The History of Paper as a History of Personal Information Management - DBR 068

Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast

This episode is about the history of personal information management as viewed through a now ancient technology, PAPER We’ll have a couple of takeaways: One is human beings have been trying to manage their own personal information for a long time, so we don’t need to be so worried about the current need – we’re humans so we manage information. We’ll glean wisdom from these previous efforts to manage the information that the world presents to us. We’ll assess tactics and mindsets that are going to be useful to us. Hat tip to the Art of Manliness website, and to Roland Allen talking about his book, The Notebook. There's also information in this podcast from a book called Hamlet's BlackBerry that I read some years ago, and a book called The information that that talks about the history of our understanding of information and its use in our world, so some combination of those things. The management of personal information Ancient: Plato was skeptical of writing as an information management technique. Less ancient: people used wax tablets.

• In the 1300s we were using money. We had language; we had poetry; we heard things that we wanted to record and wanted to tell other people. And so, life was not a ton simpler than it is now.
• Note on reusable media.

Even less, but still fairly, ancient: the commercial availability of paper

• Note: we had blank paper for hundreds of years before we had the printing press.
• People would get a bound collection of paper called a notebook. Also hundreds of years before printing.
• Gave rise to various practices in information keeping, information management.

Non-printed Books

• Initially, books were handwritten and hand copied
• Note on the reliability measures of Old Testament copying
• Making a hand-copy of a book while sitting at a desk for extended periods of time being read to and writing this down.
• A bound set of pieces of paper that you write in would not have been foreign
• The commonplace book

Printed books

• The notion of an almanac
• Printing created a more authoritative position for authors and publishers, along with a broader reach

Education

• Use of notebooks in education – what can we learn
• Diaries and travelogues would have been more autobiographical
• The notion of a textbook really dates from the 1800s or so
• The notion that education could very likely have been the creation of books for oneself
• 500 years ago, education may have consisted of putting your book together so that then you had the compendium of knowledge as it was presented to you
• Same possibly in the trades

Modern ideas

• Nuances of reusable media
• Allen: there was kind of a scratch notebook, and then a big notebook
• Modern journaling
• The possible need to have two notebooks

Is the creation of a book a good educational goal?

• How do we apply modern technology?
• Capture and Processing using modern tech
• Complexity led to ancestors keep records of people and places and things.
• Some of that turned into financial record keeping

Maybe we should be spending our time trying to create our commonplace book(s) as we learn things. Summary