If you just want to play around with Speedwords and give it a test drive, try learning the 27 single-character Speedwords in Table 2-1 and use them for a few days. Learning this list will probably take only a few minutes, and you might be surprised how natural it is to work them into your ordinary note taking.

Table 2-2 contains the most important Speedwords for my own use, beyond the original 27. If you learn just these 100 or so words, you will greatly increase your writing speed.

Table 2-3 presents a few useful verbs that it is easy to conflate, grouped for easy reference.

Dutton Speedwords uses affixes (prefixes and suffixes) to extend its basic vocabulary. Table 2-4 lists only the most important affixes.

Many of Dutton’s affixes are idiosyncratic; this is sometimes listed as a major drawback of the language. The idiosyncratic quality of Dutton’s usage is a problem only if you are using Speedwords as an international auxiliary language, not if you are merely taking notes for yourself.

Neil D. Fleming and Colleen Mills developed the VARK system to describe different ways people absorb information.¹ VARK stands for the four types of learning defined by the theory: visual, aural, reading/writing, and kinesthetic. Most people can take in information through all of these channels, but each person usually has one preferred format:

You can complement the VARK system with the learning styles defined by Peter Honey and Alan Mumford.² This schema tells less about the format of incoming information and more about how people assimilate the information once they receive it.

Honey and Mumford define four styles or roles that indicate a preferred approach to new information:

Here are some suggestions about altering an information format to resemble more closely the type of information your brain prefers. Just find your type and try some of the ideas listed under it.

After you’ve made the information more palatable to your brain, use your best learning style to help retain it. Select your style from the following list and try some of the activities associated with it:

Your source list can come from free writing, from a catch [Hack #13], or even from a chat transcript. What’s necessary is to turn the source into a list.

Let’s start with free writing. Think of a subject you think about a lot. Situate yourself in front of a keyboard, close your eyes, and then type out everything that comes to you about the subject. You can try to focus on one topic, or fan out to just about everything important to you. Whatever you think about will appear in the mind map.

When you are done, read what you wrote. Wherever you spot a complete and distinct idea, enumerate it. Enumerate ideas, not sentences. Three sentences on the same idea receive just one number. One sentence with three ideas in it receives three numbers.

Suppose you had written the following in stream-of-consciousness free writing:

I think a lot about programming. I keep wondering, what about block-level design patterns? I’ve noticed that people who are starting to program don’t know how to hook from “I’m visiting every member of a two-dimensional array” to “I need two nested for loops.” What can we do about that? I think we can make “Block Level Design Patterns.” They’re too elementary to be noted by the sophisticated Design Patterns community, but I think they would be useful nonetheless. We could show patterns of exception use, patterns of conditional loops, and things like how to articulate decisions into variables, and we could explain all the trade-offs involved in these things.

Enumerated, it would look something like this:

I think a lot about programming. I keep wondering, what about (#1) block-level design patterns? I’ve noticed that (#2) people who are starting to program don’t know how (#3) to hook from “I’m visiting every member of a two-dimensional array” to “I need two nested for loops.” What can we do about that? I think we can make “Block Level Design Patterns.” They’re (#4) too elementary to be noted by the sophisticated Design Patterns community, but I think they would be (#5) useful nonetheless. We could show (#6) patterns of exception use, (#7) patterns of conditional loops, and things like (#8) how to articulate decisions into variables, and we could (#9) explain all the trade-offs involved in these things.

Now, draw up the source list:

Note that we list the number, a context hint, and a few words to describe the idea. The context hints are just like the context hints in a catch.

Now that you have your source list, it’s time to assemble your mind map.

Take a few ideas from your source list, and write them on a piece of paper; take a few more, and map them out too; and so on, until you’ve mapped them all. Continuously, in the background, think about the map as a whole. By the time you reach 30 to 50 items, the map should be fairly interesting, with several clusters.

Put your first idea anywhere on the page. When you place your second and third ideas, think about the relationship between the ideas. Place related ideas nearby, and put unrelated ideas far away. When you place an idea, just write the number and one to three words.

Make important ideas large. Make unimportant ideas small. You can even abbreviate small ideas to just their number.

After a while, you’ll have interesting clumps of ideas. When you can name the theme relating ideas together, write down the name in big letters between the ideas. I call these names magnet words, because they represent what pulls ideas together.

With time, you’ll need more than just distance to show structure. Introduce lines. Connect related major ideas by line to see structure. Vary the length, darkness, path, and arrangement of the lines.

I like to use color. I recommend four-color pens, if you are doing this with paper. (Bic makes some that are commonly available.) You can establish any sort of coloring convention; I tend to use blue for structural elements (lines, magnet words, etc.) and black for ideas.

As you draw, you will naturally pay more and more attention to structure. You might need to redraw portions of the map a few different ways to see what works right and feels right.

Ideally, with few exceptions, your structure will give each idea one obvious place for it to go. If you find that a pair of ideas meets and that they are really the same idea, just expressed in different ways or from different contexts, this is a good sign. It means your thinking is synchronizing different contexts that share something.

Bind together a stack of index cards with a binder clip or rubber band. Merlin Mann of the 43 Folders productivity blog made this design popular as the "Hipster PDA,”³ but the stack is more structured than the loose bundle of notes that that term implies. Here are a couple things no good stack should be without:

Use any to-do-list software with which you’re comfortable. I use Emacs PlannerMode.⁴ The important thing for the purpose of this hack is to be able to print out your to-do list so that you can bind it together with your stack.

