A term that personal knowledge enthusiasts often encounter is "capture."
We capture all kinds of things these days: interesting articles we encounter online, intriguing ideas we read about, and even our own thoughts that pop into our heads.
Today, I want to delve into the latter.
When we capture our own thoughts, we often describe it as "externalizing." Externalizing is the act of bringing something internal—something inside our skull—onto an external medium in the physical world, such as a computer or piece of paper.
While I've often used the term "externalize" myself, it has always bothered me. For me, it carries a connotation of moving something, implying a sort of relocation of mental content from within the mind to an external space.
This, of course, is not the case. The original thought – or at least the idea or concept it was about - remains in the mind even after externalizing it. It stays in our memories.
So why do I feel there is this incorrect attachment of “moving something” at play?
Perhaps GTD is partly to blame here. GTD views externalizing through a very specific lens: everything you hold in your mind is seen as "mental clutter." David Allen refers to the externalizing process as “closing open loops." I've previously—even more dramatically—referred to it as the pruning of pesky mind goblins (Zeigarniks). Regardless of the terminology, the objective is to "clear our minds" of some burden and to achieve a state of "mind like water". In other words, to “empty” our minds.
And indeed, this advice is invaluable. All serious practitioners of GTD attest to the liberation felt by unloading mental burdens into an external system. This practice often yields significant returns in terms of mental clarity and productivity. In fact, this single piece of advice may offer the greatest "return on investment" of the entire GTD methodology.
However, it's crucial to acknowledge that externalizing does not genuinely free our minds from their contents. It doesn't induce amnesia; otherwise, we would be puzzled each time we consult our task manager, with no recollection of inputting any tasks. Instead, externalizing enables these thoughts to recede into the background, thereby freeing up thinking space and reducing cognitive noise. We're not entirely erasing them from our minds; instead, we're relegating them from working memory to a quieter, more subdued state in the background. However, the term "externalize", particularly when juxtaposed with the "mind like water" analogy, suggests a complete removal of mental content from the brain. It implies that the external artifact holds greater importance than its original representation in the mind.
This is clearly misleading. That is why I've recently adopted the expression thought mapping instead of externalizing or clearing one’s mind. I define thought mapping as the process of manifesting thoughts in physical reality. It is the act of creating representations of thoughts and mental states (e.g., goals, intentions, tasks, projects) in an external medium in the form of analog or digital artifacts.1
For instance, we can map an idea or concept to a note within our personal knowledge companion, or we can map a task to a task artifact within our task artifact manager.
This process essentially mirrors what we previously referred to as externalizing; it's nothing new. But we now have a more precise and nuanced terminology.
What’s more, I propose an extension to our vocabulary here. Given the relevance of thought mapping to timely, actionable thoughts, I find it useful to introduce a complementary term—work mapping—for all thought mapping that results in the creation of task artifacts.
The growing demand for thought mapping has spurred the emergence of various modern tools for thought. Similarly, the need for work mapping has led to the proliferation of task artifact managers (I use Todoist, but many great options are available).
However, we all know that mapping our thoughts and working with these outlets is not enough. After all, I like to say that managing tasks is like herding sheep 🐑 (they scatter quickly), and organizing ideas is like chasing fireflies 🪰 (they fade fast). It is not an easy feat to keep them organized. Thus, we also need to manage whatever we have accumulated in these outlets. This is why TAM (task artifact management) and PKM (personal knowledge management) have become disciplines in their own right. And it is why blogs like Fractal Productivity (FP) exist.
I would be interested to know what you think. Thought mapping is a little more cumbersome of a term than externalizing. But in my opinion, it better reflects what we are actually doing: materializing representations of our thoughts in the physical world. We could also refer to the process as “mapping” to have a shorter term. What’s more, with work mapping, in particular, we would have a completely new addition to our vocabulary, increasing our strength of expression.
Please map your thoughts to a comment below :)
External hereby refers to something in the physical world; some work from the mental world is materialized in physical reality, for instance, by writing it down on a piece of paper.
Representations allude to the fact that the artifacts we create are not the real thing (they are the map, not the territory) but that after "externalizing" them, a mapping exists between them.