Gerrit Niezen

I've always wondered how Cory Doctorow is such a prolific writer. Yesterday I discovered his blog post The Memex Method where he describes how he uses his blog as a memex, or a “second brain” as the productivity and knowledge management community calls it.

Every day, I load my giant folder of tabs; zip through my giant collection of RSS feeds; and answer my social telephones — primarily emails and Twitter mentions — and I open each promising fragment in its own tab to read and think about. If the fragment seems significant, I’ll blog it: I’ll set out the context for why I think this seems important, and then describe what it adds to the picture.

I've been using Readwise for a long time to keep track of what I read. Whenever I highlight something in a book, a saved article or a blog post it gets saved to Readwise, and I get a summary email with random saved highlights every day to review. More recently, Readwise Reader makes it even easier by providing a single place to read RSS feeds, saved articles and e-books.

I have stored highlights from 48 books and 320 articles since I started using Readwise. Unfortunately, while it's good to review these highlights, I've never really done anything with them. Cory uses his blog fragments to synthesise books, essays, stories and speeches:

Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.

I've always wanted to use my blog as a second brain. I just had a look for when I saved my first article to Readwise. It was on 21 January 2020, so almost four years ago. Funnily enough, it was an article about how to make a memex! Here is the highlight I saved from that article:

If you do all your thinking in public, in venues where you always have to start from a presumption of zero familiarity with your other thought, you can't create complex thoughts at all.

This is the opposite of what Cory does, and I think where I've been going wrong these past four years. Here's what he says:

The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself.

Very true. I've gathered lots of little personal notes over the years, but there's no rigour to them. I can't really use them to do anything. They're not complex thoughts! So here is a new year's resolution for 2025: Instead of squirrelling away personal notes in a private vault, share them on a blog with the world!

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