Summary
The aim of this course was for you to create a basic system for filtering, saving, annotating, processing, and sharing information you come into contact with, converting it into something that others find valuable.
You were going to achieve this through these objectives:
- Reduce the amount of information you pay attention to.
- Save and organise information in a personal library.
- Extract high-value information from a range of sources.
- Convert information into something personally meaningful.
- Increase your career capital by sharing what you learn.
Pause and reflect
Before moving on
Brief pause for reflection before continuing to the next lesson.
Before moving on to the next course, it may be worth spending some time reflecting on how this one impacts on your existing workflow. For example, do you need to review your daily schedule, or system for managing email? Have the principles of information management changed how you think about your note-taking? It may be worth a more detailed review of the lessons in this course, pausing to ask what else may need to change. The other courses available may be worth considering.
Overview of lessons
The first lesson in this course asked you to make changes that should have reduced the amount of information needing your attention. This may have involved unsubscribing from newsletters and feeds, unfollowing people on Twitter, and removing some apps from your phone. These steps should have reduced the amount of noise in your working life, making it easier to pay attention to the work of creating, instead of consuming.
After reducing the amount of incoming information, you implemented a mechanism for capturing sources that warrant closer attention. These were saved for later review, when you have more time to decide if they’re worth engaging with in more depth. If this quick review identified it as a high-value source, you saved it into your personal library and marked it as something potentially worth paying attention to.
The third lesson was about extracting the most useful information from the source. This means that you needed to set aside time for reading, annotating, and thinking about what you captured in Lesson Two. The information you extract from original sources is the raw material that will influence almost everything downstream of it, which is why it deserves protected time.
The fourth lesson described a system for processing the information you’ve extracted. Where you do this processing is up to you; it could be within the same note you used to extract the information, or as part of another note. Different apps will have different workflows, but the principle is that you add something of yourself to the information. This lesson was about building a routine to create personally meaningful knowledge.
The final lesson in this course was about sharing what you’ve learned. One of the key characteristics of scholarship is that we present our ideas to peers for evaluation. In this context, ‘work’ and ‘evaluation’ are loosely defined; it may mean that you tweet an insight, and a few of your followers retweet it. Or it may mean writing an article that you submit to a journal. The idea isn’t that everything you create is subject to rigorous peer-review, but that you become part of other people’s network for learning. Over time, this builds your career capital, which gives you leverage in your career progression.
Bibliography
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