket to store the following things:

\begin{itemize}
\item my donut holes
\item my stickies
\item stamps (as in, postal stamps)
\end{itemize}

It has worked like a charm.
\end{itemize}

So in recap, your shopping list is:

\begin{itemize}
\item paper - get about 8 reams, college rule, 8.5x11", to start with.
\item pen - 3 four-color pens.
\item x3 hole punch - get it at a thrift store if you want it cheap.
\item donut holes - get 1-2 packages of many sheets.
\item stickies - get 1-2 packages of many sheets.
\item tab dividers - get about... 50 tabs. To start with.
\item pockets - if you can find 'em, get at least 4 or 5.
\end{itemize}

Now we talk about transport issues:

\begin{itemize}
\item Storage
\item Carrying
\item Archival
\item Handling Optimizations
\end{itemize}

Storage, Carrying, and Archival will be one big topic here. It's all
intermingled.

SO.

You are keeping notes. You have papers. Here is a sort of scale of
your papers:

\begin{enumerate}
\item scrawled notes on fortune cookie papers, backs of napkins, etc.,.
\item scrawled notes on blank paper.
\item notes collected onto pan-subject speed lists.
\item notes collected in your carry-about binder.
\item notes collected in your common-store binder.
\item notes in the archive.
\end{enumerate}

There is another category, hovering around 5.5: special purpose
collections. For example, I have a binder for ``Computers''. In it, it
has subjects such as ``Networking'', ``Debian'', ``Programming'',
``Software'', ``XSLT'', etc., etc.,.

I should mention there is also item ZERO:

0) stored in your mind on a peg list.

I'll talk about that later. If I forget to, mail me, and let me know
that I forgot: lion@speakeasy.org. Yes, I know that I could keep a
list of promises to keep here in my Emacs buffer. But to be frank,
after having been keeping so many lists for so many months, that I
really just don't feel like making one. Pardon my rudeness, but if you
actually DO what I am describing here, you'll understand what I'm
talking about. Back to the subject at hand.

So let me describe each of these sources.

SCRAWLED NOTES ON FORTUNE COOKIE PAPERS

Some times, you just flat out DON'T have your carry-about binder
with you. And you don't have your pan-subject speeds paper. And you
don't even have a blank paper. And your peg list is full, or you don't
feel like cycling it.

So you just have to make do with what you have.

You put a note on the back of the envelope and stuff it in your
pocket. Or you take that fortune cookie slip out and write on it. Or
whatever.

GREAT!

I mean, it sucks. But at least you got that thought! Good for you.

SCRAWLED NOTES ON BLANK PAPER

Or maybe you have a blank piece of paper in reach. Write the thought
of it, and put it in your pocket.

PAN-SUBJECT SPEEDS

But if you can, be prepared in the morning, and put a pan-subject
speeds page in your pocket.

I'll talk much more about speeds in my exposition on ``Intra-Subject
Architecture'', but a little bit should appear here.

The Pan-subjects speeds page is optimized to have graduate-student
rule. This is beyond College rule. You want 40+ lines on a
pan-subjects speed page to cram thoughts into. Again: DENSITY is the
name of the game.

Furthermore, the pan-subject speeds is partitioned. It has:

\begin{itemize}
\item Transcription Check-off
\item Subject
\item Hint
\item Content
\end{itemize}

You can put whatever you want in there. Mine also has a place for a
``Psi'' marker. That's where you list what type of thought it is, in
terms of ``Principle'' or ``Observation'' or ``Warning'' or ``Possible
Action'' or ``Goal'' or ``Problem'' or ``Starting Point'' or a host of other
glyphs. I'm not going to talk about these because they are beyond the
scope of Notebooks. They go more into mental techniques; Has to do
with mental structure and the anatomy of thought. While related and
quite fascinating, I'm just not going to go there. Whole 'nother
discussion for a whole 'nother day.

The point is, the format is malleable. Include whatever you want. I
also have a date marker at the top of the page, for the Chrono
archives. Whatever you want.

DO NOT PUT THOUGHT NUMBERS on the Pan-Subject Speeds page though. Bad
idea. The purpose of the Pan-Subj speeds is to be a TEMPORARY
placeholder for ideas.

So what are these four things:

Transcription Check-off: You check the box after you have moved the
idea OUT to where it needs to go. Don't check it when you first put
the thought in.

Subject: This will tell what subject the thought will go
into. Remember: The subjects are the big things divided by the tab
delimiters that have their whole own infrastructure on their own, that
I will describe later.

Hint: Now, this is a quick 1-2 word, maybe 3 word, description of how
this thought fits into things.

Something I learned late, but that is very important, and very
essential to this whole process, is that:

\begin{center}
WHEN A NEW THOUGHT APPEARS\\
IT DOESN'T DO SO IN A VACUUM\\
IT DOES SO IN A CONTEXT.\\
\end{center}

Words to the wise.

So the ``hint'' describes the context. This is
VERY IMPORTANT!

The context is fresh in your mind when you get the thought! It would
take a while to recognize the thought, and then identify the context,
if you didn't.

I used to try to think of every context a thought could fit in, and
then try to place it in as many places as I could. WHILE THIS IS THE
STRATEGY TO PURSUE WHEN USING A COMPUTER SYSTEM\footnote{See
http://speakeasy.org/~lion/weird.html to see an example of this}, this
is NOT the strategy to pursue in the paper system!

Besides, the thought is MOST useful in the ORIGINAL context, 95% of
the time.

And your hint- that's going to be USED. In some respects, it's EVEN
MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE THOUGHT ITSELF! Because, as you will see if
you do this for a while, it is STRUCTURE and INTEGRATION that is
important- the actual contents of the thoughts are far less
meaningful. Once you have the structure in front of you, the content
because almost obvious..! We'll use that fact in a bit, as we shorten
titles to just Speed Numbers. Don't worry about that now, though.

And then there's the content of the thought itself.

Now, say you're in a hurry- right? You just want to jot down a
thought. You're running medical records, and you can't carry your
carry-binder with you as you do so. Hey, there are limitations in
life. But you were good, and folded up a pan-subj speeds with you to
carry around. You unfold it, and write down the content of the
thought, greatly abbreviated, into an open ``content'' slot.

Do you have to fill in the hint as well? And the subject?

NO!

Just wait for break. In break, you can flesh out the content if you
like, and you can also fill in the subject and the hint. It won't be
hard. Just don't wait a whole day to get to it- do it SOON.

Now focus your thoughts on the very next work step, because you want
to STOP thinking ASAP.

Note that the pan-subj speeds paper is FAR better than a blank piece
of paper, because it provides order and space to fill in. Believe me:
When you start transcribing off the pan-subject speeds to the speed
pages, you'll understand how useful this is.

NEXT:

NOTES COLLECTED IN YOUR CARRY-ABOUT BINDER

Your carry-about binder will be YOUR BEST FRIEND.

That's right: You are going to carry this EVERY PLACE THAT YOU
CAN. Going to the movies? Riding the bus?

Wherever you go, your carry-about binder is going with you.

Thus you will want to be very particular, even religious, about your
carry-about binder.

(Note: As mentioned, there will be times where you will be ripped
apart from your carry-about binder by force of circumstance. If you
can, bring a pan-subject speed with you. Always keep your carry-about
well stocked with pan-subj speeds so that when you depart, you can
carry a catch away with you.)

A ``Catch'': ``Catch'' is a word I use to describe any device that is used
to keep thoughts as they come.

There are two basic types of thinking: Intentional and
Incidental. Intentional is you sitting down, thinking some issue
out. You'll be doing that, mostly amidst POI's (``Point-of-Interest
Pages''). But most of your thoughts will come while you are
out-and-about. So you'll have to catch them. There are various traps,
called ``catches'', that do this. The speed lists are the first good
line of defense. You have some poor ones to: the aforementioned
napkins and fortune cookie slips and envelopes, and blank pages. You
also have the peg's\footnote{``Tie Noah Ma Rye Law Shoe Cow Ivy Bee Dice Tit
Ton Tomb Tire Towel Dish Tack Dove Tub Nose...'' - yes, I chose
Dice-Tit-Ton, I know... Though Toes-Tot-Tin were harder to work with.}
But those require a lot of processing and rotation and can get pretty
funky when overused.

Back to topic.

Your carry-about binder. It shouldn't be too thick- not more than
1.5". But it shouldn't be one of those thin things either- you're
going to be carrying A LOT of STUFF in there.

What kind of stuff is going to be in there?

You're going to have:
\begin{description}
\item[Blank Paper] Say, 30-50 sheets.
\item[Blank form paper] such as pan-subj speeds, blank speeds, map pages,
and whatever other templated form paper you invent.
\item[A Zillion Speeds and References] Speed lists for your myriad
subjects. Some will be accompanied by references lists.
\item[Other Stuff] (I personally keep a lot of GTD related materials in
there.)
\item[Perhaps a Subject] Sometimes you carry a subject around from the
common store, because you are processing it, or adding new content to it.
\end{description}

You won't be carrying ALL of your subject speeds in there- only the
speeds that you are still filling out. For example, if you have 140
speeds in a subject, and the last page of speeds starts with S127,
then the last page, with S127-S140, is the only speed page that will
be in your carry-about binder. The rest are back wherever the subject
is presently residing (probably the common-store binder, or maybe in
the archives).

All of your references go there, however, because you want to be able
to give people references quickly. When you talk with people about a
subject, show them your list of references, so that you can recommend
good references to them.

Next: NOTES COLLECTED IN YOUR COMMON-STORE BINDER

Particularly, the notes will be organized into subjects. You'll also
have a place called ``CHAOS'' (which will be quickly dumped to archive,
because it is nearly the most useless thing you will have, though very
occasionally used), and a place called ``UNPLACED'', for pages that are
important but haven't been placed, and for pages that would be placed,
but that they aren't numerous enough to warrant a full-on
subject. (You'll indicate the subject that they WOULD belong to at the
top. Organize A-Z by would-be subject. When reach about 5-10 pages,
make a full-on subject for them, with all that entails.)

But mostly, the common-store is just the subjects you have been using
lately- say the last 20-40 days.

Occasionally, you'll go through the common-store, and take subjects
out that you haven't touched lately, and put them into...

Lastly: NOTES IN THE ARCHIVES.

These are big binder that store old subjects that you won't be putting
anything into for a while. Start with A-Z, split into A-M/N-Z, and
further as you fill them up. Make sure they have transparent covers
and transparent spines that you can put papers into in order to
declare their letter ranges quickly.

The ``Chaose'' subject- a non-subject, should go under ``C''. Dump chaos
into the archives frequently.

