Taking Knowledge Work Seriously
Building the fundamental skills through deliberate practice
Hiđ, Ben here.
Itâs another Saturdayđđđ.
Todayâs tip takes about 5 minutes to read.
Get Value.
When I wrote about Knowledge Work, I described the knowledge worker as someone who uses their thinking to solve complex problems to develop new products and services in their various fields of expertise. Since information is no longer a constraint, it's essential we learn the most important skill of knowing how to filter the information we find useful and to keep that information in a way that is reusable and easy to access. This approach is what is known as personal knowledge management.
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)Â is the practice of capturing the ideas and insights we encounter in our daily lives, whether from personal experience, books and articles, or our work, and cultivating them overtime to produce more creative, higher quality work.
In an information-driven economy, not having a PKM system means you are not taking full advantage of what you learn and you have no way of storing and stacking your idea for future use.
A writer, like an athlete, must âtrainâ every day. What did I do today to keep in âformâ ~ Susan Sotang1
Deliberate practice amongst athletes is a daily ritual they perform if they must continue to do what they do at that same level of performance, if not beyond. By comparison, Knowledge work rarely involves deliberate practice.
I can argue this is because the core skills of athletes are more noticeable ( running speed, swimming speed, no. of bench press reps). But the fundamental skills of knowledge work are less salient. Most times, we do them void of mindfulness or intention because we see it as a chore rather than a practice.
There are 2 fundamental skills of knowledge work:
Reading
In this context can be reading a Twitter thread or an article, listening to a Podcast or Watching a video on YouTube. It appears that only a few people can recall a high-level detail of information they read from a book. We spend a lot of time and effort reading a book but stutter and struggle to explain what we read in 3 sentences moments later. We overestimate the amount of information we can absorb and recall when we read a book. What's funnier is that we look surprised when this happens.
Writing
Writing is a great way to put pressure on your thinking: itâs hard to summarize something you donât sharply understand. Many of the most effective people I knowâalive and deadâseem unable to do serious thinking without a writing surface in front of them. It seems to extend their cognitive abilities somehow. When you write to explain an idea, youâll naturally try multiple framings, flesh out its edges, and see new connections. Unfortunately, most writing practices we picked up from schools are generally ineffective because they have no specific methods for developing our ideas over time.
Reading and Writing are like the yin and yang of knowledge work . One works to absorb information and the other retains it. Without the right structure, you end up with an imbalance of always consuming more information than necessary without recalling useful thoughts or the information retained as no way of accumulating in value for you. If you've read books that meant a lot to you in the past, but now it feels like you have nothing to show for it... If you have years of knowledge that you've either forgotten or that you're not growing in value over time... it's quite possible you're in this trap already.
Here's a test for you: Do you have notes from any idea or experience dating back from 2 to 3 years ago? How many of them have you continued to grow and link to other ideas and experiences?
If the answer is none, or if this idea is strange to you, then you might benefit from learning how to âmake notesâ and link ideas that nourish your soul now, and keep growing in value long into the future.
The Value School community is just for that.
Susan Sontag 7/5/72 (As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980)