Using index cards for personal knowledge management

Setting out in my own consulting business has meant acquiring a lot of new skills in a hurry: everything from marketing to bookkeeping, networking, providing my own document templates and contracts, scoping, scheduling and all sorts of things that as a design manager in a large corporation, I had other people to do for me.

But more than that, being on my own means getting my inspiration from distributed digital networks and having less local, immediate, physical community. I have no partners with whom I design and who know my clients’ and users’ environments, values and aspirations. I have no local folks with whom to grab a quick coffee for 15 minutes to throw ideas around – and in my old job, some of those were people I’d been engaged with in the same conversations about design for many years so that we’d developed a shorthand for talking about issues based on a legacy of common (war) stories.

So I’m beginning to learn that I need to manage not only my business activities but my business stories, my design stories. I don’t have a web of easy relationships to remind me of who I am and what my concerns are – I have to develop systems on my own to do that. I have to work harder to manage my knowledge myself.

And that’s where the index cards come in. I’ve found that using cards externalizing my thinking and helps me manage my knowledge in four key ways:

• Organizing my writing
• Reminding me of ongoing concerns
• Preparing for conversations
• Providing a visual shorthand for new concepts

Index cards for writing

I’ve always written easily in aphorisms. Many of my favorite writers – for instance, Walter Benjamin, on whom I wrote my undergraduate thesis – wrote in aphorisms or short, compact pieces of writing, and my habits of thinking have been shaped by him and others.

I found myself recently working again on some ideas about pattern languages that I’ve had kicking around for the last 12 years or so, and wound up scribbling some short thoughts down in my notebook that felt like a vague argument. They were bits and statements from some presentations I’ve given on the topic over the years – some were assertions; some were hypotheses; some were just feelings. There was an implied sequence there, like an outline forming, but I wasn’t sure I’d gotten the sequence right.

So when I got home, I typed them all out and printed them on index cards. Then I sat down on the floor and started laying them all out, and knocking them into different orders until I found an order that made some sense to me.

Index cards for reminding

And now I carry these pattern thoughts around with me – which is easy; they weigh a lot less than my Moleskine – and review them whenever I get the chance. Having chased this line of thinking off and on over the years, the small, easily portable stack of cards is keeping this topic fresh for me. Have a moment? I can work on the outline. I can review these thoughts and remember why they’re important to me, and what work I need to do in order to flesh them out.

I’m closer to getting that piece of writing out the door than I’ve ever been.

Index cards for conversing

After having worked this out, I found myself needing to do a pitch for a consulting job, and I turned to a stack of blank cards, this time. After two conversations with company employees, I had some questions I dearly wanted answered in order to write a strong proposal, and some key points that I thought would be important for the hiring manager to hear, based on what I could glean about the corporate culture from my two interviews.

So I just scribbled them out on cards however they came to me, and in the end they looked like this:

As the meeting approached, I’d read carefully through and rearranged those cards at least 12 different times until I found an order that suited me. With the order decided, I then typed abridged versions of them out in a half-page document that was easy to slide subtly between me and my notebook on the conference table, where I could see it and my audience could not. Having rehearsed with the cards for at least two days before, I could keep my abridged notes short – nearly in code – because I knew the material so well. The pitch went very smoothly, and the proposal was very easy to write, as my cards made it easy for me to get from the meeting what I needed from it.

Index cards for visual note-taking

And so now I’m beginning to use index cards for note taking: here’s a photo of my notes on Otto Scharmer’s article “Addressing the blind spot of our time,” which is the executive summary of his book Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges.

Scharmer’s article suggests a five step design process to which seven leaderships skills apply. My index card diagram overlays the skills on the process and the shape of the cards on the table provide me with a visual mnemonic that is a snapshot of my learnings from the material. That’s now become a glyph that looks like this:

And now that glyph is printed on an index card that I’ve hung on the door of my secretary desk to remind me of the ideas the article contains.

Conclusion

And so now I never sit down to write, take notes, or organize ideas without a stack of cards and a proper pen by my side, and in my bag I carry short stacks of cards to read, re-organize, ‘draw’ with, and remind me of my various projects. They won’t take the place of having conversations with other humans, ever. But they are a handy way for me to manage my learning, and I’m happy to have picked up a tool that will now be with me always.

Hope you find this helpful, too.