The archives have a second use as well: In addition to storing
subjects that aren't being used, it is also used as an archival space
for subjects that ARE in use, but have archival content.

Some subjects have old junk in them, but old junk that you still want
to be able to follow up links to. You mark old junk with a red mark at
the bottom of the page (I use the Japanese/Chinese mark for ``Old''),
and then you store it at the end of the subject space. (We'll talk
about this later, in the Intra-Subject pages, discussing page layout.)
The archival content is at the back. When you decide to get around to
it, you can take the archival content and throw it into the Archive
subject. Even though you are still using the majority of the content
in the common-store binder, or perhaps even carrying it temporarily in
your carry-about binder.


So. We're about done discussing Materials; The last topic is handling
optimizations. That is, tricks for dealing with papers.

I'll talk about papers you are going to throw away, and then I'm going
to talk about handling speed lists.

Paper you will throw away.

Put a gigantic big ``X'' over any paper you are throwing away. You don't
want to keep running back and forth to the trash. Just start a stack
of pages you are throwing out. Put a big X on them as you decide to
throw them out. In RED, if you can.

If you have a page that you are GOING to throw away, but are still
using, temporarily, put a DASHED X on the page. That signifies to you
that the page is on its way out, but still in use. THEN, when you are
done with it, put a solid X over the dashed X.

Speed lists.

It is always best to put a speed onto the subject page's speed that
the speed is going to.

Let me make this clearer: You do NOT want to use the pan-subject
speeds list! Yeah! You don't! Even though we made them! Because it's
another transcription step, and we want to minimize
transcriptions. What you want to do is put it on the destination speed
list first.

The only reason we have the pan-subject speeds lists is because we
don't always have access to the carry-around binder, where we are
storing the latest speed list for every subject.

But when you CAN, when you have access to the carry-around, put the
thought directly into the carry-around.

NOW: Frequently, you'll be thinking about some subject, but thoughts
about another subject are also coming to you. What you want to do is
to TAKE OUT those speed lists that thoughts are going to frequently,
and you want them close by your side. That way you don't have to go
rifling through dozens of speeds. You just have 3-7 by your side, and
work through those. Much quicker.

Next: When you have a big pan-subject speed list, with multiple
entrees to a single subject, you want to use that to your
advantage. You want to check them all off onto the one subject speed
list while you are there. Yes, seems like common sense, but I had to
figure out a lot of this stuff over time, so I'm telling it to you,
even though you may already know. Just in case you don't.

But remember: Avoid using the pan-subject speeds.

And now, having just told you that, I am going to give you another
case where you should use pan-subject speeds. Some times, you are
trying very hard to work on one thing, but thoughts just keep coming
at you from all angles. But you are trying so hard to stay on one
topic, and don't want to deal with all of the maintenance promises. In
this case, use the pan-subject speeds. Yes, it means more work for you
later, but, at least, you get to concentrate on your task at hand, and
trust that everything is caught into your pan-subject speeds.

There you are.

That is what I have to say here about handling optimizations:

\begin{itemize}
\item Trash X's
\item Pull out speed lists that are frequently accessed during a writing
session.
\item Transcribe pan-subj speed lists in batch.
\item Avoid pan-subj speeds, save when you absolutely need them, either by
being unable to carry your carry-about binder, or by difficulty
concentrating amidst flipping from speed list to speed list.
\end{itemize}

So in recap:

We talked about:
\begin{itemize}
\item Raw Materials
\item The carry-about, common-use, and archival Binders
\item Handling Optimizations
\end{itemize}

So you know what I have to say about the materials that the notebook
system rests on.

Next, I'll talk about general principles that apply across the entire
notebook system.

Then, we'll go into the intra-subject architecture, followed by the
extra-subject architecture.

Then I'll talk about the Theory of how this all works together.

Finally, for those techno-philes out there (and you are many), I'll
write about the Question of Computers. Why they suck for what we are
trying to do, why it doesn't HAVE to be that way, describe a simple
program, that, if written, could alleviate 50-90\% of the burden of
this system (albeit at a cost...), and I'll describe my notion of the
ultimate note-keeping computer system.

I will also talk in that last section about the versioning problem, a
problem that plagues even the existing notebook system, as I have
described it, though it is a bit more manageable on paper. Maybe Ted
Nelson has solved it. Maybe he hasn't. I don't know. He's not telling
us. I do not believe it can be solved. Not in a way that we really like.


\chapter{General Principles}
This is a description of some general principles, some general themes,
that apply to the entire note-keeping process.

\begin{enumerate}
\item Information Presentation issues:
   \begin {itemize}
   \item Page Layout
   \item Partitioning
   \item Info Density
   \item Page Numbers
   \item (Maps)
   \end {itemize}

\item Process:
   \begin {itemize}
   \item Late Binding
   \item Out Cards
   \item Tolerance for Errors
   \item ``Starting in the Middle''
   \item ``Divide when Big''
   \end {itemize}

\item Writing Form:
   \begin {itemize}
   \item Color
   \item Quality
   \end {itemize}

\item Psychology

\item Maps
\end{enumerate}

We'll start with Information Presentation issues:
Information Density,Partitioning, Page Layout, Page Numbers.

Information Density has to do with how much information we can cram on
to one pages. There are times where you are going to want a loose
density, and times where you will want very tight density.

When you are working with things like MOC's, TOC's, or any other
form of presenting raw data, then you want to make things as tight
as possible.

There are many ways of doing this, but one of the best ways is to have
a template that helps you write small and cram things together. For
example, I have standard form speeds (both subject and pan-subject)
that keep ~45 lines of text- far more than a college rule. It makes
you write small. And it's not just height- when you write small, you
write small in width too, so something that once took 3 lines now only
takes 2.

Information density is a MUST for tables of contents. No double
spacing, unless you love flipping pages and scanning with your eyes!
You want to be able to see as much as possible in as small a space as
possible.

On the other hand, there are times where you will want things spaced
out. If you are writing in a POI, you'll want to have plenty of room
for comments from the future. You'll want to have space to interrupt
yourself, or maybe later draw diagrams. You will want LESS information
density.

So keep these things in mind as you work on your notes.

Next: Partitioning.

Partitioning will be a recurring theme as you keep your
notebooks.

Let's take the example of a single page: Do you have a space for the
Title? How big will you want it to be? How about the page number? How
much space will you allocate for revision? How about the page's date-
do you want to leave space for that?

Content. As mentioned in information density, you'll want space for
future comments. Perhaps you are anticipating a lot of work in the
future, so you'll allocate more space for that possible future
content.

Now lets get off the page, and talk about namespace.

Whenever you create a system for naming things, you are working in
partitioning. You have only so many letters. True, you have infinite
glyphs, but they are kind of hard to make indexes out of- they have no
intrinsic ordinality, the way letters do.

Some time you may want to reserve a space of page numbers for some
particular thing to be filled in in the future. We'll talk about page
numbers in a moment.

Partitioning is difficult for me to talk about in the abstract, so I
just want to leave you with understanding that ``Partitioning is
something that I'll be spending some time thinking about.'' When the
particulars of your immediate situation become clearer to you, you'll
see what needs to be done. You will have options. The strategies in
this book will describe many to you. Over time, you will gain skill in
partitioning.

Page Layout.

The last two topics have been pretty vague: ``Think about info density,
think about partitioning.''

This one is going to be pretty specific.

On a given page, you can find the following things:

\begin{itemize}
\item Content
\item Date
\item Title
\item Page ID (``Page Number'')
\item Sequence Identification
\item Archival Mark
\end{itemize}

You are probably familiar with the first four, the last two may be a
little bit of a mystery to you.

The details of the first four:

Content will fill most of your page. I need not explain it.

The date goes in the top right corner. It reads something like
``(Sunday) 25 May 2003.'' I use the Japanese characters for Sunday,
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I highly
recommend learning those particular characters. They are not hard,
they are very useful, and they look far more different than one
another than the letters for Sunday Monday Tuesday etc.,. You'll be
able to mark down the day of the week a lot quicker, and you'll have
greater information density. Highly recommended.

The Title appears at the top of the page, centered. Usually the title
will include some sort of identification. For example, a title may
read: ``POI\#26 - the Kitty Model''. The title is ``the Kitty
Model'', ``POI \#26'' is the identification for the sequence of pages:
This is Point-of-Interest \#26. You needn't always have a title, nor
need an identification. But it's best to have both.

Titles are most important for POI's, because they delimit the
boundaries of the POI. Anything that goes beyond the boundary of a
POI's point of agreements or title are basically lost, as far as
retrieval at a later date goes. That is, if it isn't described by the
title, you won't be able to find it. Stay in bounds, spark new POIs
when you need to. I'll talk about this more later, when talking about
POIs.

Now we have the ``Page ID''. It's a whole topic on it's own, so I'll
talk about it after I talk about ``sequence marks'' and ``archival
marks.'' For now, let's just say that the page number goes in the
bottom right corner, so that you can flip pages and find what you are
looking for.

Sequence Marks.

When you create POI \#28, it may consist of 1 page, it may consist of 3
pages, it may consist (you want to avoid this) of 27 pages.

But you don't want to have to turn the page to see if there is more
material or not. That's a waste of time. So what we have are ``Sequence
Marks''. They effectively say whether there is another page in the
sequence or not.

As we see when we talk about Page ID's, some times you can tell just
by the Page ID. (``P27'', alone, means that there is no next page, that
this is a one-sheeter. But if it reads ``P27-1'', than you know that
this is the first of several.)

But generally you can't.

In the bottom right corner, you put a little glyph- a little arrow
pointing to the right- to mean ``Continues on the next page.''

And if there is nothing on the bottom right corner, that means that
you were too busy to put the arrow there, but that you can still,
probably go to the next page as well.

However, if you see a little ``box'', a little square, drawn in the
bottom right corner, then that means that that's the end of the
sequence.

Unless! Unless! You might extend the POI (or whatever sequence it is-
maybe some Research, or a Reference, or whatever) later, in which case
you need to put an arrow through the box.

The box is made transparent, so that you can later put something in it
to cancel the box.

So if you see a box with an arrow on top, that means that once this
was the last page of the sequence, but that you later extended it, so:
Turn the page.

The sequence mark appears ABOVE the page ID.

Archival Marks.

Archival Marks appear to the LEFT of the page ID. (This is all in the
bottom right corner of the page, now.)

The archival mark is a RED mark (unlike the BLUE page numbers and
Sequence markers). It can look like whatever you want, I personally
use the Japanese Kanji for ``Old''.

