Has the time come to outsource our mind?  We’ve outsourced computation to machines, and increasingly, memory to the internet. But the complex and intermingling world of your thoughts, your mental hyperlinks, your notes and observations –can we outsource that? 

The very notion of outsourcing human functions is an interesting one. It turns out that cooking is a way of kicking off the digestion process outside the body, thereby reducing the need for a bigger stomach or a larger digestive canal. One of the reasons we can walk upright is that human babies are born much earlier in their development. So we’ve outsourced a chunk of the gestation process as well. 

So why not the brain? One of the most significant functions the brain performs is to keep us productive. Both in a biological sense, by continuously reducing the signal to noise ratio, but also in how we live our lives and use our time. But we forget things, we lose threads, we have great ideas one morning and we kick ourselves because we can’t remember them the next day. Enter the brave new world of digital note-taking.

Most people go through life taking notes and making lists in some form. Paper, pads, notebooks, disposable sheets, napkins, whatever is at hand, but very few achieve any level of permanence. Some exceptional people are revered for preserving their notes –from Da Vinci to Darwin. These have served as insights into their thinking, reasoning and their lives’ work has become more accessible because of these notes. In keeping with this tradition, brands like Moleskine have done fabulously well for a while by making paper and pen exciting again. But we all know the limitations of paper-based notes. So what does the future hold? 

Today you don’t have to be a mastermind to organise your thoughts. There are tools aplenty and they are increasingly doing the hard work for you. I started using Evernote in 2009 and switched to the premium version sometime around 2015. Over the course of that time, it has become an extension of my mind, performing a number of tasks that I would earlier have to perform mentally and manually. First off, the meeting notes. Today I can go to a meeting with an organisation and I can pull up notes from a discussion I might have had with them 5 years ago. Second, I’ve collapsed all my to-do lists from other apps into a single note which I keep updated. Third, all the information I regularly use –project codes, company information, employee IDs of teammates, all go into some semi-permanent notes. Fourth, passing thoughts, fragments of ideas, notes from books I read, all go into notes for future assimilation. Lastly, all interesting links go in there, and all my writing starts in Evernote, even this note. Of course, the ancillary penultimate app means that handwritten notes from my iPad are also integrated, and the scannable app does the same for any legal or formal documents I have to scan. All of this is not to suggest Evernote is the answer. It just happens to be a tool I (and about 225 million others) use to organise my notes and my thoughts. It’s interesting, of course, that the Evernote founders had the vision to do this when Microsoft already had OneNote and Apple had a perfectly usable notes app that came free. Yet Evernote has found a steady and committed user base. Until now.

It feels more recently, that Evernote is struggling under the weight of its own success. There are more disgruntled users on the boards, and a host of new apps have appeared to push the boundaries further. Notion, Hypernotes, Mem.ai, Roam, Walling, Craft, AmpleNote, and Obsidian are just a few. Of these, Notion has already hit a $2bn valuation, and investors such as Andreeson Horrowitz are getting into this space. The next generation of apps actually set out to do more than replicate your notebooks. They are typically powered by graph databases which seek to organise and link your notes and information to create your personal knowledge graph. This means that if you were to write your summary of a book you’ve read about advanced materials one day, and the next day you were jotting down notes after discussing potential uses of graphene for an architectural project, and 3 months later you were writing a blog about bio-inspired adaptive materials, then your notes app would find the linkages between these 3 notes and connect your thoughts behind the scenes. In much the same way that while writing the blog, your brain might throw up the memory of that discussion about graphene being used for a desalination membrane in a building. 

A tool is of course only as good as its user. And if you as the user aren’t organised, the tool will disappoint you in some way. Each of us evolves our own methods of retaining information. Apparently, a chap called Luhmann, a German scholar in the 20th century, build a system that has hit the Zeitgeist just at the time that note-taking has become a sexy category of investment. This system is called Zettelkasten and it has hit my feed in about twenty different articles in the past fortnight (see here, here, and here). It’s as though the Internet is nudging me to tell you about it. 

The problem with our personal library of notes is not capturing (which most of us do more or less adequately) but retrievability, interlinkages, and metadata. Libraries follow the Dewey-Decimal system for retrievability, but it depends on books to be kept on the right shelves (or drives) and doesn’t capture interlinkages. (That’s why Tim Berners Lee had to create HTML! )You may have written some excellent notes about how cricket tactics apply in business. But you may have never used the word ‘sport’. When you’re looking for sporting related references for a presentation will you find this note? Will you remember it? You can use extensive tagging systems, or you can use the Zettelkasten method, which involves index notes, snippets, and more detailed notes in interconnecting ways. It uses the principles of atomicity, autonomy, and linkages and from the looks of it, as you use it, it structures how you look at information and I suspect it makes you more naturally organised. 

But I also suspect that the Zettelkasten will be overtaken in its moment of glory by technology. After all, most technology is about democratising expertise. So the combination of graph databases, semantic intelligence, image recognition, OCR and other emerging technologies, probably means that the newer tools I mentioned above will actually do most of your heavy lifting so you won’t have do follow the Zettelkasten or any other system. It will happen on its own, it will be much more sophisticated and nuanced than any system you could build and follow. And over time, perhaps decades, it will actually start resembling your own neural patterns. After all, Evernote’s tagline has been ‘Remember Everything’ (hence the elephant in the logo, one assumes). But Roam goes further to ‘a note-taking tool for networked thought’. Whereas Obsidian even says “A Second Brain for you, Forever“, and Mem.ai calls itself ‘Your mind, on tap’. You can see the direction of travel, can’t you? 

Perhaps at some point, the app will generate new thoughts for you as well. It may pop up with a message saying “you’ve been thinking about advanced materials as well as sports, would you like to think about how next-generation artificial materials are taking sports performance to new levels? Here are 20 links on the subject. At which point writing this newsletter will be a doddle.