I these days, people have less time to read. Most of us can’t sit down, 4 hours in a row, to read. Our reading will be sparse. We like to read, but we’ll read 4 or 5 pages here, another 3 or 4 pages there, etc.

Many people will read before sleeping. They will read 10, 15 or 20 pages. Reading needs to be planned like any other tasks we have to do daily.

Personally I like books with small chapters or books with pauses in chapters. I need it because I hate to lose track of my readings. If a book is wrote with small chapters, between 5 and 10 pages, or have pauses (2 carriage returns), I’ll be able to read them in minutes. Then, I’ll be able to read these short chapters between other daily tasks.

If I check the chapter I’m starting to read and see that he have 75 pages, I’ll certainly not start it for a 15 of 20 minutes of reading. Then I’ll wait until I’ll have the time to read it. It’s rare that I’ll have the time to read 75 pages in a row during a normal week of work. Then, the result will be that I’ll read less during this week.

Otherwise, if I’m starting to read and see that the chapter have 10 pages, I’ll be able to read it somewhere between two daily tasks. The result will be a greater reading time because I’ll be able to more effectively plan the reading of these small chapters with my other daily task.

I don’t think that I’m alone in this situation. Our world is changing and I think that authors will need to take this new fact in count when they will write their books. They will need to write smaller chapters to give their readers more flexibility to read their books. I think that authors like John Grisham understand this new need.

Technoratie: [reading] [books] [planning] [gtd] [tasks]

Rhythm seems to be everywhere in the nature and human creations. It’s adulated, observed, imitated and searched. Being in the rhythm is a state where many would like to be. Rhythm is gracious, beautiful. Rhythm is present in music, chant, and poetry; also in dance, swimming and running. Things that have rhythm seem beautiful, elegant and effective.

At this point my brain stopped.

It was true, but not for everything. The art of combat is everything but rhythm. The art of combat is the art of being arrhythmic. It’s the art of breaking the rhythm of your enemy. The only rhythm a fighter should have is one in constant mutation, broken, chaotic. To have the edge in a combat you have to be unpredictable, arrhythmic. You should be a mimicker: constantly evolving.

Technoratie: [combat] [rhythm] [grace]

A lightweight version of my Analog Blog concept as classification system for my personal pocket journal

What I like with the Moleskine pocket daily diary is his size and his number of pages (much more than the Moleskine pocket ruled notebook). He is just perfect to slip it into your coat’s pockets; and have enough pages to be useful as a personal journal. When I bought it some months ago I first thought that I would use it as a pocket diary. I quickly realized that it would not be a good idea and that it will be much more useful as a pocket personal journal. Then I started to use it as an idea repository organized as a lightweight version of my analog blog concept that I developed some months ago.

Why do I opt for a lightweight version of my system to use with my Moleskine pocket diary?

• Because the pocket diary is too small to efficiently implement the whole concept. I don’t want to write my life in it; only ideas that come up in my mind and quotes that I found during my journeys. Given this, a lightweight version of the concept is all designated to fulfill my needs.

Why to use this classification system to organize my pocket personal journal? Because I want to rapidly and effectively organize my ideas. I could put my thoughts without any classification system. I could put my quotes here and there. I could put book excerpts at random. The problem with this is that if I search for something, I don’t want to check every of the 300 pages before finding it. But I don’t want to put as many time to organize my journal that it take to write it. It’s why I adopted a lightweight version of the analog blog system.

The lightweight version has only 3 sections:

1. The content pages.
2. The categories pages (build as the index of the journal).
3. The external references pages.

This is what looks like a typical page of my pocket personal journal. It’s literally a repository of my ideas, my thoughts, quotes and book excerpts. There are only 5 features that I implemented in these content pages:

1. The page number.
2. A possible reference to an internal ( ->[x;y] ) resource.
3. A possible reference to an external ( [x;y]-> ) resource (see the section bellow for more information about this feature).
4. A date (in this case I used the date of the original Moleskine pocket diary; but you can explicitly write it near your entries).
5. Possibly Meta Data words at the top corner of your pages.

The categories page(s) is essential. The idea and his functioning is the same as in the analog blog system. You can see it as a dynamic index. You can create your categories when you start your personal journal; you can also create them when you need it. When you’ll put a new entry in you journal that have the same semantic meaning as a category, then you’ll only have to add his page number at the end of the category’s line.

