Back to School Resolutions, Tiger in my tank, If I only had a second brain

I previously mentioned my love of making new years resolutions in the fall when school starts. We are raised to start school in the fall. We get new kit, new shoes, and school supplies that smell like the Target store. So whySo why wait for the New Year to make your resolutions? This year I am getting a late start because of surgery. It's been two months since my last trip to the Keck body shop, and I feel like this is the time to knuckle down on my goals for the following year.

There is a tiger in my tank.

I am starting to feel some of the success of my surgery. Now, at two months out from getting a complete ostomy surgery that removed all the remaining ill bits of my anatomy. I don't feel sofa-sick anymore. This last week, I noticed I have more stamina for sitting up. Right out of the hospital, I could not sit up in a chair at my desk. This week I am sitting at my desk for a few hours in the morning. It's going well. All the ergonomic rules about not sitting too long apply double for me. The dog is great about letting me know when we need to go outside and walk around the block so she can smell stuff. Overall, I am starting to feel better. I continue to get a weekly fill up for my dehydration. Plus I drink a gallon of fluids daily. There used to be an ad campaign for gasoline that promised this particular brand of gas would put a tiger in your tank.  I feel that way after I get my weekly IV fluids. Also, it gives me the stamina to do multiple tasks where previously, one job would finish me for the whole day.

What am I reading now?

The challenge to move forward with my overall recovery now switches to my cognition skills.  I am reading How to build a Second Brain | by Tiago Forte and using a template from Thomas Frank that builds out the note-taking functions covered in the book as an app that works on both my phone and my notebook. My challenge for the next year is mastering this digital system of taking notes, writing new content and keeping track of all my activities.

In the introduction, Tiago Forte describes an illness that debilitated him in college. He describes the effects on his mind as similar to my experience of late. We both had the fog of lost memories. I can not remember whole episodes, conversations and trips from over the last 6 years. Tiago describes the same experience. He started to rally all his notes, medical records and reading into a digital library. I was happy that in his case led to a treatment plan that gave him back his life. I found it familiar to my own experience. I have tried to amass all my medical records into what I call the "Book of Keck, in three volumes."  This multi-volume file folder has all my notes and treatment history for my chrohns disease along with volumes for the other things they treat me fot of the crohn's desease. I never made it to the digital formatting of all this information which would be life-changing.  When I do this task I envision seeing all my medical notes as an online database. Instead of thumbing through file folders, I could pull up my a digital database. An on-screen timeline would allow me to read doctors' notes and separate the hospital visits and procedures that currently run together in my brain. My paper book of keck is not useful as a tool. It's more like an old college file that I would never open again.

Sharpen the saw

There is a story about two loggers.  These guys were evenly matched same tools and build. But one cut more wood and took an hour off to do another chore. The slower axeman finally asked the better lumberjack what made him so much better. To which the better lumberjack replied that his mystery hour's break wast to sharpen his tools.

There is a common lesson here between stopping to sharpen the saw in the axeman story and taking notes for my second brain app. Tiago Forte points out in the books introduction, a study from Japan of primates and people that confirms that when we use a tool like a rake to extend our reach, the mind maps that tool as part of our body. So consistently using a note taking app will extend our memory and thinking making it searchable and shareable in ways we could not conceive of previously.

"...information workers spend a great deal of time looking for the data they want and only find it 50% of the time."

Another example of sharpening the saw is my photo albums. When we first had a good scanner I scanned all my picture. The process took a week at least. I discovered in doing the scanning that immediately, my photographs became so much more useful to me. I could crop them, enhance them, and most importantly, share them.  The system is still a bit hobbled because I did not name the pictures or write descriptive text to make the database searchable. The only way to find a picture now is to scroll through the file and eyeball the picture I want to use. With a little effort I have been moving pictures to files based on who is in the photo. Still there is quite a bit of searching with  no success.  Tiago Forte references that information workers spend a great deal of time looking for the data they want and only find it 50% of the time. I can relate. I have so much data in files on my computer and handwritten notebooks that would be much more useful to me in a second brain system. I am going to follow up next week with more details on this book, and the week after.