Tools for Thought

Many decisions we make during the day are easy. What do I want for dinner? Should I get gas now or later? What’s the best route to get to my destination? Easy decisions typically involve a very finite number of variables, low enough to manage them in our heads.

The moment we have to compare, sort or relate more than three or four factors, it becomes more efficient to track them externally, using media like paper, a whiteboard or a computer. This type of externalized thinking is called distributed cognition.

Distributed cognition is a fancy term for a simple concept.

• First, we collect our thoughts about the project or situation at hand
• Then, organize these thoughts into one of three schemes to clarify their meaning and relevance

Once we have all of our thoughts in front of us simultaneously, it becomes easier to see or define their relationships.

We can think relationally when we have persistent mental representations in the physical world to work with. When we try to manage multiple thoughts without physical aides, we’re limited by short-term memory to comparing two thoughts at any given moment. Managing three thoughts requires two comparison operations. This can happen quickly, but has operations multiply, the overhead soon becomes unscalable.

I use the word “thought” in a peculiar way — as a general term to stand for any object of our attention: an idea, a fact, a memory, a concern, a concept, or a detail. Thoughts can be broad or specific — we can think about a “bird” or a “beak.” Like a hologram, we can take a fragment of a thought (beak) and reconstruct a whole from it (bird).

In ascending order of complexity, lists, trees and maps are the scaffolds used to hold our thoughts in place while we examine them objectively. Lists are for simple overviews, trees are for hierarchical relationships, and maps are for nonlinear relationships.

Lists

These are fairly self-evident. If you want to make it easy to pick up everything you need at the grocery store, you make a list. If you want to ensure that all relevant topics are discussed during a meeting, you create an agenda — a list.

Lists come in two types: ordered and unordered. Ordered lists can be organized chronologically or by priority of importance. Lists may be unordered because they represent an initial brain dump — collecting before organizing — or because sequence and priority are irrelevant. The Beatles are John, Paul, George and Ringo, regardless of order.

The advantage of lists is simplicity. They’re intuitive to make without specialized tools or further instruction, and they’re compact enough to fit onto any collection medium — the back of an envelope, a PDA, a notebook. The disadvantage of lists is that the person making them will sometimes unconsciously populate a list using a narrower set of criteria than originally intended. A list about “rock and roll” might begin with a diverse array of thoughts around the topic (electric guitars, groupies, lyrics), then slip into a narrow array without the list maker realizing it (a list of rock stars). With trees and maps, we explicitly group thoughts under headings to prevent getting sidetracked from the big picture.

Trees

Trees organize thoughts into hierarchies, allowing us to see their linear relationships. Trees can be graphical, with boxes and lines, or they can be simply written outlines. If the hierarchy is self-evident, making a tree is still helpful for more objective examination. Writing outlines and org charts are typical examples of trees. If the hierarchy is as-yet undefined (drafting a book proposal, or an org chart for a new business), it often helps to collect thoughts in list form first, then organize them into a tree to clarify or establish their relationships.

Trees can be top-down or botton-up. If you’re planning to write a book about dogs, you can start top-down, brainstorming chapter ideas: breeds, training, feeding, and so on; then repeating the process for sections within each chapter. Bottom-up trees are for working inductively. You want to write a book about dogs, but sense that you would like it to target a more unique niche. You start brainstorming prospective chapter ideas: accessories, grooming, pedigrees, etc. — suddenly, you see a pattern, and realize that writing a book on competing in dog shows might be the way to go.

The advantage of trees is that the categories and subcategories are explicit. It’s obvious during the brainstorming process when there’s too much emphasis on one category. The disadvantage of trees is that the relationships between categories, subcategories and elements must be understood up front. It can be difficult to drop a new idea onto a tree when there’s only an intuitive grasp of how the idea relates to any of the existing categories. This is less of a problem with bottom-up trees, but maps offer more freedom to accommodate looser relationships.

Maps

Maps — a generic term for diagramming structures like flowcharts, mind maps, flowscapes and concept maps — can be used to illustrate a process, determine relationships between different elements, or capture thoughts before the relationships between them are evident. Maps can incorporate trees and lists as part of a larger whole. Some maps are strictly procedural, like flowcharts, while others are relational, like concept maps.

Mind maps, the most widely used mapping scheme for personal use, can be done on paper or computer. Many people find that mindmapping on paper is more fluid and spontaneous than doing so in programs like MindManager or Freemind. On the other hand, computer mind maps can be distributed easily, and it’s possible to attach support material to nodes if desired. A mind map for a project can double as a digital file cabinet for all relevant support materials, like documents, presentations, images and web links.

The advantage of maps is that they can include all types of elements or relationships within a project or situation. In a mind map, for instance, list items can orbit a central theme, and each of them can branch into its own tree of related details. The disadvantage of maps (some types, at least) is that it’s possible to continue free associating indefinitely and lose sight of the critical elements in the map. Sometimes it helps, after making a map, to pick out the critical nodes and consolidate them into a list, or a shorter map.