It looks like this:
\begin{verbatim}

   |
 -----
   |
  ---
  | |
  ---
\end{verbatim}

Looks sort of like a tombstone.

If you put that mark there, that means that the information on this
page is no longer required in the subject, in the common-store
binder. However, it may still be the target of some links you set up
some time long ago, so you want to keep it around. (In the Archives!
Not carrying it around with you everywhere.)

So what you do is POINT to the MOST RECENT information on the page-
put a note in red saying, ``SEE ALSO: (page id of more recent
information)'', and then at the very bottom of the page, to the left of
the page ID, put your red glyph for ``Archive.''

Archival pages are in the back part of your section, in terms of
physical page layout. Not the VERY back- that special page is for
abbreviations and shorthand. But generally, you throw archival stuff
out back. Then when you want to save space, you take all of the
archival stuff, and merge it into the archive binders.

Finally- Page Numbers.

I use the word ``Page Numbers'', but I should really be saying ``Page
Identification'', because it's actually much more than a number.

Here's are some actual ``page numbers'' from my notebooks:

  ``Notebook S27-S47''
  ``GKI REF 1-II-1, 1-III-1''
  ``Mental Technique P7-1''
  ``P2-3''

The first one means: ``This is a page in the Notebooks subject,
representing Speed Thoughts numbered 27-47.''

Next: ``This is a page on the Global Knowledge Infrastructure; It's a
commentary on reference number 1; In particular it is commentary on
sections II and III of the document.'' (In the references list, you
would see that reference number 1 was ``Towards High-Performance
Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware'', by Douglas C Engelbart
in June 1992.)

Next: ``This is a page on mental techniques, the first page in POI \#7.''

The last, ``P2-3'', says nothing more than ``This is page \#3 of POI \#2.''
How do you know what the subject is? Because it's in the tab ``Personal
Records.'' Since you don't move pages around (we'll actually talk about
that later on- there ARE times when you do- see the section on ``Out
Cards'' below), there's no need to worry that you won't be able to put
it back, unless there's some freak disaster (such as hitting an
economy binder the wrong way, pages spill out, and then something
happens to ALSO, further, put the pages radically out of order- I've
never seen that last part happen).

So the parts of a page ID are:

  Subject - Segment - Segment ID - Page ID

It's a little different for reference segments, because they adapt to
the form of the book that they are commenting. But I'm getting ahead
of myself.

The ``Subject'' part is optional. You don't HAVE to repeat the subject
over on every page. I'd argue that it's not even good to do that,
unless you have good reason to believe that your binder is going to
explode and all the papers fly out in completely different, unordered,
directions. If you fear that kind of thing, put the Subject on every
single page. Or at least an Acronym for the subject. (Replace ``Global
Knowledge Infrastructure'' with ``GKI''.)

There ARE places where it'll be good to put the subject on EACH page,
and you'll even want to spell it ALL the way out.

In particular, I am thinking of the Speeds pages, and your P and P
pages. Your latest speeds pages, and your P and P pages, from myriad
subjects, will all be living right next to each other. You will need
to flip between them, thus necessitating the appearance of the subject
name in the Page ID. More than that though, you will need THE FULL
SUBJECT NAME spelled out, because otherwise you are going to have to
expand out the full name of the acronym when you are ordering the
speeds. ``Does MTK come before or after MP?'' quickly grates on the
nerves. (This is ``Mental Techniques'' vs. ``Metaphysics.'' N is \#12, and
T is \#19, so MTK does indeed come before MP, even though by acronym,
it would appear to go the other way.) So just spell everything out on
your speeds and on your P and P's.

After the (optional) subject is the (required) segment.

The segment signifiers I use, in no particular order, are:

\begin{itemize}
\item PJ         - ``Project''
\item POI or P   - ``Point of Interest''
\item RS         - ``Research''
\item REF        - ``Reference''
\item A/S        - ``Abbreviations/Shorthand''
\item P and P        - ``Purpose and Principles''
\item I          - ``Index''
\item SMOC or M  - ``Subject Map of Contents''
\item S          - ``Speed Thought''
\item Cht        - ``Cheat Sheet''
\end{itemize}

We'll talk about these segments more in ``Intra-Subject Architecture.''
All you need to know for now, is that there are these segments, and
that they have a short identifier, and you'll be sticking that
identifier in your page ID.

Most common will be:
\begin{itemize}
\item S   (Speeds)
\item M   (Map, or more appropriately, Subject Map of Contents [SMOC])
\item P   (POI, the Point of Interest), and
\item REF (Reference).
\end{itemize}

Sometimes I use ``R'' rather than ``REF'', but it's problematic because it
is easily confused with ``RS''- Research. Quite different things, though
similar.

Immediately following the Segment Identifier, you will have a NUMBER.

That number can mean one of either two things:

It can be a TOC \#, or it can be a VERSION \#.

They are only slightly different.

The TOC number means ``Ordinality in a table of contents.'' Even if you
aren't keeping a table of contents yet (there's not much reason to
make a table of contents over only 2 or 3 POI), you still have the
notion of ordinality, and that the pieces in the segment are in some
sort of addressable order. So that's the first.

The second, ``Version number'', is when you have things that don't really have
a table of contents.

Consider A/S (``Abbreviations and Shorthand'') for example. You never have
multiple A/S's. There's just one- the A/S. Holding all of the
abbreviations and shorthands that you use.

Ah, but maybe it's getting over stuffed. Maybe you've filled out all
your hash tables in the A/S section, so you need to make a new
version- ``A/S2''. You'll copy all of the original A/S (just ``A/S'';
though you can write in a ``1'' if you like) into the new, larger
tables, you'll archive A/S1, and then just use A/S2.

There you go.

The same goes for the maps. You usually start with just a single page
map. But eventually, you need to scrap it, and replace it with four
pages of map. So the first map was v1, and the next map is v2.

Your first map page was just ``M'', meaning ``This is a map page, the
first map page ever, and there isn't even a sequence for it, it's just
a single page.''

But your next map pages will be ``M2-1'', ``M2-2'', ``M2-3'', ``M2-4'',
denoting their pages within Map \#2.

You can later expand out with ``M2-5'', ``M2-6'', ``M2-7'' if you like.

And eventually, you'll do a major reorg, and you'll go afresh with
``M3-1'', ``M3-2'', ``M3-3'', and so on.

So these are more like Version numbers, in this case, rather than TOC
entry numbers.

Finally, after the subject, segment, and TOC/version number, you have the
page ID.

Most of the time, this is straight forward.

You start with 1, then you go to 2, then you go to 3, yadda yadda
yadda.

But there are two special things to note:

\begin{enumerate}
\item It's totally different in the REF segment.
\item Sometimes you want to put a page between two existing pages, so you
give it a ``half number'' or a decimal value. For example, if you want
to put two pages between P7-4 and P7-5, so what you do is you make
P7-4.3 and P7-4.7. Hey! There's no binder police. You can do whatever
you like, as long as it works for you.
\end{enumerate}

By the way- I want to briefly comment on that principle. ``There's no
binder police.'' I'm writing this complex system to you, explaining how
I made it up, and how it works. What's most important is that you get
the IDEAS here, not that you actually replicate my entire system
exactly. In fact, I hope that you \emph{DON'T}. For one, you are living in
a different mind than I am, so you are going to probably want to put
things in a different way than I do. But more than that, I WANT TO
HEAR NEW IDEAS. I want to know what people do with this. And if you
just say, ``Hey, I did it exactly like you,'' well, what growth is there
in that? I mean, it might be good for a little while, but I really
want to see what else is out there. My system changed in a major way
at least once every 2-4 months. And it was always a positive
change. So I want to hear what you all do. And remember: There's no
Binder police, like my girlfriend always tells me about cooking. ``You
want to put paprika in there? Throw paprika in there. There's no
cooking police that are going to go after you.''

So get the meat of what I am saying, the IDEAS on how you can organize
stuff, and then adapt it to your domain.

THEN TELL ME ABOUT IT LATER! Yeah! I'd be astonished to hear that
people are doing this- for one- but to hear that you even carried it
FORWARD and tried out NEW Things. That'd just validate my life right
there, on the spot. <laugh>

Okay. So where were we. Decimal pages. All's fair in love, war, and
binders. Decimal pages if you like. This isn't BASIC programming,
where you have to renumber if you want to put something between lines
2 and 3.

But References.

I have found that it is best to annotate references by using the
book's own organization.

For example, say a book (or web page) is organized into three parts
(I,II, and III), and those parts are divided into chapters (1,2,3...)

Then as you annotate, USE THAT STRUCTURE.

The page ID for comments on chapter 3 of part II should begin with
``II.3''.

At the VERY END of the book's structure id, THEN put your normal page
numbers, ``1,2,3...''

So for example, if you wrote three pages to go along with ``II.3'', they
should be ID'd ``II.3-1'', ``II.3-2'', ``II.3-3''.

Or more completely, assuming this is reference \#7, in subject
``Robots'': ``Robots REF7-II.3-1'', ``Robots REF7-II.3-2'', and ``Robots
REF7-II.3-3''.

And that's that for page numbers and Information Presentation issues!

We talked about page layout, partitioning, info density, and page
numbers.

Maps are related, but we'll talk about them independently.

Next we'll talk about general PROCESS principles:

\begin{itemize}
\item Late Binding
\item Out Cards
\item Tolerance for Errors
\item ``Starting in the Middle''
\item ``Divide when Big''
\end{itemize}

I want to start with my favorite of these: ``Tolerance for Errors.''

This is ALL IMPORTANT.

You can't do this and be a perfectionist. (Well, okay, it does require
some sort of perfectionism to insist on recording and integrating
every meaningful thought. But lets ignore that for the moment.)

I had a good friend in high school. Every day, he would make sure that
the entire classes notes fit onto 1 page. This wasn't done for any
good reason, it was just the sort of thing like "step on a crack break
my mothers back", and you just get into it and can't stop. So he write
REALLY REALLY SMALL on the page. And each page was perfectly,
identically formatted.

That will absolutely NOT work here.

Now, suppose you are stuck in this. Just say.

Then THERE IS A CURE.

What you must do, first, is realize that the imperfection is
imperfect, because it is getting in the way of optimal experience of
life.

The second, is to INTENTIONALLY FUCK UP YOUR PAGE. And you must do it
a different, unique, creative way, each time, until you no longer have
a phobia of imperfection.

Take a big fat pen, of the ``wrong'' color, and put a big line down the
middle of the page.

Or!

Intentionally- On Purpose- Completely Mis-ID the page. Say it's a page
from another section, another segment, and a TOC entry ID number like
``Infinity'' or draw a little happy face where the page ID goes.

