How Do You Organize All of Your References?
Chapters
0:0 Cal's Intro0:32 How Do you Keep Track of all your references
1:4 Two schools of thought for information management
2:25 What Cal uses
00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:00:03.360 | Longtime listener and first time asking the question here.
00:00:12.160 | I'm quite fascinated by reading your articles,
00:00:16.560 | neither the New York Times or your books.
00:00:20.160 | You have so much references.
00:00:24.280 | So the question is, how do you keep
00:00:27.040 | track of all the references?
00:00:29.280 | Do you have a method?
00:00:31.040 | Let's say if you were to read a book or article
00:00:34.120 | and then you find a quote, how do you store them
00:00:37.800 | or how do you keep them so that you can refer back
00:00:42.120 | when you are doing an article?
00:00:44.760 | Anyways, I'd like to know your method
00:00:48.920 | and look forward to hearing.
00:00:52.040 | Thank you for all the good work you do.
00:00:55.160 | Cheers.
00:00:56.400 | Well, when it comes to information management
00:01:00.000 | of this type, there's two big schools of thought--
00:01:03.240 | proactive or reactive.
00:01:06.080 | So the proactive information managers
00:01:08.720 | want to take the information they encounter
00:01:12.320 | when they first encounter it and put it
00:01:14.280 | into some sort of system, even before they necessarily
00:01:17.960 | have a specific use for that information.
00:01:19.920 | They want to get it into a system
00:01:22.000 | where it can later be retrieved if needed.
00:01:24.680 | And in the more advanced version of those proactive systems
00:01:27.560 | where new novel connections can form that themselves might even
00:01:32.720 | help give you ideas about what you should be writing about.
00:01:36.000 | So this is a really big idea right now.
00:01:37.960 | A lot of the proactive systems you might hear about
00:01:40.680 | are inspired, generally speaking,
00:01:43.560 | by the Zettelkasten system, where
00:01:46.120 | you have contextual links between different pieces
00:01:49.280 | of information.
00:01:50.120 | Information are like nodes in a graph
00:01:52.200 | and you have edges that connect them.
00:01:53.800 | Through these connections, you can find information
00:01:56.080 | serendipitously.
00:01:58.560 | Second brain is a concept like this.
00:02:01.240 | You might have seen--
00:02:02.360 | I think this is Diego Forte's second brain
00:02:04.360 | is one example of this.
00:02:06.000 | When I had Srini Rao on the show, I interviewed Srini Rao,
00:02:08.760 | he talked about his use of a particular Zettelkasten-style
00:02:13.120 | note-taking system that he actually had generate for him,
00:02:17.800 | basically, article ideas.
00:02:18.960 | He finds interesting connections,
00:02:20.400 | then all the information he needs is there.
00:02:23.680 | I largely do not use proactive systems.
00:02:27.080 | There's an overhead to them that I haven't yet gotten over.
00:02:31.280 | There's a lot of overhead to getting that information
00:02:33.520 | in there.
00:02:34.320 | My time is quite limited.
00:02:36.440 | So I often don't have or feel like I
00:02:38.240 | have that time to sit back and extract things
00:02:41.640 | from the books I'm reading or articles that I'm reading.
00:02:44.760 | I'm not saying it wouldn't work for me,
00:02:46.680 | it's just I haven't done it.
00:02:49.360 | I am more of the reactive camp, which is a much more minimalist
00:02:53.160 | approach.
00:02:53.920 | And the reactive camp is, I'm working on this.
00:02:58.080 | I got to get a lot of information
00:02:59.400 | to help support this thing that I'm working on.
00:03:01.720 | And you go out there and you find some information
00:03:03.360 | for that thing, and then you work on it,
00:03:05.040 | and you have all that information right there to cite.
00:03:08.360 | Almost always, that's how my writing comes together.
