VPZtms Part 6: Discovery
Discovery is the act of finding information. There are two types of discovery, active and passive.
Active discovery is seeking out a solution to a specific problem you are having. For example, if you were launching a website, google searching a good hosting company is active discovery.
Passive discovery is following sources that you trust to report information that is important to you. Reading favorite websites, blogs, and print publications are all passive discovery.
A healthy combination of both is good information management. Active discovery is obviously essential, most of us spend much of our day seeking out solutions to problems. Passive discovery’s advantages on the other hand aren’t immediately clear. They are easily overlooked but are just as important.
The Advantages of Passive Discovery
Passive discovery has advantages that can’t be duplicated by active discovery.
Finding solutions to problems that you don’t know you have. In order to solve a problem with active discovery, first you have to identify that you are having a problem. This can be harder than it sounds. It sometimes takes significant imagination to realize things could be better than they are now. Not having to identify your problems yourself means solving more problems with less effort.
Creating an awareness of which problems have good solutions. This will sometimes save you from reinventing the wheel, but it also has much deeper advantages. Familiarity with many solutions means you can focus on the relationships between solutions. Most new things are created by combining two things that already existed.
Passive discovery’s advantages show up less frequently than their active counterpart, but when they do their impact is often much greater.
One last point about passive discovery, it is very easy to do. Just scanning headlines and digging deeper when find something is all it takes. It sounds trivial and I’ve never heard it considered “serious work.” But when I look back on what’s had the biggest impact on my work, it’s not the solutions that I was looking for, but the ones that found me.
good stuff — thanks for sharing your insights…
do you plan to reveal any strategies you may have for ensuring you are able to remain in passive mode as much as possible via the various tools you’ve mentioned?
-t
ps: the spam is especially surreal when following picasso…
Hi t,
Thanks for the comment and sorry it took me awhile to respond.
I don’t think passive discovery is something that you should have to force yourself to do. For me passive discovery is usually time that I enjoy, such as RSS feeds over coffee. The “passive” in passive discovery should be emphasized. It shouldn’t feel like work. What you are looking for is a feeling of information streaming in that you aren’t trying too hard to understand now, but that you are cataloging for future reference.
With that said, I thought about your questions and several tips occurred to me of things I’ve done that have improved both the quality and frequency of my passive discovery, so I’ve made some notes and I’ll turn them into an future post. Thanks again for bringing up the question.
Most of what I had planned to write about is the cataloging of the information you find through passive discovery. Part of my information management system is a simple way to take the information I find through passive discovery and put it somewhere where I’ll see it again exactly when it is useful to me.
And yeah sorry about all the spam around here. Last week I setup akismet which seems to be helping keep things cleaner around here.
-Roben
Roben,
no worries on the spam, i found it amusing…
after reading your series i decided to take another look at rss readers and voodoo edit and am now using both actively, however, not without issue…
i’ve been using sage (the firefox add-on) for rss and while it’s no where near as feature rich as NewsFire, the fact that it’s in my browser keeps it accessible and, more importantly, in mind — the same holds true for scrapbook, delicious, and diigo…
it’s great that there are so many cool new tools cropping up from small shops to handle the new web 2.0 reality, but when you couple an exploding amount of richer and richer offerings (info “types” available on the web) with the fact that few of us are trained librarians, most of us are making a mess within which we not only can’t find anything, but which also commands an inordinate amount of time to create…
in my experience one of the biggest obstacles to personal time and info management (the former often being impacted negatively by the latter) is the frequently difficult in-stride decision about which tool to use to capture the relevant info while researching — more and more, i find this to be a thought-consuming stumbling block which breaks my concentration from whatever topic i was trying to explore…
should i, for example, save useful info found on site A by simply bookmarking it? or add it to my social bookmarks via delicious where i’d have to go fish within my own soup by recalling the tags i assigned it? or do i capture an offline copy via scrapbook so that i know it’ll be there for me when i need it (crashes and corruption notwithstanding)? do i add it to my rss feedreader so i can read it regularly?
in each case, there are trade-offs that start to inform usage over time — such as adding resource hubs (like blogs, link pages, etc) to delicious because they’re potentially fertile libraries of resources which i may want to explore at some point in the future, but for which i can’t be bothered to capture each individual article, etc at this juncture… or like stumbling upon a great article that i’m uncertain will exist at the point i expect to have time to read it…
anyway, i’m sure you get the point, but with all the shiny new tools and functionality and info “types” that commonly accompany a given topic these days (web pages, images, pdf’s, flash videos, etc), it can start to become problematic to stay focused on what one is trying to do, especially when it involves maintaining 20 different plug-ins in order to “work” with it all in one place (i.e. the browser) — then there is the in-browser vs. file system storage for the topic… what the hell to do with pdfs, for example?
so assuming all the tools you have play pretty together (currently scrapbook is unusable thanks to sage), one still have to constantly stop and think about where and how to catalog info “do i really need an offline copy of this?, what should i call this?, what keywords would i likely use to find this article later”, etc, etc, rather than focusing on the topic itself…
and that’s all in the capture scenario, but what about when trying to synthesize all the info that you’ve collected down stream? you have to look in in all the little nooks and crannies that you’ve been at pains to create while capturing which is generally somewhat less than optimum from a usability standpoint — requiring all kinds of editors, players, etc, each of which adds its own layer on the info of interest…
of course, none of this is too threatening when there aren’t time constraints — as i would hope would be the case when in discovery mode — but the water gets a little murky when doing research for projects where the discoveries have to find their way into measurable results for which some bean counter somewhere has a calendar and ledger ready and waiting…
(perhaps you’re wondering, but) the point is that these are the sort of psychosomatic gymnastic questions that i was hoping your series might shed some light on…
voodoo edit is great and will probably replace sideline for me, though it isn’t as convenient to access (even using QuickSilver which i swear by) as sidenote which stays invisibly pinned to the edge of the screen waiting for me, but it is responsive and reliable + has the wonderful wiki functionality — really useful…
by the way, have you mucked around with mind mapping tools? i really hate the term (sounds so new age 12-stepish), but if there were a voodoo mapper out there, i’d be all game…
-t
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