Put ``Yesterday'' as the date. Or whatever.

Just mess it up. On purpose.

And then sigh a breath of relaxation.

You've screwed the virgin. There's no need to worry now.

Similar to this notion of Tolerance for Errors is "Starting in the
Middle."

Suppose you have a new idea on how to organize your notebooks. That's
GOOD! You want to evolve your system. Most of your ideas will be good!
You'll have some bad ones, but all in all, most will be good, and
you'll want to encourage the process of evolving.

What you DON'T want to do is go back to your months worth of previous
notes, and adapt them all the the new system.

Absolutely not. If you do that, you're going to be stuck forever in
your old thoughts, whenever you get a new idea.

So the trick is to ``Start in the Middle.'' Just start NOW with the new
system.

If you want, you can partition out part of your name-space for a new
experiment. Maybe have a segment named ``X'' for a while, until you
figure out whether you like it or not. Then you can rename it if you
like. (When devising naming systems, always leave ``outs'' if you can.)

So we've talked about tolerance for errors, and starting in the
middle. These are process issues we're talking about, again.

Now lets go back now and talk about Late binding, and out cards.

Out cards: When you move a page from one place to another place, you
need to put an ``out card'' in the old place. That is, you put a page in
the old place that the same PAGE ID as the old place, that points to
the new page.

That's because sometimes you have links to the old place. You don't
know, and you don't care to keep track. If you had bidirectional links
all over the place (this seems to be one of Ted Nelson's favorite
ideas), it would take forever to do (you couldn't refer to something
without actually digging it up and then linking back), and you'd have
all these irrelevant links all of the place. Sometimes a forward link
matters a lot more than knowing that you are linked. Anyways.

You don't know if you are linked to or not, or by how many. I suppose
you could count, but it seems like a waste of time. The solution is
the OUT CARD.

If you find that a bunch of out cards are next to one another, you can
just consolidate them into one, with a wide-range page ID. For
example, ``POI3, Pages 4-7''.

Now that we've talked about out cards, it's easier to talk about late
binding. Late binding is a common theme in the notebooks.

You want to do work that doesn't apply to the present moment, and
that might be rendered completely unnecessary, AT THE LATEST TIME
POSSIBLE.

A demonstration.

You make a page, but later move it. So you have an out card.

Now you move the page AGAIN, so you have two out cards.

Out card 1 points to Out card 2 points to the page.

Now, suppose you find a link to out card 1. "That's interesting,
what's this?`` You find out it goes to Out card 2. ''Curious and
curiouser!" Finally you find the page.

Now, generally, if you follow a link, you are more likely to follow it
again in the future. It's a subject of thought and what not. So what
you do, after looking up the final link, is that you go to outcard 1,
and correct it to point not to card 2, but to the final
destination. And then you go to the ORIGINAL link, and have it not
point to card 1, but cross that out and put in the final destination.

Yeah! That's late binding. You fix it all up when you ACTUALLY FOLLOW
THE LINK.

But you don't do that before, because it would just take too long and
be too boring to fix up everything before hand. There's no need. Just
do it at the last possible moment.

Finally, ``Divide when Big.''

Sometimes a subject gets BIG. REALLY BIG.

And as it grows, you start to see dissimilarities where before you
didn't.

It's a little like Mozart or symphony music. One symphony sounds
pretty much like another symphony, if you don't listen to them a whole
lot. ``Oh, there's some classical music playing.''

But then, as you start to listen, and think about what you are
listening to, you'll start to notice distinctions and connections,
where you didn't notice them before. And as you do so, you'll see this
new structure.

That same exact thing happens with the musical stream of thoughts
going through your head.

The most dramatic example in my case was the fate of two subjects:
``Society'' and ``Metaphysics''. I now laughed thinking that I had them as
just singular buckets. But I can't really blame myself, because: How
should I have divided them?

The subjects are not logically arranged, by some sort of cosmic
organization. They are arranged subjectively, by their own connections
in our lives. The process of keeping these notebooks exposes the
connections in your mind. They give you a MIRROR to understand your
mind and thoughts.

Okay, so what happened to ``Society'' and ``Metaphysics''?

They blew up!

``Society'' became: Military. International
Powers. Meetings. Festivals. Communes. Anarcho-Science. Global
Knowledge Infrastructure. Democracy. Social Ideologies. Social
Goals. Electronic Collaboration. Activism (which later gave way to
Strategy.)

Wow! To think, it was all just one subject before.

And ``Metaphysics''? Spirit. Mind
First. Admonishment. Ethics. Values. Imagination. Personal Identity.

So: Divide when Big.

It'll help you focus your thoughts. I'll talk a little bit about how
to do it in ``Extra-Subject Architecture'', talking about how to spawn
out subjects from existing subjects. (Easier than you think. It's
MERGING subjects that's terrible. But that's pretty rare. Happens, but
it's rare.)

SO. We've talked about process. We've talked about dividing when big,
about tolerating errors, starting in the middle, we've talked about
late binding and out cards. This is all process stuff.

Before we talking about information presentation, like page layout,
partitioning, info density, page numbers. We're talking all together
about general principles.

Next we'll talk about Writing Form, Psychology, and Maps.

Writing Form first.

There are two major things to mention here: COLOR, and QUALITY.

And this is where paper and pen really start kicking the computer's
ass, and the computer-fanatics don't even know it.

Discussing quality is really made a lot easier by contrasting it with
computers, actually.

A long time ago, I stored all of my thoughts in a computer text
file. It was actually an AWESOME system. The computer has so many
advantages that the paper world doesn't. For example, you don't have
to put a thought in just ONE place- you can easily put it into 5
different places! I call it ``Multi-cat'' or ``Multiple Categorization.''
It's easy- just put tags. (It baffles me to this day why people who
make computer notebooks DO NOT do this more frequently..! There's all
this notebook software out there, and you STILL have to put a thought
in one place, and one place only..! They just have a single category
tree, and you have to put a thought in a single place. To do
otherwise, you have to copy and paste or something. Terrible.) Any
ways.

For all this awesomeness in the computer, you are unconsciously pulled
into a problem:

ALL OF YOUR TEXT looks EXACTLY THE SAME.

I mean, lets ignore the obvious problems with including
picture. (Yeah, like you really want to scan in every single image you
make. And like you really want to be so punished for visual thinking-
the BEST thinking.) Just consider straight text.

In the computer, ALL of your text is EXACTLY THE SAME.

YES, YES! I CAN HEAR YOU COMPUTER-PEOPLE'S COMPLAINING.
``But you can use FONTS!'' But you can make it Bold! But you can make it
Italics! yes! Yes! YES! I know it! You CAN do all those things.

But that doesn't make it \emph{FAST}. In keeping notes, you don't want to
constantly be dicking around with your UI. You want to be able to JUST
WRITE.

It annoys me enough that to switch pen colors, I have to flick a tab
at the top of my pen. But at least I don't have to move my hand away
from my pen, or move to a completely different section of the screen
to set a font, or move the cursor around. To change fonts for a
segment of text, you have to do all that stuff. And you STILL don't
get all of the variation you want.

And look: there are ADVANTAGES to having SLOPPY TEXT.

It tells you something about the development of your thoughts. When
you see sloppy text, that means "This is just a quick idea I spat
out.`` When you see regular solid text, that means ''This is something I
thought over for a while." You have your own writing style, and it
communicates to you things that are important to you, though you may
not consciously register it. (Actually, that's good: Unconscious
communication is far stronger, and doesn't get in the way of your
thinking.) All of this, all of this telegraphing, disappears on the
computer.

The diagrams, the writing style, all disappears.

And consider maps. Maps are basically the backbone of this whole
operation that I'm describing. You just can't do it on the computer
easily. It takes WORK on the computer to say, ``This text is tiny,'' to
give the nuances of positioning, size, quality, all of that stuff.

And icons. I use icons all over the place. That's hard to do in the
computer.

So, by contrasting with the computer, I have described the kinds of
things you want to concentrate on in your notebook. USE DIAGRAMS
EVERYWHERE. They are FAR better than coercive linear text. And USE
VARIABLE WRITING STYLES. Write sloppy, write neat, and everything in
between. It communicates to you. Use shorthand and abbreviation. Know
Gregg's script? Use that when it suits you. You can late-bind decode
it later. It's probably not as important as something else.

Okay.

Enough on that.

Now lets talk about color.

Your pen has four colors: Red, Green, Blue, and Black

You will want to connect meeting with each color.

Here's my associations:

\begin{description}
\item{RED}:     Error, Warning, Correction
\item{BLUE}:    Structure, Diagram, Picture, Links, Keys (in key-value pairs)
\item{GREEN}:   Meta, Definition, Naming, Brief Annotation, Glyphs
\item{BLACK}:   Main Content
\end{description}

I also use green to clarify sloppy writing later on.
Blue is for Keys, Black is for values.

I hope that's self-explanatory.

If you make a correction, put it in red. Page numbers are blue. If you
draw a diagram, make it blue. Main content in black.

Suppose you make a diagram: Start with a big blue box. Put the diagram
in the box. (Or the other way around- make the diagram, than the box
around it.) Put some highlighted content in black. Want to define a
word? Use a green callout. Oops- there's a problem in the drawing- X
it out in red, followed by the correction, in red.

Some times, I use black and blue to alternate emphasis. Black and blue
are the easiest to see.

If I'm annotating some text in the future, and the text is black, I'll
switch to using blue for content. Or vise versa.

Some annotations are red, if they are major corrections.

Always remember: Tolerate errors. If your black has run out, and you
don't want to get up right away to fetch your backup pen, then just
switch to blue. When the thoughts out, go get your backup pen.

BY THE WAY- I forgot to mention this in the materials section, but
it'll do just fine here.

Those four color pens- I think they're made in France or something. At
any rate- YOU CAN SWAP COLORS. For example, say that you have one pen,
but it ran out of black. So you start using your next pen. But then
say that you run out of BLUE in the new pen. You CAN open up the pen,
pop out the blue, and put it in the newer pen. Yeah! The procedure is
difficult to describe. You just have to yank really hard on the
ink. Then push it into the new pens place. It works! It's not
advertised, but it works! So there you go.

Key-value pairs: Sometimes you have a big hash. For example, in
abbreviations lists- you'll have letters A-Z running down the left
side of the paper. One line may have, say, 3 key-value pairs in it. In
my ``People Abbreviations'', for example, under ``MNO'', I have ``MT'',
``NC'', ``NH'', ``ME''. Those letters are written in BLUE, because they are
keys. The values, written in black, are ``Michael Turner", ''Noam
Chomsky``, ``Napoleon Hill'', and "Michael Ende.'' Quite an interesting
collection of people, no? That's why they get to be two-letter
people. <smile>

NEXT, the Psychology of notebooks.

