We’ve covered the Capture and Manage verbs in the KM environment, now it’s on to Connect!
Connect
Connecting, for me, is partially the use of linked data in Roam, Obsidian and Notion (see the Capture post for more on that) and partially the ability to connect ideas graphically. Roam and Obsidian, at least, have the ability to create mind maps in their apps, but they are clunky and hard to create and manage and there are lots of other options out there that work much better, so I use those.
I have a license for SimpleMind because that’s required to be able to use it on my phone (and it was reasonably cheap at $10) and I use this book reviewing system to capture information from the print books that I read (very difficult to highlight and import those highlights from print…). Once I have the book’s notes all arranged in a nicely graphical mindmap, I export that map (and the underlying outline of it) to PDF into Evernote and then, from there, I (have in the past) add it to my Asana to-do list (which is *another* tool that could be part of my tech stack) templates that I’ve set up to surface those notes 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months, 1 year, 2 years and 4 years from the day I create the tasks. The reason this is in the past is that I’m looking at Roam to do this for me – Roam can do the calendar math for me by virtue of it’s date management system, so I can take notes in Roam (or export them from SimpleMind to Roam using my phone) and then add dates using the [[in 3 days]] [[in 3 weeks]] etc. syntax and Roam figures the dates for me and then the notes show up on those dates in the future. Either way, it’s an incredibly valuable way to ensure that you are reviewing your reading regularly and not losing the information you read quite so quickly! I use my Dropbox account (yet another tech that should be in my stack?) to store the maps so that I have access to them on the phone and on my various desktop/laptop computers as needed.
Coggle (as well as Miro and a NUMBER of other mind-mapping tools on the web) is also pretty handy. I use it for web-based, cloud-stored maps that I want to work on at the computer and don’t need on my phone. I used Coggle to create the image atop each of these posts and found it pretty easy to pick up.
The reason I like to think of these as part of the Connect KM environment is that using tools like Miro can be incredibly useful for groups or collaborative work in general – as can a fairly new option from Google called Jamboard. It’s more of a post-it on a whiteboard kind of tool, but it has the same visual impact that mind maps do and is fun to play with, so it’s on my tech stack, too, these days.
Next time, we’re going to cover the Enhance part of our KM environments, so stay tuned!
Part 1 – Capture | Part 2 – Manage | Part 3 – Connect | Part 4 – Enhance | Part 5 – Find | Part 6 – Create
