Episode 148 of The Informed Life podcast features a conversation with Dr. Luc Beaudoin. Luc is co-founder and CEO of CogSci Apps, the developers of a brilliant Mac productivity tool called Hookmark. He is also an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University and author of two books on using cognitive science to improve productivity.
Hookmark plays a special role in my personal knowledge management setup: it allows me to link to just about anything on my Mac — Word documents, PDFs, email messages, etc. (As Luc clarified in the conversation: it doesn’t link to everything — but it does to a lot of things!)
If you’ve read Duly Noted, you know why this matters. The ability to link things to other things reduces friction when doing knowledge work. For example, if you write yourself a reminder to follow up on a request you received via email, you won’t waste time looking for the email when you’re ready to carry out the task.
As Luc put it,
I think of Hookmark as extending consciousness, because a function of consciousness is to retrieve and process information. So this helps you retrieve information that you’re working on.
The most stark case is when you set up your work environment. When you start, let’s say, to resume a draft of some creative artifact, if you can have links to the various pieces that I was referring to, then that saves you a lot of setup time. But also while you’re working, when you’re 15, 20 minutes, an hour into the project, you repeatedly need to access the information. Reducing the friction at setup time and reducing the friction during the process of working are what Hookmark’s about.
As suggested by his company’s name, Luc’s background — and the tool’s origin — is in cognitive science. Research in the space points to ways of improving our ability to do ‘deep work’ — essential to academics, students, authors, and ‘knowledge workers.’
Hookmark embodies the principle of ‘ubiquitous linking.’ As Luc explained it,
when you can establish a link between two related information items, you can use those links. Basically, it circumvents the need for searching or navigating and gives you immediate access to the information that you need. And while a search may seem like an instantaneous satisfaction of an information need, in fact, searching for information — Googling or using Spotlight or whatever — requires multiple steps.
And as you execute those steps, there are consequences for the human mind. The information in your working memory starts to decay, and other information becomes active. So your context starts to shift. And that’s not a good thing, especially if you have to repeat this multiple times because there are multiple information items that you need to work with.
And also there’s the distractibility component. So when you’re searching for information, like for instance, an email, you need to consult the email from a co-author. So you go into your mail app. That’s the most dangerous environment — the browser in the mail app — it’s just so distractible. You can notice something, and the next thing you know, 20 minutes have gone by, and you’ve completely lost your train of thought, and you have to restart.
Again, focus — critical to knowledge work. If you can link to anything in your ‘learning environment,’ you can quickly come back to whatever you’re focusing on at any given moment without becoming distracted. Luc has shared a Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking that explains the philosophy behind this approach in greater depth.
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Luc for suggestions for improving our ability to do knowledge work (beyond getting Hookmark, of course.) He suggested deliberate practice. I can vouch for this: thinking and personal knowledge management are skills that can be cultivated, just like any other.
It had been a while since I’d hosted a conversation about PKM on the show. I learned a lot from this conversation with Luc — including the fact I’ve only been using a fraction of the functionality in Hookmark! I hope you get as much value from our conversation as I did.