I want to talk about being excited, ``stewing", and ''The Kitty
Model". All three very different things, but all about the
psychological aspects of notebooks.

Being Excited: Be excited about keeping your notes. Imagine what can
come of it! Experience the vision. You are building CLARITY. You are
organizing all of your thoughts together, and seeing what it adds up
to. The results *WILL* surprise you, and you *WILL* see things that
you have NEVER seen before.

Next: Avoid STEWING.

Stewing is what I call it when you are just floating over your
notebook, putting things in, maintaining it, and being overall pretty
directionless. Just watching connections form.

I suppose it's all right for a little while, and that it has it's
uses. You certainly have to do a degree of processing as you keep your
notes. But if you just found out that you spent 3 hours stewing over
your notebook- you want to, and can, avoid that. Focus on the priority
tabs, and decide on thoughts to calculate out. You have problems in
your thoughts: figure out solutions. Go for "major notions per
minute", don't get so bogged down in details.

Finally: ``The Kitty Model.''

So-called because my girlfriends name is Kitty.

I really want to just scan in the page that she made (and that I
included in my notebooks.) However, our scanner has broken for the 3rd
time, and we really think it's dead now, SO, I'll just have to tell
you what ``The Kitty Model'' page depicts.

Words in parenthesis are either cartoon images or Kanji.

I am ``Lion''. ``Kitty'' is my girlfriend. ``Kitten'' is our daughter. (I
should introduce you to my family. Amber is my girlfriend. Our
daughter's name is ``Sakura.'')

Straight from ``Notebooks P26'':

\begin{verbatim}
------------------------------------------------------------
POI \#26: The Kitty Model                     (Mon) 26 May 2003

(Lion) ``Oh! I Thinked a Think!''      (Lion) Writes think down.

10 years later.

(Lion)                  ``How will I develop all these thinks?''
(2 stacks of notes.)    ``One at a time I guess.''

(Kitten) - ``Daddy!''
(Lion) (a page)     "OK this is a good think,
                     let's develop it a bit."

(Kitten) - ``Daddy, I'm getting married!''
(Lion) - ``Oh shit! I got another think!''

10 years later...

(Kitten) (Lion) (4 stacks of notes.)
``Daddy?''   ``Shit. I have all my thinks written down!''

    ... (grave marker) <- Lion

    (Kitty) (Bonfire) <- Lion's thinks.

                                                P26
------------------------------------------------------------
\end{verbatim}

Note the page ID in the bottom right corner, the title on the top, the
date in the top-right corner, and the page contents in the middle.

This cartoon speaks for itself. Particularly, on the immobilizing
features of the notebook system, and the perils involved here.

Contemplate deeply on this image.

Otherwise, you may find yourself in very dangerous territory.

I'm fucking serious. If you don't worry about this, then you are going
into major spiritual self-damage. If you don't believe in that kind of
thing, then consider damage in terms of however you contemplate your
life. But it can be REALLY BAD to do this for prolonged periods of
time.

I'm not saying it isn't a good idea to do this for a little while, or
even periodically. But you don't want to do this for much longer than a
few months at a time.

Unless you are a monk. In which case- go for it. {:)}=

Let me know how it goes.

FINALLY.

I want to talk about Maps.

They are SO CRITICALLY IMPORTANT TO THIS WHOLE THING.

Because they are the ASSEMBLY POINTS. That's where ALL OF YOUR
THOUGHTS come together into one place.

Your POI, your Speeds, your Research, your References, just
everything. You assemble it all together on the map.

And the map you construct- that MAP is FAR MORE IMPORTANT than the sum
of the CONTENT of all of your thoughts. Because, with that map, you
can reconstruct the WHOLE THING.

Take this book for instance. What I've basically done, is taken my two
map pages from my ``Notebooks'' notebook, and I'm just going over the
maps I have. Serializing them out into text.

For example, on ``General Principles'', there's a link to ``Psychology'',
with ``.33  .37   p26'' next to it. In green, next to ``p26'', it reads
``the Kitty Model.'' Can you guess what .33 and .37 are about? They're
about being excited, and about not stewing. If I had put under ``.33''
the word, in green, ``Excited,'' and under .37 ``Don't stew'', I wouldn't
even need my speed lists. I could just reconstruct the whole thing for
you here in text, based on the map.

So there is that.

Now I want to talk about constructing maps, in the particular. (For
this, I'm going over to my ``Visual Language'' notes, and looking at the
SMOC, pulling out the section on ``MAPS''.)

And there I have it:

Multi-dimensional MOC's, Possibilities, in Explanations, and Why
Better.

For the sake of writing this book, I'm going to skip the possibilities
of mapping, and explanations, and focus in on Multi-dimensional maps,
and maps the are better than TOCs (in most cases.)

(I'm demonstrating this to you, so that you can see, as I go with
this, how they work.)

I see off in the distance ``Mental Coercion.'' It's it's OWN topic,
within this SMOC for Visual Language (``VL SMOC''). The big things in
this area are ``MAPS'' and ``Mental Coercion." Between them is the ''Why
Better field.`` Surrounding that are "Uncoersive'' (which itself links
to ``Mental Coercion''), ``Structure'' (which links to the hypertext
movement), ``Enables Strategy'', and ``Only read NEW ideas.''

Those things are written in tiny little lower case letters. And the
are surrounded by lots of little dots with small numbers by them-
references to the VL Speed Lists.

And before we go much further: YES, I do realize the irony here. YES,
I do realize that my writing here is terrible. I'm not a writer. And
YES, I realize that this should be written AS A HYPERTEXT. And YES, I
realize that for being such a strong proponent for visual language,
that this document should be VISUAL. And YES, I realize that it should
be mapped out, rather than a big long didactic mentally coercive text.

YES, I realize all of these things. But I also know that my computer
skills of actually inputting those things- are actually pretty
poor. I'm a great programmer, but I don't know how to use
photoshop. And the tools out there are pretty poor for the kinds of
things I am describing.

And I realize that if I try to write in those ways, that this book
will never appear on the Internet.

And I further realize that there is NEAR ZERO content on the Internet
that has to do with the kinds of things I am describing.

SO. In conclusion. I say ``better a little than none at all.''

I only believe that, if you are actually reading this, if there is ONE
PERSON in the world interested in this subject- that you will be
grateful that this work appears, even in this ultra-crummy form.

YES, I have talked with people who have read MY ENTIRE WEIRD FILE
(http://speakeasy.org/~lion/weird.html), SO. I believe people will
read this. And that someone may even follow the directions and do
something like this themselves. Please contact me if you do.

I MAY (I would say ``Will'', but I don't really know for sure) make a
2nd draft of this document. (Whoa! Concept!) And if I DID, I would
put it in DOCBook. Than you'd at least have a table of contents, and
organized pages. As much as I hate tables of contents for their
weaknesses. And I MAY even scan in pictures and diagrams from my
notebooks, and if I DO, the text would become incredibly more clear
and accessible. And it is CONCEIVABLE, THAT, IN THE DISTANT FUTURE, I
would put together this all in a mapped, hypertext, icon including set
of pages. It would be a lot of work, but I could go that far. If
people were interested.

So the lesson is: If you are slaving through this, if there is a
Single Soul out there actually reading this: You MUST let me know. It
is a MORAL IMPERATIVE.

Thank you.

Back to maps, from Irony.

I want to write about why maps are better, and about how to frame the
first page of a bunch of map pages. I also want to write about
creation techniques.

Maps are better than TOCs because:

\begin{itemize}
\item They are mentally uncoersive.
\item They reveal structure in ways MOCs cannot.
\item They enable Strategy.
\item Incredible (useful) Subtlety
\end{itemize}

``Mental Coercion''. Let me describe this idea for a moment.

Think about a Shakespeare play.
Now think of a map of, say, the Earth.

The Shakespeare play is ``Mentally Coercive.'' To get it, you have to go
through the whole thing, start to finish. You can't watch it
backwards, and get the same thing. It's possible, but difficult, to
just look at portions of threads that interest you, without
significantly processing other sections. You have to scan a lot, if
you want to do that.

Now contrast that with a globe. If you are interested in a particular
thing, you can just go straight to that thing. Focus in on the State
of Washington, or whatever have you.

In your mind, the rest of the globe disappears. You're just looking at
Washington, and Canada, and Oregon, and what not. ("Yes, I am a
US-ian and Seattle-ite. Anything north of the border is just
'Canada'. Quebeque, BC, what are those things? It's all just Canada,
to my untrained ear." No cruelty intended. Apologies to the rest of
the world for the incredible harm our country inflicts.)

That's what I mean when I talk about ``mental coercion.''

It is my opinion that most books (textbooks in particular) are
unnecessarily mentally coercive. I believe that you could also write
fiction that was not mentally coercive, and still get around "but do
they understand the build-up?" problems that hyper-text fictions
have. But I am not here to talk about hyper-text fiction, I am here to
talk about maps right now.

So one: Maps are mentally uncoersive. Much of the remaining advantages
are based on this.

Next: Maps reveal structure.

Maps reveal structure in ways that TOCs, by nature of their forced
ordinality, CANNOT.

How could I possibly represent the links from MAP - to Why better -
Uncoercive - MENTAL COERCION in a TOC?

Both ``Map'' and ``Mental Coercion'' are ``high level'' constructs.

Can I imagine:

I. MAP
   1. Why Better
   2. Uncoercive
II. MENTAL COERCION

..?

Not only does it not work, but ``Uncoercive'' should be connected
BENEATH why better, and we're also screwed up because as soon as we
put in item 3, the link is broken between Uncoercive and "Mental
Coercion".

No, that's all wrong. I am convinced that the only reason that we do
TOCs is because we just haven't built the tools to make Maps. We are
being beat up by the constraints of our medium of expression.

Fortunately, this will all change in the future. Scott McCloud and
Robert Horn etc. all are hard at work at correcting this mistake, now
that we have the computers that can express what we really WANT.

Complex structure cannot be represented by a TOC. It can only be
represented by a Map. Even then, there are still problems, (for
example, non-graphable interconnections), but we are still light-years
beyond the TOC.

Next: Maps enable Strategy.

