Stowe Boyd on Obsidian and Taskidian, learning loops, work management, reasoning by analogy, and sedimentary thinking

“People have to dedicate a chunk of time to actively make sense of the world every day. That is get out your diary and write all the thoughts you had in your head and didn’t have time to synthesize until you woke up this morning, or read the things you think are most critical to read and take notes, and capture chunks of information that you think are going to be of relevance to you in the future. You have to make that investment.”

– Stowe Boyd

About Stowe Boyd

Stowe Boyd has been studying work and the tools we use to adapt to the future for the past three decades. Stowe coined the terms ‘hashtag’, ‘work management’, ‘social tools’, and ‘spreadbase’.

Website: Work Futures

Blog: Stowe Boyd

LinkedIn: Stowe Boyd

Twitter: Stowe Boyd

What you will learn

• What is the following people model? (03:14)
• What are the advantages and how to use Obsidian (06:12)
• How maths is a tool for connecting information (10:08)
• How can we thrive on overload as individuals and as a team? (16:48)
• What is the role of visuals in complementing words and its role in organisations (19:00)
• How to nurture the process of synthesis and pulling together into a whole all of the disparate things that we see (23:19)
• Why you need a daily routine for information processing (28:14)

Episode resources

• Tumblr
• Medium
• MIT Technology Review
• New York Times
• Feynman Technique
• Obsidian
• Christopher Lasch
• N.S. Lyons
• Notion
• Evernote
• The Revolt of the Elites by Christopher Lasch
• Taskidian
• Data View and Query Tool Obsidian
• Kanban boards
• Set Theory
• Lambda Calculus
• Recursion
• Social Network Theory
• Storm Norm Model by Bruce Tuckman
• Swift Trust
• Cisco Webex Ahead
• John Borthwick
• Pace Layers
• Stewart Brand

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Stowe, it’s wonderful to have you on the show.

Stowe Boyd: Nice to see you again, actually, it’s been a while.

Ross: It has been a very long time now. I think it’s fair to say, thrive on overload, you make sense of the world of work and where that’s going amongst many, many other things. Where does that start? What’s the starting point for you in being able to make sense of this incredible world of information that we live in?

Stowe: I guess the start, in a way, was the transition from the old world onto the internet. I’d gotten involved with that relatively early and embraced all that that entails, the good and the bad. I started blogging in 1999. It was a long time ago. Around the same time, I got really interested in the transition to collaboration technologies, as most people call them, but I use different terms. I followed that very avidly for the last 20 years, honestly. That was the grounding of everything that came later. From that, I got interested in work; what people are doing aside from just the technologies that they use to do it. That’s basically the background, the foundation of everything else I’m involved in, or have been involved in for the last couple of decades.

Ross: Why don’t we start from the tactical and build out into the macro of what you do? How do you choose your information sources? Where does your sensing of the world stand? What are your sources? What times of the day do you do that? How do you get to come across the things that feed your mind?

Stowe: I’ve always been a real fan of the following-people model. I once said that the most important decision in a connected world is who you choose to follow. That’s a lot of it. There are specific people, hundreds of them out there, that I think highly of and are good sources. I try to follow them in whatever mechanism that comes; Newsletters now is very common but also before that things like Twitter, Tumblr, Medium, and all those kinds of platforms. That’s it principally; that and, of course, certain journals, periodicals that I think are important, MIT’s Technology Review, for example, or the New York Times, real obvious things. I’m pretty avid about keeping up with those sources. I have a deluge of newsletters coming to me all the time these days.

Ross: Following these people, finding these sources, how do you pull out what is relevant? Something which you do need to capture or to do something with, how do you identify what it is? What do you do with that to pull that into your framework of thinking?

Stowe: I think I’ll operate on this Feynman notion that you have a list of 20 questions or 12 questions or some number that are important to you so you’re always on the lookout for information that adds to, clarifies, or debunks things you’ve already been thinking about. I definitely have that. I’ve got this list of topics and when they reoccur, I’m very interested, I capture, read, and try to assimilate it. I was doing this in the morning before we got on the call. I was reading about this characterization of the two sides of the world, virtuals versus physicals, and people are grounded in those worlds.

This aligns with other discussions that are important to me about how does the world work, and how is politics and economics changing. I copied two things that I was reading this morning, put them in my Obsidian vault, and highlighted the things I thought were critical. Sometime in the not-too-distant future, I’ll go back and write something, and pluck that quote from Christopher Lasch and that other thing from N.S. Lyons and it’ll find its way into something that I synthesize and try to help me make sense of the world, then I’ll share it somewhere.

Ross: So you’re using Obsidian. I’d love to hear why you’ve chosen to use Obsidian and how specifically you use that to capture and connect.

Stowe: It’s the most recent example of trying to use and maintain a body of information, what I call “My Workings” and you’ve got to keep it somewhere. In the old days, people would keep a commonplace book and write on the pages or take clippings from magazines and glue them in whatever. But, in the digital age now, I’ve tried a whole bunch of other tools. They all did what they did, and they sufficed maybe at various points in my progression. I have gone through Notion, Evernote, and a bunch of others, too many to name actually.

Then, in the last year and a half, I’ve been using Obsidian, and I really like it because of its flexibility. I mean, the fact that it’s extendable, that people have built all kinds of plugins that do all kinds of interesting things, that makes it easy to cross-reference and find things. Finding is really critical. I need like 100 ways to find things because my memory is flawed and limited but I can have an infinity of markdown files on my hard drive. I want to be able to go there and say, who was the person that said, who was the guy that wrote the book The Revolt of the Elites? I don’t remember. I know today because I just put something in there but six years from now, will I remember that? Maybe, but maybe not. But I’ll search it and I’ll find out. I really require a system and Obsidian is one of many candidates that I am currently invested in. But it’s not necessarily the end-all and be-all, who knows? I might move again.

Ross: I’m using Obsidian as well. There’s Roam Research, Obsidian, and Logsec and some other similar tools. Do you think there is potential for the next generation beyond that?

Stowe: They’re evolving very quickly, they’re all on their own development paths but they’re all looking at each other like, they have that feature, I’ll implement that. Yes, it’s another interesting frontier technology space, very interesting stuff.

Ross: You connect some when you take notes, whether that be