00:03:11.360 | If I'm working on an article, then I
00:03:14.080 | will go out there and find sources I need for that article,
00:03:16.760 | and I will keep track of them right there in Scrivener,
00:03:19.280 | in my research folder, link, link, link, link, link, link,
00:03:21.960 | link, and they're all right there.
00:03:23.560 | That goes to the fact checker.
00:03:24.800 | That's where all the citations come from.
00:03:26.560 | If I'm working on a book chapter, similar,
00:03:28.760 | I have a rough outline of what I want there.
00:03:31.120 | That outline might have some sources in mind.
00:03:33.000 | But then I go out when I'm working on that book chapter
00:03:35.280 | and find those books and find the articles
00:03:37.400 | and talk to the people.
00:03:39.440 | And I keep track of right there for this chapter.
00:03:41.800 | Here's all the different sources I used.
00:03:44.120 | Often, I'll just footnote as I write.
00:03:46.480 | OK, here's the source.
00:03:47.560 | Here's that source.
00:03:48.360 | Here's this source.
00:03:49.400 | And I do it on demand.
00:03:51.280 | Now, there's little hacks in here.
00:03:52.720 | So when I'm book writing, for example,
00:03:55.160 | I will use shorthand for my references.
00:03:57.920 | Maybe I'll just mention the PDF name of the article I cited
00:04:01.600 | or a brief description of the book title.
00:04:05.800 | I tend to then hire an editor to come in later and actually
00:04:08.680 | clean up all of those references to be in the proper style
00:04:12.360 | citation so that--
00:04:13.520 | there's some hacks.
00:04:14.400 | There's some technical hacks there.
00:04:15.880 | But I'm not drawing from some very large second brain
00:04:18.600 | Zetalcast and inspired system to get those references.
00:04:22.360 | I find them as I need them.
00:04:24.880 | Now, what happens here is that over time,
00:04:27.720 | if you write enough things and you have put together
00:04:32.080 | enough creative ideas, you have been
00:04:34.040 | bathed in a lot of interesting notions.
00:04:36.680 | You've been bathed in a lot of interesting citations.
00:04:39.080 | You've been bathed in a lot of interesting case studies.
00:04:41.480 | And your brain itself implicitly implements
00:04:44.440 | some sort of Zetalcast and type system.
00:04:46.120 | So then when it comes time, if you've
00:04:47.660 | been a writer for 10 years, to do
00:04:49.120 | a chapter for a book on a certain topic,
00:04:51.080 | already off the top of your head,
00:04:52.880 | you get five or six good starting points.
00:04:55.160 | Oh, I should use an example from Lincoln.
00:04:56.880 | And I remember listening to a thing about Thoreau.
00:05:00.120 | And oh, and I wrote about this guy before.
00:05:02.640 | And there's some stuff I learned about him that I never really
00:05:05.100 | got around to using.
00:05:05.980 | I tend to find that stuff is relatively accessible
00:05:08.140 | and it pops up.
00:05:08.760 | And it's a good starting point.
00:05:09.880 | And you start with those sources,
00:05:10.920 | and those lead you to new sources.
00:05:12.340 | So your brain itself actually can
00:05:14.800 | do a good job of implementing what a lot of these systems
00:05:18.120 | are trying to replace.
00:05:20.200 | And so that's how I do it.
00:05:21.320 | It's incredibly low overhead.
00:05:22.560 | I'm exposed to a lot of information.
00:05:24.040 | I remember a lot of stuff.
00:05:25.600 | That's my starting point.
00:05:26.920 | But when it comes time to write something,
00:05:29.960 | that is when, in the moment, I begin to more systematically
00:05:33.120 | try to find sources.
00:05:34.880 | Storm right there where I'm working.
00:05:37.720 | It all happens more or less on demand.
00:05:40.760 | It may not be the most elegant system.
00:05:42.740 | It may not be the most serendipity, promoting,
00:05:45.740 | supporting type system.
00:05:47.060 | But it's very low overhead.
00:05:48.420 | And so far, it seems to work.
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00:05:54.820 | (upbeat music)