You can zoom in on precisely what you want to read.
To be STRATEGIC, you need CONTEXT. Without context, you cannot make
strategic decisions. With a TOC, you are limited to TWO pieces of
context: What's above, and what's below. (Actually, you also get to go
back an indentation level, and you can also look at children of a
super-topic. So that's two more.) So you are confined to a grid. But
we don't want that. We want to be able to go every which way, in order
to more fully see the context, the terrain, so that we can make
strategic decisions about what to read, or what to write.

Finally: You have the possibility of incredible subtlety.

I'm not talking useless or "This is so incredibly subtle, you will
never even get it."

I mean- that you can position things, precisely, in order to make
statements that require no words. This goes back to the sort of
``unconscious communication'' idea I mentioned. It's BEST when you can
communicate complex ideas, without even speaking a word- and people
``just get it.''

What am I talking about here?

I'm talking about how you can position ideas that are related close to
one another, and you don't even have to assign a label to the group of
ideas.

Or you can position one idea right smack-dab between two other ideas,
if there is a relationship between them. \emph{And people will get it.}
People can figure out what you can mean. And even if you don't draw a
line between them, people will pick it up.

This blends into my next topic, which is constructing maps.

When you create a map, as per my system, you have two basic types of
``materials''.

You have your LINKS, ``Hard content'': That is, your speeds, your POI,
your References, your whatever. Even other maps. Every thing you keep
in your subject, appears as ``Hard content'' on your map.

Then you have your MAGNETS. These are words that ``pull'' on the hard
content. They build your structure.

Here's an example from my notebooks, particularly ``PFT'' - Public Field
Technologies. I wanted to make a map of what PFT meant to me. I made a
big list of all of the public field technologies:

1 - Visual-Verbal Language
2 - Self-help Books
3 - Personal Notebooks
4 - Home Organizing
5 - Community
6 - Co-ops
7 - Communes
8 - Community Dollar Networks
9 - Free Software Dev Pratices
10 - Community Democratic Self-Rule
11 - Babysitting Networks
12 - Community Public Papers
13 - Community Wireless Networks
14 - Festivals that INVOLVE Participants
15 - Toolshare Networks
16 - Activist EDU Networks
17 - OpenSpace Technology (OST)
18 - Social Blueprints
19 - Social INET Organizing Blueprints
20 - Group-Help Books
21 - Arguments Databases
22 - Collaborative Mapping
23 - Groupware
24 - Wiki
25 - Anarcho-Science
26 - Collaboration Techniques and Study
27 - Field Advancement Study
28 - Visual Facilitation
29 - Public Field Technology self-Study
30 - Open HyperDocument System (OHS)

That's a list of what I call ``Public Field Technologies.'' But I don't
want to get lost talking about it all right now. The focus is on the
mapping process right now.

First that was just an unnumbered list. Then I numbered it. (1-30).

Then I started to look for patterns. I tried a few ways, and then I
realized that I could handle a substantial number of the items by
making a scale:

From Individual, to Family, to Clan/Tight-Community, to Loose
Community, to Global. Yeah!

So 2 and 3: Self-help books, Personal notebooks (this!), those are on the
``Individual'' end of the scale.

Then on Family, there's ``Home Organizing.''

You don't want to actually write out ``Home Organizing'', because it's a
lot of space, and a lot of writing. You just want to put ```4'' on the
map. That way, if you decide to move it later on, you just cross out
the ```4'', and put it somewhere else. Much easier. Much more agile.

Once it's all solidified and you are happy with it- you can turn on
the Green, and expand out the numbers. But for now, you want just
numbers out there.

So the word ``INDIVIDUAL'' appears, pretty big, on the page. That's a
``MAGNET'' word. It's ``attracting'' `2 and `3 to itself. They are right
next to it.

Now let me point out something interesting:

`10 is ``Community Democratic Rule.'' Where did I put that?

It's not attached directly to a magnet word! Actually, it appears
BETWEEN two magnet words: ``Clan,Tight Community", and ''Loose
Community."

