Smart Glasses, Book Notes, and a Memex - DBR059

Episode 59 of the Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast podcast, hosted by Larry Tribble, Ph.D., titled "Smart Glasses, Book Notes, and a Memex - DBR059" was published on December 6, 2024 and runs 54 minutes.

December 6, 2024 ·54m · Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast

0:00 / 0:00

Episode Description

I got this question from one of the participants in the current Attention Compass group training – "What should I be recording/capturing?"

I had mentioned that I kept Book Notes. There was some debate on the usefulness of capturing Book Notes, around the usefulness/efficiency/etc. of broad capture of information.

For about 75 years now, people have been thinking about 'ubiquitous capture". I'll argue that we've entered phase three. It's quite within technical reach, IMO, with Smart Glasses (although I'm not sure that's the purpose).

The question is: what evidence is there that it would be useful.

The point is – how much information should we be trying to keep and how do we know when we've got it covered. How much technology should I be using?

We'll take that on in today's episode.

The two primary challenges of capture

It's hard to predict what will be useful
It has a cost, so we want to be efficient. Cost = 1-storage, and 2-review
(processing)
Cost 1 is falling rapidly
Cost 2 may be subject to AI intervention

The history of ubiquitous capture

Memex
Ph.D. reading and Book Notes
Google glass
Now – Meta smart glasses

Better/worse ways to read (from an information capture standpoint)

"How To Read a Book" – use the parts of a book
Example, TOC has two main purposes

1) find for second reading
2) pose questions for first reading what's an index?

Make Book Notes
The notes become the index, which is stored in the book – how can I use that?
challenges to making Book Notes

But how DO we read

Reading fiction is different than reading non fiction.
We just expect to gain pleasure or alleviation of boredom from reading fiction.
We don't have a habit of reading in an environment that's conducive to taking notes

Why Book Notes

What are 'book notes' – summary of takeaways
Purpose: I don't have to reread the book to verify/remember the information I need.
Reading apps like Kindle are not all the way there; best is to just have some copy paper in there and a pen
This makes associating our thoughts with a physical book pretty straightforward

How much capture is too much?

Extending the book notes model
Indexing information that we consume.
If we're in an information/attention economy, then how do we practice 'economy' in gathering information?
we're utilizing our attention to create information, we need to do it well/efficiently
our brains are unreliable when we consume information
Back to books / Ph.D. reading
Hard to manage the information when we read a lot of books

Beyond books and book notes – toward ubiquitous capture

One problem – how do we store our own thoughts
Brains are not real reliable storage mechanisms
We don't know exactly what information we'll need later
Make some notes to yourself; it's a waste of time to have to re-consume all the information in order to recall the nugget that we wanted

The technological road to Memex