Not to be confused with the bloated software product of a similar name, this is the part of your exoself that maintains your clarity and focus. In the back of your stack, insert cards with motivational quotations, short mental exercises to maintain mood and rationality (such as those in the emotional ABCs [Hack #57]), or reminders and heuristics (such as “Remember to buy my wife presents, just whenever”). Consult your outlook when you feel stressed, or simply whenever it occurs to you.

The MotivAider⁵ is a small device, much like a pager, that you can set to vibrate at set intervals to keep you focused on whatever behavior you wish to associate with it. You can put this silent countdown timer into your pocket or clip it to your belt, and then set it to intervals ranging from one minute to one day. It will vibrate at the specified interval, then immediately reset itself, so if you set it for 45 minutes it will vibrate silently at 45-minute intervals. Later models can vary the interval randomly.

The MotivAider is a sublime tool. Some people use it to remind themselves to smile or not to slouch. You will use it to remind yourself to consult your stack. “Program” yourself to consult your stack whenever the MotivAider goes off, do what’s on top, then position the next card. Write new cards as needed, offload long-term to-do items to your to-do list, and sometimes move them the other way.

Scan the cards in your stack, plus any other paper notes you have, and then save them to hard disk with your to-do list and other critical personal data. Check your critical data into CVS or Subversion and find a friend with whom you can exchange remote backups. Encrypt sensitive data so that remote sites can’t poke around in the files. If you enable secure remote access to your repository, you can access your critical personal data from anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection.⁶

Whenever you write something down, figure out when it will be safe to destroy it, and mark it accordingly. If you’re writing on a page and you know you won’t want to keep it a long time, or if you’re just using a few sheets of paper to work out some thoughts, put a lightly dashed X in red ink across the front of the page. You should still be able to use the page. This just signals you to “destroy on sight.”

Naturally, you’ll know not to toss the page the hour or day when you’re using it. But when you’re done, if you ever see that paper again, you know that you have preauthorized the immediate destruction of the page.

Don’t think twice! Just throw it in the trash!

But have fun doing so. That gleeful grin on your face can help dispel doubt in your mind. Mark mail as it comes in, magazines, everything that hits your desk. Then respect the kill dates and don’t second-guess yourself.

You can even set up files for things that need to be around a bit longer. If today is June 7 and you know you’ll need something for two weeks, put it in a file marked “June” and then throw away everything in that file when July comes around. Make a file for July if you feel it will be needed until sometime in July. Just be sure that you aren’t moving things forward indefinitely. Be firm and stick with the original kill date.

You can mark things similarly when you work on your computer. Create a directory called tmp, give yourself permission to throw away anything in it, and then work in it.

Work inside tmp, save important files to more permanent directories, and then delete everything in it at the end of the day. Have no doubts: if there were something in it that you intended to keep for longer than a day, you wouldn’t have put it into that directory. Your project’s source code, if you are a programmer, does not go in tmp. But keep the text of a temporary file, or a download, or a throwaway project, or anything else with limited utility in your tmp directory, and then get rid of it all every day.

If you need to keep something for a couple of days or a week, make folders for the months as you did for paper. In that case, make a tmpjun folder for the month of June and delete tmpjun when July comes. You can also name the folder tmp2006 and delete it in 2007.

By now you should have the idea. For any medium, you can find a strategy for communicating to yourself when to stop caring and just throw it out.

When you have those rare things that you really must keep for a long time, you’ll know it at a glance, because it won’t have any red text on it or whatever signal you used for that medium. For those important things, you must do the opposite of pre-deletion: set aside a special, protected space for them.

When you have a lot of clutter, you need to figure out which things you still need and which things you can chuck. If you run into a stack of ideas (in paper or electronic form), you don’t necessarily know if you need them. Maybe there’s something important in there, right?

So, you pull up a chair, and you go through them one by one. It can be quite an emotional ordeal. If you’ve pre-deleted, however, there’s no heartbreak, no thinking, no consideration. Just tossing.

If you have clutter, it’s obviously harder to find things physically. But this principle applies to computers, too. Even if you have a lot of storage and a wonderful indexing and searching system, it becomes harder and harder to manage and use the material you have as you gain more material. The less you save, the less you have to work through to find what you need, and the faster it goes. You’ll find that it’s miraculously easier to do things, all over the place—at work, on the computer, wherever—because you threw away your junk.

You might lose something, of course, and there might be times that you threw away something you could have used, but you might have lost the same thing in the clutter, too. Given that you’ve stored truly important things in a safe place, and that almost anything else can be replicated in one way or another, you might find that your newfound agility offers returns in increased concentration that more than compensate.

An interesting thing about records is that we tend to see them again. That’s what they’re there for, after all. There’s something about looking backward, however, which seems to damage the soul.

Reactivating dead thought patterns, over and over again, we can feel old desires like ghosts, moving us this way and that as we put ourselves under their sway again. A 15-year-old boy remembers wanting to become an astronaut. A 23-year-old man laments a lost girlfriend. Even the little things carry ghosts: a shopping list never fulfilled for an old project, a half-finished drawing, a story idea in a line.

If the bad memories nag, happy memories can be even worse. Winning a medal in sixth grade. Old soccer trophies. A special love letter. To be sure, we remember these times with love and fondness, but there is also something bad there. There can come to be a strange gnawing feeling and a dissatisfaction with a present that can never live up to the polished memories of old expectations.

Be careful of what you force yourself to remember. Be mindful when sending messages to your future self, because it might not want to be bothered so much.