Notes and tasks — the shades of thinkspaces
This story is about how thinkspaces help us in different ways to manage notes and tasks, knowledge and plans in a one tool.
While working on the RedForester project, I address questions such as what the purpose of our tool is, what main use cases we should highlight to people, and so on. The basis of these questions stands out in terms of how people work with different kinds of information in general. And the difference between note-based and task-based use cases seems interesting to me.
Is it strange to manage notes and tasks in one place?
Recently I’d got into a dispute with Kate (she is the CPO on our team) about the balance of Project Management & Knowledge Management in doing a startup. It looks like I tend to go the knowledge management way.
In contrast to her I love to take notes during brainstorming sessions — notes about competitors, notes about some ideas to the future, to create tasks with detailed descriptions (in the form of a bunch of notes), and so on, I even found a thread on Reddit about that.
Kate told me, that this way is slowing down our overall speed of making decisions and pushing her out of focus. She wants to use more rigid (template-based) structures in project management, like to-do lists or timelines of tasks. The purpose and value of making / taking notes and storing them for some time are not evident to her. Moreover, new notes that I or someone else put on the project are leading her (by her words) to lose time trying to decide whether she should pay attention to them or not, and so on.
She even agrees that tasks could also be seen as temporary notes) But when you execute a bunch of tasks (a plan), other notes could distract you and make you lose focus.
I did some research about how different tools cope with this. And want to share my insights about how to classify thinkspaces based on this notes / tasks dichotomy.
Why I write Thinkspace while many other people use the note-taking term?
Note-taking is just one of the functions of Roam, Notion and so on. They are called note-taking tools or all-in-one tools, but from my point of view, the question is whether the vision of the tool is too limited or too broad. It seems to me that thinkspace is the right term for such a tool, just because most of their functions boost the user’s thinking process (save information, analyze it, communicate with teammates, plan next steps, and save feedback again). By the way I give a more detailed explanation in my previous article on Medium.
Classification options
At first, let’s see common way of the thinkspaces classification.
Classification of Ness Labs
Let’s look at the thinkspaces classification of Ness Labs (Tiago Forte tells about it in his YouTube video).
Ness Labs highlight three main note-taking styles:
- The architect. They enjoy planning, designing processes and frameworks, and need a note-taking tool that allows them to easily structure their ideas (e.g. Notion).
- The gardener. They enjoy exploring, connecting various thoughts together, and need a note-taking tool that allows them to easily grow their ideas (e.g. Roam and Obsidian).
- The librarian. They enjoy collecting, building a catalogue of resources, and need a note-taking tool that allows them to easily retrieve their ideas (e.g. Evernote and OneNote).
But as you can see, this classification focuses on the level of knowledge (notes) and ignores the other class of thinkspaces which focus on project planning and management.
Let’s come back to the notes / tasks division and take a look at it through the prism of the “doing startup” case, which I discussed with Kate earlier.
As far as we will think about suitable thinkspace for doing startups, we quickly get the understanding that startups differ very well in the importance of knowledge (notes) vs plans (tasks) management.
When you’re doing startup, you should find your product market fit as fast as possible, or you’ll lose your energy and fail.
That’s why many founders think of project management as about management to-do lists, which might be enhanced by deadlines or goals, but no more.
As such, they tend to think about project management more in a temporary way, than in a persistent way. They don’t want to save to-do lists for future analysis; they couldn’t spend time making roadmap drafts/variants; they even don’t want to save notes about hypothesis / ideas user feedback and so on.
I feel, that sounds reasonable, but it doesn’t suit all types of products. E.g., if you are doing a deep tech startup or your product is horizontal (like a tool for many things, remember Trello, Notion, Airtable, etc.), then you have to focus your energy not only on product market fit (=understanding of target audience and their pain), but also on your vision of product (new way of doing smth).
To make your vision more solid and have the ability to build a product upon it, you need to do research, and so you need to work with knowledge, not only tasks from to-do lists.
I decided to dive into the topic and have found the Cynefin framework useful for thinking about these tasks and the knowledge continuum in innovative project management.
Classification based on the Cynefin framework
Cynefin framework
The Cynefin framework (/kəˈnɛvɪn/ kuh-NEV-in) is a conceptual framework used to aid decision-making. Created in 1999 by Dave Snowden when he worked for IBM Global Services, it has been described as a “sense-making device”. Cynefin is a Welsh word for ‘habitat’.
The Cynefin framework (Figure 1 below) is a problem-solving tool that helps you put situations into five “domains” defined by cause-and-effect relationships. This helps you assess your situation more accurately and respond appropriately.
So most startups start in Chaotic zone, and if the domain area is simple enough, the founders are trying to move directly to Obvious zone, eliminating two other zones, by quickly testing hypotheses and searching for a way to set obvious business model rules.
But in some cases, this is impossible due to the complexity of the domain area or market. In those cases, founders could move by the Cynefin cycle, and that’s where knowledge management helps them. And so they need appropriate thinkspace.
It’s interesting and useful to find the current zone for your project; at least it gives you an understanding of what project management way and thinkspace tool will suit it.
The sample of Cynefin based classification
Let’s see an example of thinkspace classification based on the Cynefin framework. I should note that this is a simplified approach, and some of the thinkspaces could be seen on the border of Cynefin domains.
Nevertheless, I’ll give it a try with
- Jira,
- Roam,
- Miro,
- Trello.
Miro is one of the best tools for working with chaotic systems. You could just sketch some arbitrary borders for knowledge/tasks domains and then make it a bit more clear for teammates during online discussions. After that, many Miro users switch to other knowledge- / task-management tools.
Roam is a bright representative of the note-taking class. It is well suited for more or less stable but complex domains. It’s convenient to work with implicit relationships (causes-effects pairs) with Roam and to make some of them clear.
Jira is well suited for more or less strict business processes. It works well for management in very complicated system development with a large number of tasks, milestones, developers, and dependencies, but the relation between them should be clear at the start of the project.
If you have many options, a high level of uncertainty, or even a non-linear roadmap (these are features of complex vs. complicated systems), Jira is not your choice.
Trello (or Kanban as itself) is well-done with an explicit cause-and-effect pair and will greatly boost team productivity if teams work with such deterministic systems.
Trello has great popularity because of its simple but powerful environment. Trello’s founders compare it with Excel).
RedForester — adaptable thinkspace
I’m interested in finding a place on the plot for my project, RedForester.
It seems to me that RedForester is quite adaptable thinkspace and it could support teams working in different domains. But the main domain for it is complex domain. Like Roam, it has a feature of linked notes content and helps to cope with complexity by using the main hierarchy if someone needs it.
As a visual tool, RedForester could cope with chaotic systems, but it has some restrictions comparable to Miro. From one side, these restrictions help to make a transfer from a chaotic to a complex system, but from the other side, they’re useful only if you want to make such a transfer).
RedForester could help you make a move to a complicated system domain as far as it has extensions and node types. Using them, one could make a business process formalization with the appropriate level of formality.
Regarding obvious systems RedForester could be used as an outliner or mindmap + kanban board.
So it’s interesting to me to develop RedForester as a platform where users could create their own thinkspace and make it closer to one of the Cynefin domains.
See you, Alex
p.s.
If you don’t agree with this text or want to share your own opinion and collaborate, please comment. I’m waiting for your feedback!