Clan/Tight Community has, immediately connected to it, ```6 co-op'' and
```7 commune". And Loose community has connected to it ''`5 Community
(Local)``, "`14 festivals involving participants''. Interestingly
enough, it also has some magnet words on it's sides- "Community
Communications Line`` (w/ 12 and 13 attached) and ''Community Resource
Collection" (w/ 8,11, and 15 attached).

But Democratic Self Rule, \#10, floats between them.

So this is an example of some of the subtlety that maps allow, that
TOC's do not, and how they work out. Yeah!

Incidentally, for those who wonder:

The line from Individual - Global was just one half.

The other half is centered around Collaboration, and Communication
itself (Visual-Verbal Language).

So there you are. You should be able to map things now, at least
crudely. Your skill will increase with practice.

Now I want to talk about what to do when maps get big, and multiple
categorization of maps.

When maps get big, you want to rebuild them, and have a "distant
view". You also want to respect multiple-categorization. Frequently,
there are three ways of looking at the same thing, and you will want
to capture all of them.

The first map in a sequence of maps should be a MAP of MAPS.

Oh, by the way. Yes, you can have icons and pictures and smiley faces
on your maps. THERE ARE NO MAP MAKING POLICE. YOU CAN DO IT HOWEVER
YOU LIKE!\footnote{
I kind of like Tony Buzan. I kind of don't. I think that his
rules are a bit constrictive. WHY must you use millions of colors? WHY
must you draw them LIKE THAT? I don't want to. I think it's a waste of
time. And I want to draw the maps how I want to. I don't find your way
particularly perfect or anything like that. And I don't think that the
ability to draw maps requires certification or anything like
that. Okay. I have too much of an Anarchist in me. Drawing Power for
the People! Much more a Mark Kistler guy. draw3d.com - YEAH! You're
ALL Creative Geniuses! YEAH! Okay- I'm done.}

So have a map of maps at the beginning. And have super-maps as you
need them: Maps that give you a birds eye view of other maps.

And have teleporters and warps from map to map. Really, you can do
\emph{whatever you want}.\footnote{
I swear, I have just been touched by the spirit of Mark Kistler, by
the mere thought of the man. Por la Sociedad Libre! I swear- that man
wears too much black and red- and that big red and black star? The
Raised Fist holding a pen? His insistence on the intrinsic value of
people? Hmm...}

ahem.

So. You now know why maps are cool, and how to make them.

You won't just make them in your SMOC and GSMOC, you may also make use
of them in your POIs, as I did with the PFT map.

And we're done with this section! We've discussed the general
principles!

A brief rehash:

\begin{itemize}
\item Information Presentation (page layout, partitioning, density,
  page numbers)
\item Process (late bind,out card, errors, start middle, divide when big)
\item Writing (color, quality)
\item psychology (the kitty model)
\item maps
\end{itemize}

Next, we'll talk about the architecture within a subject.

Then we'll talk about the super-architecture, binding all of the
subjects together.

Then a bit about the theory of notebooks, and finally, the question of
computers.


\chapter{Intra-Subject Architecture}
Within a subject, you have a large collection of papers. They have a
logical organization (into segments), and a physical organization (the
sequence of papers).

The major segments are:

\begin{itemize}
\item P and P     - purpose and principles
\item Speeds  - speed thoughts
\item SMOC    - subject map of contents
\item POI     - point-of-interest studies
\item RS      - research
\item REF     - reference
\item PJ      - project
\item I       - index
\item Cht     - cheat sheets
\item A/S     - abbreviations, shorthand
\item X       - experimental, temporary (UNLINKABLE)
\end{itemize}

At least, those are the major segments I have hammered out well. There
are MORE segments that I would like to practice, formalize:

\begin{itemize}
\item CEP    - chronological episode
\item TD     - topical deliberation
\item DD     - data dictionary (definitions)
\item L/T    - lists and tables (high info density)
\end{itemize}

Something to recognize here is that you can make up whatever you
like. However, you don't want to just make up a new thing every time
you have a new thought or format. You want to think about your
divisions, and create new ones sparingly. If you can fit something
into an old one, and nothing suffers, then preserve the old
situation. It's only when you have something really ``new'', that is
best served by a new category, that you will do well.

I haven't studied and thought out the details of why this is the case;
It is just something that I happen to notice. With practice, you can
flesh this out. One day, YOU can write a great explanation on how it
works, and we can consolidate everything into one huge glorious
document.

Now- YOU DON'T HAVE TO HAVE ALL THESE SEGMENTS. Remember: Late bind,
late bind, late bind! Only build what you have to when you need it.

I should add here also that- for many of these, you'll want to make
TOC's for them. When you start a subject- you know, you've collected a
few pages in the ``Unplaced'', all with the same subject marker. And
after it reaches about 5-10 pages, you say, "Well, let's make this
into a full-on subject now." So your subject starts with roughly 5-10
pages. You don't have to start writing a POI TOC if you only HAVE 2
actual POI. Wait until you actually could USE a POI, before you write
one. After you have about 10 POI, THEN make a POI TOC. Late bind.

So we have segments. What else do we have in the subject?

We have the physical organization to talk about as well- the way
papers are physically laid out, from front to back.

It is the shorter topic, so I'll describe it immediately.

PHYSICAL LAYOUT

  (Title Layer)
The Subjects Tab Page
SMOC    - subject map

  (Lookup Layer)
S       - speeds
TOCs    - tables of contents
I       - index

  (Contents)
(Just about Everything Else)
(Archival Store)

  (Quick Access)
Cht     - cheat sheets
A/S     - abbreviations

(Note: The P and P page does NOT go in the subject. The P and P pages, one for
each subject, are collected into a grand P and P collection area. More on
this in the ``Extra-Subj Architecture''.)

That is:

You start with the actual tab page, that delimits the subject in your
notebook. You know- it's a big yellow/tan sheet, it has a plastic tab
sticking of the edge, and you slip a little paper in. On that little
paper you slip in, you place the name of the subject. Simple as
that. Your subject starts with that.

Then you have the SMOC- this may be one page, it may be many pages. If
you have many pages, the first one should be the page that points to
the rest of the MOC pages, or presents your ``super-map'', or whatever.

By the way- SMOC means ``Subject Map of Contents.'' That is, it's a MOC
that applies over a subject, rather than a GSMOC, which we'll talk
about in ``Extra-Subject Architecture''.

Following the SMOC, you store your Speed Thoughts. Now realize- you
WILL be missing some of your speeds- the latest ones, in fact. Because
you are carrying those around with you, in your carry-about
binder. But most of the time you are dealing with your subjects,
you'll be in your common-store binder, or maybe even in an archive
binder. But the speeds that are not on the latest page, you will store
right after the SMOC.

Why? Because your SMOC will refer intensively to your Speeds. You'll
have little ```28'''s and ``33'''s that you are going to want to collapse,
by using the Speed lists. You don't want to have to fish around into
the middle of your binder, looking for the speeds. So put them RIGHT
AFTER the MOC.

If you are in the process of doing a LOT of work with a particular
map, you're just going to want to open up the binder, pull out your
speeds, close the binder, and work with the pages side by side.

So immediately after the MOC is a convenient place.

THEN, you follow the older speeds with the TOC's- the table of
contents for the rest of the stuff.

Again, for similar reasons. You'll have ``(5)'' or ``P5'', however you
choose to notate it, on your map. And you're going to not want to go
fishing through the contents of your subject. You're going to want to
just glance at the TOC, and see that POI5 is about ``Naming'', or
whatever.

(BTW, after you perform a lookup on a map, and you are pretty sure the
item won't be moving around a bunch, switch your pen into green, and
write a 1-3 word description/mnemonic next to the link on the map.)

Ah- there's a very SPECIAL TOC- that is, your references list..!

References can be either ``expanded''- meaning that you've actually gone
to the work of analyzing them on paper, or ``not expanded''. Meaning you
just keep a reference to it, so that you can write bibliographies, or
refer it to friends, and what not. Remember that reference page
numbering partially adopts the actual reference's structure. So, the
actual reference pages serve double as a TOC.

Sadly, the pages can be in only one place at a given time. I keep them
in the carry-about binder, immediately coupled with the latest speed
list, so that I have it on hand to cite to friends who are interested
in something I am talking about. It also helps in libraries and
bookstores when I decide to make good use of my time by looking things
up. More on references later. The point is: The References pages are a
special form of TOC over your reference analysis, consideration.

Now: What order do you put your TOC's in?

Put them in alphabetical (expanded, not abbreviated) order.

Let's suppose you have 4 research entries, 2 expanded references, 13
POI, and 1 project.

\begin{verbatim}
Research
Reference
Point of Interest
Project
\end{verbatim}

...alphabetically:

\begin{enumerate}
\item Point of Interest     - POI
\item Project               - PR
\item Reference             - REF
\item Research              - RS
\end{enumerate}

After the TOC's, you place your Index.

I'll describe it later, but for now: It's basically an A-Z/123/Symbol
mapping from a subject, to ALL of the resources you have on that
subject.

It's LATE BOUND- that is, it isn't current. Maintaining a current
index would take for ever, and you'd only use some parts of it
anyways. Maintaining it would be a constant interruption. Bad Bad Bad!

What you do is- whenever you find yourself flipping through your
notebook looking for all occurrences of a subject- a minor subject,
since major subjects already appear nicely on your MOC- then you cache
your results onto the index page. More on it later.

After the Index, you have pretty much ``Everything Else'' that hasn't
been already described.

How do you organize it? The same way you organize the TOC:
Alphabetically, by full expansion.

If you have 3 references, say REF3, REF9, and REF21, then they should
(obviously) appear in the order REF3, REF9, and REF21- numerically.

After you have placed ``Everything Else'', then you have the ``Archives''.

Archival pages are the ones with the red glyph at the bottom denoting
an ``Archival Page''.

You organize ALL archival pages in Alphabetical order, based on
Segment.

YES- ALL of them. Even including your Maps, TOC's, and Indexes, A/S's,
whatever. It all goes in alphabetical order, when it comes to the
archives.

Do remember: When your archival section grows unwieldy, or if you just
want to ``get rid of it'', you can pull all those pages out, and merge
them into the archival binder's place for the section.

Finally, you have your cheat sheets, and AT THE VERY BACK, your
abbreviations/shorthands lists.

Remember that the EASIEST places to reach within your subject are: The
VERY FRONT, and, the VERY BACK. So we keep important, frequently used
things there. The very front is the most important map of all of your
maps, and the very back is your most frequently accessed abbreviation
sheet.

You SHOULD be using abbreviations- LOTS of them. Unfortunately, I
haven't written much on abbreviations, but there's a reason for that:
Many people have already written a lot on the Internet on the
subject. Look it up on the Internet. If you want to get really wild,
use Chinese/Japanese Kanji, or use Gregg script. Best: Use a visual
language's iconography.

So, that, in short, is the paper layout.

Now, let's talk about the individual segments themselves. Then we'll
talk about some of the experimental segments.

PURPOSE and PRINCIPLES

The P and P is unique in that it has ZERO presence in the actual subject
pages, unless it is an old version in the archival pages.

The purpose of the P and P is to determine what goes IN the subject, and
what goes OUT. It describes the BOUNDARY OF THE SUBJECT.

If it turns out that something goes OUT of the subject, the P and P page
also gives you some hints on where to send it.

There are two ways that I have denoted P and P pages.

The old way is to take a page in half, make the top have ``INCLUDES'',
and the bottom half ``EXCLUDES''.

Form:
\begin{verbatim}

--------------------------------------------------
    (subject name) P and P                date

INCL

  * (inclusion)
  * (inclusion)
     * (exception)
  * (inclusion)



EXCL

  * (exclusion)          (target)
      * (exception)
  * (exclusion)          (target)
  * (exclusion)          (target)

                            (subj name) P and P(ver\#)
--------------------------------------------------
\end{verbatim}

Here's an example from my books:

\begin{verbatim}
--------------------------------------------------
   Personal Psychology P and P            [no date!]

INCL   * Clearly Psychological Forces
       * Self-Image
       * Motivation
       * Feelings
       * Self-Help Techniques

EXCL   * Non-Mechanical Forces  (->MP)
       * National Forces        (->MP?)
       * Very Broad Modeling of my Life (->MP)
       * Gender Studies         (->SOC?)
       * Imgn                   (->IMGN)
       * Values, Goals          (->Values)
       * A.C.T.S. functional details (->ACTS)
       * Inter-Personal Psychology (->PPL)
       * Though Focus Techniques (->MTK)

                        Personal Psychology P and P
--------------------------------------------------
\end{verbatim}

Let's note something first though-
This page is out of date!

So as a demonstration of Late Binding, let me fix this now.

``MP''- that is, ``Metaphysics'', was blown up a while back. I don't think
many of these redirects are correct now.

What is pointing to MP? ``Non-Mechanical Forces'', ``National Forces'',
and ``Very Broad Modeling of my Life.''

I know right off that ``Very broad modeling of my life'' should go into
``Personal History.''

Switch the pen to red, cross out ``MP'', and replace it with ``PHist''.

How about ``National Forces'' and ``Non-Mechanical Forces''-? Those DO
belong in Metaphysics. Just to be sure, though, I check the GSMOC, and
see if the ideas would rather gravitate elsewhere. The GSMOC suggests
proximity to Spirit, Values, Imagination, Personal Identity... No,
it's none of those. So we'll keep it in MP for now. If there are
enough related thoughts in MP, these subjects may ``break out'', be
ejected from MP, but for now, they'll live in there. The closest is
``Spirit", the purpose of which is explained in the ''Spirit and Awareness
P and P" page, but glancing at the page makes it clear that the ideas
don't fit in there. MP it is.

So that's how P and P works. It tells you what to include, and what to
exclude. And the things excluded, it tells you where else to put
them. (Or maybe not. If there is no such place yet, just leave the
target blank.)

There's another way to do P and P-

That is to make a diagram. You put a large circle in the center with
the P and P's subject. Then you draw lines out to words representing other
subjects. What is included goes center-ward, what is excluded goes to
the extremities, to the subjects that are their actual targets.

When inclusion and exclusion are along an axis, the axis takes the