These categories pages will be in the first pages of your journal. Remember, this is a sort of index or table of content. When you’ll need to find something, or check what you already thought about something, chec’k this section to quickly find what you want. It has the same utility as the Synopsis of Categories of the Roget’s International Thesaurus. You can easily use it as a source of inspiration; a place where ideas emerge.

[Category’s name]

• This is the name of a category. Use words with clear and rich semantic meaning to name your categories.

[x – y – z]

• This is the pages of your journal where you can find entries with the same semantic meaning.

I put the external references pages at the beginning of my journal (some pages after my categories pages). You can also put it at the end pages without any problems. This is the place where you’ll put the external resources references referred by your journal’s entries. In my case, it’s usually a reference to a book where I wrote an excerpt of it in my journal. It could also be an internet URL, an address, a phone number, etc. The purpose of this section is to put references to resources that you don’t want to rewrite every time you refer to them in your journal.

[x : y]

• This is the reference’s identifier. X is the number, the ID, of the external resource’s reference. Y is the page where the external reference is viewable. Then if you check the page content excerpt above you?ll see: [3;6]-> . When I read this in one of my content pages, I know that if I’m checking at the page 6 of my journal, I’ll find the external reference #3 that refer to a resource (in this case it’s a book called “Page after Page” that refers this journal’s entry).

I used this lightweight version of the analog blog system since some months and I’m really satisfied by it. It’s simple (much more than the original version) and effective (I use it often to find ideas to write about on this blog).

The whole aim of this is system to save time while using my journal as a personal source of knowledge. The axiom is that if I can’t find the information I want; it’s that I don’t have the information. The personal journal concept is a way to backup and/or create the knowledge, the information; and this classification system is the way to find this knowledge, this information. The union of the two concepts is the foundation of my axiom.

Technoratie: [moleskine] [journal] [diary] [organization] [notebook] [notetaking]

Your brain works with stimulus. If you don’t stimulate it, he will wait until something append. If you always stimulate it in the same way, then, he’ll, most of the time, always answer in the same way.

Given this, the trick is to stimulate it with as many sort of stimulus as you can think of. It will force your brain to compute on the same idea, differently.

Take this example: you are working on a piece of writing. What will stimulate your creativity to write it is the environment around you: the place where you are writing, the pencil you are using, the paper you are writing on. It’s not only the environment around you that will stimulate it, but also your pass experiences, you knowledge, etc. Everything will act on the final result of your writing.

Remember, we try to work differently to stimulate the answer given by our brains to a specific problem. We need to stimulate it in different ways, to try to force it to enter in other dimensions.

In the current example, you can change many things in your working environment to stimulate your brain differently. Change the place where you are writing: go to a coffee shop instead of your bedroom. Use paper of different colors: it will play on your moods. Write with your sheet in landscape and not portrait.

It’s important to stimulate your brain to find answer to questions. It’s how it works: by stimulation. Most of the great scientists of our history understood it: Eisenstein, Gödel, Diffie and Hellman, etc.

The idea is to see things differently, with another angle, to redirect our minds in other dimensions.

Technoratie: [brain] [mind] [stimulus] [different]

I found that my readings are a great inspiration source for my writings. Last week I have been sick for many days. I hadn’t the head to read. The only think I did was watching TV. Then I got lag in my works and hadn’t much time to read books of blog feeds. It’s why I lacked to write on my blog; it’s why it will be this for another couple of days.

But I found something in this process. My readings are really important in my writing process. It’s where I seem to get a great part of my inspiration. I wanted to write something yesterday but I wasn’t able to focus on anything. I wandered why and I found that I practically always wrote things that come up in my mind when I was reading. It was a revelation and a thing to have in mind: I need to read to write.

I’m a somewhat big reader. I read a book a week, sometimes 2 when I have a reading rage. I read anything. When I read, I think about what I’m reading, but sometimes my eyes read but my mind is somewhere else, musing on something trigged by the reading, in relation or not with it. It’s for this exact reason why reading is at the center of my writings: because it has the power to trigger different ideas in my mind.

Technoratie: [writing] [reading] [ideas] [inspiration]