Imagine that you are experimenting with a note-taking system, or a system to organise information in your life and work. It can be something as simple as keeping a daily planner and an open note on a note-taking app, or as complex as using a digital tagging and nesting classification system to save notes according to their relevant area of life and their appropriate subcategory.
Now imagine that you are a grad student who in the past few years in their academic career has been testing, perfecting, ditching, finding and developing note-taking and information management systems that would better suit your way of thinking and how you lead your life. Although a great part of academic programs are designed to teach you to think and make you used to being confronted with heaps of information and extracting synthesised meaning out of it, there is also a slight series of irretrievable loss that happens in the process.
Fast-forward, you have finished your diploma, you passed your defense for your dissertation and you are done. Nonetheless, by the last stretch of the whole process, you finally devised a good system that turned out to be indispensable for finishing your dissertation research. All the knowledge that you captured and processed at that late stage is now easily retrievable and you truly feel that you’ve properly incorporated it in your mind. So the irretrievable loss that happened is that a big part of previous notes that you took during seminars or lectures with inspiring teachers or topics are scattered all around several different documents, digital and physical. They are the remains of deceased systems that didn’t make the cut. But it turns out that these carcasses still contain all that knowledge that you wouldn’t mind accessing again without having to waste hours sifting through your notes and reprocessing them into your final system.
I hope that with this new generation of AI powered software, very adept to language understanding, an application comes out that can solve this issue. An application to which you could upload your information management system’s blueprint and that could go back through all your disordered notes, process and rearrange them to adapt them to your system. All this other notes you created while you were learning the ropes, you can’t dig through them and rearrange them without going crazy in the process. The fact is that you know how to, but the metaphorical height of that pile of notes is demoralising. Who has time for that? Even worse if you are fresh out of a bloody struggle with your dissertation. It’s a migraine inducing, repetitive chore akin to the worst administrative tasks that exist. Well, isn’t digital software a notorious talent for these things. There really should be an application that helps with this.
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