Two PKM posts I keep thinking about

I saw two tweets on my timeline last week that I have not stopped thinking about. Let me tell you why!

Note- I love PKM and thinking about what information could look like but I am not an expert and often don’t have the words to explain what I mean. This is my best attempt right now!

Maggie Appleton shared an article by Julian Lehr about multi-layered calendars.

I was intrigued by this as the graphics were gorgeous but I was a bit confused by the term “multi-layered calendars”. In the article, Julian very clearly explained how calendars could do so much more. At the base of it, it’s because there’s always more ~going on~ than the single event in your calendar. He suggested adding extra data to give context to the event, such as linking Strava data to the ‘Run’ event in the calendar. I think this is a genius idea. This is just a small part of the article, so please read it for full context, there are some very interesting and thought-provoking points in there.

One particularly interesting thought of Julian’s was how calendars can help us change the future, but as someone who tries (on some level) to memorialise the every day of my life, it got me thinking about the past. Imagine if we could just dive back in to different times in life just by looking in your calendar app.. that would be incredible. Everything is connected to a date, so it’s logical to me that the calendar becomes the hub in which you can explore the past you. You can do this to an extent with Day One but the central app there is obviously a journal not your Calendar. Maybe I am thinking of a meta-calendar that links any piece of information I have in my system that has a date assigned to it. I like this idea. Day One could link to the date rather than the date linking to the journal entry.

Julian’s article also made me think about history notes… (when am I not thinking about history). In books and documentaries you often hear/read “tensions were rising in x decade”. Where do I put that piece of information? It’s linked to time... where do I put it so it shows up in context with all of the years within that decade so I can have that piece of information that tensions were rising in the background? Now I’ve seen Julian’s graphics, I’m picturing it like his Boarding and flight example.

As thought-provoking as it is, I currently have no idea how to put that in my notes so I’ll be thinking about this for a while!

This very random tweet about Erich Friedman’s website

Erich is a retired professor who updates his website with all sorts of fascinating lists and nuggets of information.

If you felt any reaction reading the tweet, please go and visit his website. There’s one page on his Mathematical Genealogy which is incredible, it essentially traces where his work came from and everything that was done before him, that allowed him to do his research.

It’s such a different way of “doing” PKM (or perhaps Personal Information Management is a better term here, but does it really matter…?) to what we see, and perhaps he doesn’t even think of it as such. But I’ve found it fascinating. I think it’s delightful and I now want to start adding random information to a page on my website.

It shows the person behind the screen I think. There’s more to life than the work we publish, whether that’s articles or websites or maths papers like Erich. We’re still existing and interacting with the world behind the scenes, whether it’s playing mini-golf in Florida on the weekend, or listening to perfectly curated Spotify playlists that remind you of a different time.

Let’s start sharing some of that!

So two random tweets that have been on my mind. What do you think?