Thinking on Paper – a collection of building blocks | Hacker News Reader

Thinking on Paper – a collection of building blocks

6 pointsthomasteepe6 comments

The following building blocks for thinking on paper could be used on their own, but their combination seems much stronger to me.

Building block 1: Use a sheet layout with smallish boxes, a) to form manageable "units of thinking" that can be concatenated box by box and step by step, and b) to trigger frequent refocusings on the most relevant aspects in the process of thinking.

Building block 2: Use thinking tools to generate content in those boxes, with tools for reflection being especially useful.

Building block 3: For the boxes, choose from a variety of note-taking elements, notably mind maps.

Building block 4: Work persistently over a series of sheets.

Here's an illustration: https://tinyurl.com/yt3zp4m3

Is there any particular reason based on this system to go 1-2-3 vertically instead of horizontally? I was a bit confused until I noticed the box numbers in the upper-right corners. In many languages, we read left-to-right, so I expected to see the the next block to the right of the first one.

For me, it's a natural consequence of filling a box line-wise vertically from top to bottom. If you want to use the sheet layout variant with 3 columns and boxes of variable height rather than a fixed 3x3 layout, the vertical scheme seems again more natural.

But whoever feels more comfortable with a horizontal scheme should do so.

Is this your own method or did it come from another source?

It's not from another source, and in the specific combination shown in the illustration it's "my own method". But there is, of course, material on traditional mind maps like the Buzan book, literature on problem solving like Polya's "How to Solve It" and many many others, and general material on thinking and writing. For me, the concept of "concatenating units of thought" via the boxes was a surprise, with an unexpected impact it had on my thinking processes, and I do not know of a method that uses this as a key point.

Please update illustration link, doesn't work.

The link is correct - here is a clickable version:

https://tinyurl.com/yt3zp4m3

Reply on news.ycombinator.com