form of a line, with subjects at either end. Put the
exclusion/inclusion specification at the ends of the line. That way
you can visually see how to cut topics.

There is usually only a single P and P page per subject; I have never seen
one grow beyond one page.

Now you understand P and P.

Next:

SPEEDS

Your speed thoughts pages are ideally built by a computer. When I get
around to putting this online, I'll also place the Word documents that
include my templates.

Remember: We want info density for our speed thoughts. Pack as many
onto a page as you can.

The format of a speed thought page looks like this:

\begin{verbatim}
--------------------------------------------------
        (Subject Name) S__-S__         ___________
V # Hint @ Content
_|_|____|_|_______________________________________
_|_|____|_|_______________________________________
_|_|____|_|_______________________________________
_|_|____|_|_______________________________________
 |(and so on...)
_|_|____|_|_______________________________________
_|_|____|_|_______________________________________
                    []      (Subject Name) S__-S__
--------------------------------------------------
\end{verbatim}

A bit of explanation is in order.

The ``V'' is some sort of glyph that means ``checked off''. I use a
downward pointing arrow, but you could just as well have a check mark,
or just a dot, or whatever.

That column means whether the given speed has been mapped or not.

You'll collect speed thoughts quickly, probably faster than you can
map them. Every now and then, you'll go over your speed thoughts and
map them- preferably from most recent to oldest (most recent tends to
be more immediately relevant, and worthy of thought). You can go in
any order that you want. But you want to keep track of what you've
mapped, and what you haven't.

The ``\#'' column is where you number the speed thought. If it's speed
\#47, the number ``47'' should appear here. (On the first row line of the
speed- a three line speed has the number appear only in the first row-
the rest, leave blank.)

Note: When you are mapping speeds onto the map, you're going to want
to do it like this:  ```47''. Just a single dot, to denote that 47
refers to a SPEED THOUGHT. Speed thoughts will, by far, populate the
integrated MOC. It'll look like constellations- lots of little black
speed map stars, with blue structural lines and magnet words revealing
the underlying structure of your thought.

Believe me- it's beautiful when you see it all done out.

Next comes the ``Hint''. The ``Hint'' is a 1-3 word description of the
CONTEXT that the speed thought lives in. This is MAJOR important! Why
is it so important?

Because when you are mapping your speed thoughts, you don't want to
have to keep recognizing the content of the thought- you want to just
put the thought where it goes. Thus the aid of the context hint.

Next comes a funny little ``@'' sign column. Actually, I use the
character ``Psi''. You can omit this column if you want.

I use it to provide some information on what \emph{type} of thought it
is. This connects into something I call ``Icons for Thought'', and it's
part of my MTK (Mental Technique) notes. I'm not going to describe the
system here; This is a book about notebooks. Maybe some day I'll write
about it. A brief description will do though: Some thoughts are
``problems'', ``goals'', ``questions'', or ``incentives." Some are ''starting
points.`` Some are requests to "analyze'', to pick apart, and some are
requests to ``articulate''. Some are notes on ``maps'', some are ``rules''
or principles, some are ``names'' or ``borders''. Some are ``see alsos''
(but NOT references, which go in REF), some are ``quotations'', some are
``hazards'' or ``rebounds''. There are many variety of types of thoughts.

Free free to skip that column.

Lastly, there is the content.

Some times, you'll just put a word in there, or maybe two words. Some
times, you'll fill three rows of content.

Put in what you are comfortable with. Lean toward the terse, away from
the verbose. Use abbreviations and shorthand.

You can use the speed lists as a ``to-do'' sheet as well- maintenance
events that you want to see show up later. Check them off in the first
column when you complete them.

Again. There are NO Speed Thought Police. You can lay out whatever you
want. Add columns, subtract columns. Whatever you do- let me know about
it, or let the world know about it somehow. I want notebook creation
to be a creative science, after all..! Your thoughts and experiences
MATTER!


Now, I've presented the description of the Speed page, but I also want
to talk about some issues connected with Speed thoughts here.

* Pan-Subject speed-thought lists
* Growth Process (Memento->Speed->Articulation)
* ``Completing'' a speed

Remember that there are Pan-Subject speed thoughts. The page and form
for a Pan-Subject speeds page looks exactly the same, except that
instead of \#, you have ``Subject''- where you tell what subject's speed
list is the target. And instead of checking off when you've mapped it,
you check off when you've transcribed the speed thought to the
appropriate speed list.

Next: When you are recording speed thoughts, there is a sort of
``growth process''- a scale of articulation.

\begin{verbatim}
0.   the idea
0.2. (repeating in your mind?)
0.5. (paged?)
1.   Memento
2.   Speed
3.   Articulation
\end{verbatim}

First you have an idea in your head. You might repeat it in your mind
to not lose it, you might add it to a peg list and review it
periodically, until you have access to paper.

There are strategies for holding thoughts in your head. Very briefly-
take the thought, reduce it to a short, few-syllable, word. As you
pack in thoughts, cycle through the words.

When you UNPACK, unpack only a single word first, for each item, until
you have them all out. Then go over the list again, adding a SECOND
WORD. After you have two words out, you're pretty safe. Then add a
third. Now you're solid. Now go over the list and give a single line
description.

Don't start with two words- just go parallel, striping one word first,
then the second, then the third, then you are safe.

Your 1-3 word description is what I call a ``memento''. Then if you
expand it out a bit, I call it a ``speed''. 1-5 lines, tops. Anything
more, and you should probably be writing a POI entry, or some other
``articulation''.

The speed lists should contain memento's and speeds.

So, you have a view of where the speeds fit in the scale of ``an idea''
to ``full on articulation''.

Most thoughts are best left at stage 1 or 2. Just place them on the
map, and check them off. Some thoughts, however, you will need to
delve into.

Be sure to do so strategically.

When I talk about MOC's, I'll talk about strategy. IF I FORGET TO,
MAIL ME AND LET ME KNOW! Using strategy, you can figure out what to
articulate and what to leave un-expanded.

Yes, I'd use a speed list to maintain these promises, but hey- I'm
going to build that list later. (I am an experienced notekeeper, not
an experienced book writer.) I'm aiming for raw content right now. In
future book experiments, I'll try other stuff. Right now, I'm just
racing to the end.

What more?

Ah- Speeds to Completion. You want to eventually be ``DONE'' with a
speed thought.

Generally, the speed thought is ``done'' when it's mapped.

What happens when the map is fundamentally changed? You move to a new
map version? Well, when you redo maps, you want to lose as little
information as you can. You will invariably lose SOME, because your
old ways of looking at things are frequently wrong, or deficient in
some way. If you like, you can mark a RED check into the speed's box
when it is ``retired''. I personally haven't done this. If you put red
checks in all of the boxes, check the archive box [] at the bottom of
the page, and you can safely put the speed list in archive.

I find it best to LOOK FORWARD, rather than LOOK BACKWARD, in the
notebooks. (Psychology note!) Thoughts die. That is good. They are
reborn, symbolically, in your new map structure.

Is there anything else I want to say about speeds?

I once thought it would be a good idea to take speeds that were taken
off a map, and transfer them ``back'' to the speed list. That is, white
out it's checked box. As I said above, I think it's best to just let
them die. We WANT to forget old thoughts. And as Michael Ende likes to
point out, that something has entered our mind and then been
forgotten- it still leaves a trace on us, in our unconscious. I agree
with Michael Ende. Let it go. That thought HAS helped you, carried you
forward. It contributed to helping you recognize a new map, a new
order. It's time is done now.

There. I have said what I want about speeds. I'll talk about how they
can ``navigate'' over maps in the maps section. Which- is- coming right
up!


SMOC

The Subject Map of Contents. In the ``General Principles'' chapter of
this book, I already wrote a lot about SMOC. I want to fill in some
holes here, now.

In particular, I want to talk about:

\begin{itemize}
\item page layout
\item strategy
\item trickling speeds over the map
\item icons
\item transitioning maps
\end{itemize}

That is, I want to write about how a page is laid out, how to use the
SMOC to make strategic decisions, how to trickle speeds (and other
entries, but mostly speeds) over the map, icons on the map, and
transitioning from an old map structure to a new map structure.

A map has a simple page layout:

\begin{verbatim}
--------------------------------------------------
                 Map Title
(creation date)
(freeze date, once frozen)



               (your content here)





                     []      (subj) SMOC(v\#)-(page\#)
--------------------------------------------------
\end{verbatim}

I'm not going to write about what map content looks like- go back to
the ``Maps'' section in ``General Principles'' to learn about that. I'm
going to talk about specifics in SMOC pages here.

The creation date- list that first. That's when you make the map. Once
you retire a map, you give a ``freeze date''. That's when the map is
done. (Check the ``archive box'' [] at the bottom, too.)


Next: Strategy.

After you accumulate, say, 20 speeds, a POI or two, and a few
references, and whatever else you have, it's time to get a good
overhead view of your thoughts on your subject. That will both suggest
places for thinking to plug in holes, and show you the ``boundaries'' of
your thought, so that you can expand those boundaries.

Almost always- when you complete a map, you'll suddenly have an
avalanche of thoughts..! Not just immediately, but over the next few
days as well. Your mind, upon seeing the structure, will suddenly have
a ground to go further from. You've turned on the lights in the
present room, and can now find the door to continue to the next.

Now: Your map is 2D, but time flows linearly. You need a path of
progress. What you do is this:

You take out all those little sticky tabs that I told you to buy in
the materials part. They are about 1/2`` wide, at most, and maybe 1/4''
tall. You pick the subjects and locations that need the MOST work-
somewhere between 1-10 of them.

You write red words onto 1-10 of your sticky tabs, describing the work
to do. Then you place the red tags onto the map.

THOSE are your options. THOSE are the places where you should likely
devote your attention. As discussed in the theory section of this book
(next-to-last chapter), the source of input to your notebooks isn't
the speed lists- the source of input to your notebooks is your
ATTENTION, which THEN produces speedlists.

Now: A note about these strategy tabs.

You don't have to wait for a remapping effort to make these. Any time
you have a thought about ``what to work on'', you can make a sticky, and
put it on your map. If there IS no place on the map for it, just put
it out floating in space on the map. That's just fine. You'll map it
out later.

AND: As things become unimportant to you (happens a LOT), just take
tabs off. Throw them away.

If you want to remember to put a tab on, but you aren't there at the
moment, just put onto your speed list, "\#43:blahblah:Remember to work
on BlahBlah." Then when you are processing your speeds, and you see
that, if it is still important to you, check off the speed, make a red
sticky, and put it on the map in the right place.

The speeds don't just catch ideas- they also catch work
requests. Remember that.

So, where were we... I want you to leave this strategy session with
this in mind:

You have your sticky tabs. You stick them onto the map, to indicate
where work needs to be done. You take them off when you they become
irrelevant to you, or when you complete whatever issue it is. Then you
just throw the little sticky in the trash. It's work is done.

You do NOT want to write priorities on the map. The priorities change
VERY frequently. They should be going on and off pretty
frequently. You'll mess up your map if you keep writing all over
it. No need to replace it that often.

Anything else I need to say here?..

One last thing:

This really belongs in the ``extra-subject architecture'', but it's
related, so I will describe it here.

You may take off ONE sticky, the most important one to you at the
moment, and stick it on the GSMOC. I haven't described the GSMOC yet,
but for now, just know it is a map of all of your subjects.

That way, when you are pouring over all of your subjects, you'll see
what is the most important first thing to think about in that
subject. At least, what you thought was most important the last time
you were in there. (Things change quickly.)

And also: Try to keep only one sticky per strategy idea- try to avoid
keeping copies at multiple levels. I tried multiple levels once, and
it just became a maintenance nuisance. Whenever you have multiple
levels, just take ONE item from the lower level, take it off of the
lower level, and stick it onto the higher level. Have only one
higher-level item for each lower level island that exists.

Now I'm done talking about strategy.

So, we've talked about the simple page layout, we've talked about
strategy- next, we talk about trickling speeds over maps.

Okay: So you have a big list of speeds, and an empty map.

You make a new map version.

Suppose you were on Map \#1. But you have 100 speeds, and Map \#1's
getting old. Now you are making Map \#2.

Let's suppose- actually, that you need a ``temporary map"- a ''scratch
map." A wise idea- because you might make mistakes, no? And you'll
want to correct them.

What should you number the scratch map? (Or should you keep it at
all?) I say ``YES!'' You should number it \#2! Not 1.5, and don't throw
it in the trash. Just call the scratch map ``M2''. Then when you make
the ``real'' map, label it ``M3''. That's TOTALLY OKAY.

And besides, I've been surprised by how many times the ``scratch'' map
ends up being the ``real'' map. And you are going to be interrupted some
times, too. So just treat the scratch map as a real map, and don't be
afraid of growing numbers.

We have a versioning system. USE IT!

So you have either no map (you are making the first one), or you have
a poor one, and you have a big list of unmapped speeds.

The procedure is as follows:

\begin{enumerate}
\item Take an idea off the speed list, preferably from the bottom.
\item Think, ``How do I think about this idea, in terms of structure?''
\item Build missing structure, if it isn't there.
\item Put the speed thought on there.
\item Check off the speed thought.
\item Are all speeds done? Or are we satisfied? Or are we interrupted?
   If No, go to 1.
 \end{enumerate}

Here's an example.

Here's a Speed List:

``Electronic Collaboration''

\begin{verbatim}
# | Hint                 | Content
--|----------------------|------------------------
1 | Structured Email     | Should people structure their Email? ex name-sys
  |                      | f titles, 1 email/topic address. ref to
  |                      | ``Struct Considered Harmful.''
--|----------------------|-------