What is this blog about?

This blog is an attempt to explain some of my ideas with a hope to get useful feedback from whoever is interested or has something to say about it. This is my first blog post ever and it is not going to be perfect :).

In general, this blog is about productivity, visualizations, decision making and science behind all that. It's also about a tool, called notegraph (in development) which can help some of us to be more productive and creative.

How it all started

The idea of building this tool came to me as I watched one of my colleagues in a struggling startup trying to use Excel to show his thought process about one of the product/marketing moves. It really turned me off; I mean, not his ideas (in fact, they were pretty good), but the attempt to fit complicated and flexible ideas into some rigid structure, that was designed for numbers. Our minds work in different ways, they're not calculators. Therefore, the better organization system, the better!

Existing tools

All right, someone may say, there are mind maps and similar tools out there. Great, those tools are there and they are useful, but they are not so popular. Majority of the people never heard or never used mindmaps. The level of populrity I'm talking about is a Evernote, that tool is popular because it's a great product and it works well. Plus, none of those tools really designed for the web, I mean, why can't you just simply include a beautiful mindmap attached to your blog that makes it easy to navigate and understand all that content better?

Problem

Our modern world throws a lot of information at us through different media and that's OK and can be entertaining sometimes. But if you actually care about productivity and creativity, for example at work, you should care about amount and format of information entering your head. There are limits; it takes mental efforts to read this text, to listen, to think... If you can focus on something specific for long enough period of time, you can be far more productive comparing to multi-tasking mode.

Information overload

What it all comes to is an information overload, that happens when the amount of information available exceeds our capacity to make sense of it or seriously affects our ability to make good decisions. There are all kinds of science researches and books about this topic. The one I can recommend is a Organized Mind - which is interesting, easy to read, and is based on scientific facts.

Another thing that bothers me. In order to communicate our thoughts we have to use a language and that requires some mastery in that field. At a point when people with brilliant ideas cannot get their point across because they suck at writing and public speaking. There must be a better way... I'm not saying to stop using language, but use it a way that is more organized or/and has a different format that is easier to get right.

How to deal with it

The solution is to use better organization system. The system that helps someone organize ideas and information visually. The tool, which does not exist and cannot be matched by functionality of anything out there on the market. I have some ideas about what would make such tool. I will try to release different components in blog posts with examples of how it can be applied to real world situations. Those will be visual components, presented as pictures and graphs. Take a look at D3 examples - some of those techniques can be used to represent our ideas and help us be more organized. So we can free up our mental capacity for more important things, like changing the world.