LENCHI_Chapter 2 Accelerating Intellectual Production with Digital Tools

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In Chapter 5 of "The Engineer's Guide to Intellectual Production," I introduced the KJ method as a way to organize vast amounts of information; the KJ method is also a powerful method for hypothesis generation that cultivates information and creates a fertile ground for ideas to sprout. We explained that finding relevance subjectively, rather than objectively categorizing, is essential for generating new ideas.

Let's touch on the topic of "digitization," which is mentioned on p. 176 of "The Engineer's Art of Intellectual Production. In the traditional KJ method, sticky notes with information written on them are spread out on a desk and arranged manually. Kozaneba enables this to be done digitally. Kozaneba has greatly improved the efficiency of idea generation. (*1)

On the other hand, in the phase of nurturing the ideas that are generated, the concept of "interruptible design" raised on p. 171 of "The Art of Intellectual Production of Engineers" becomes important. For the maturation of ideas, it is essential to think intermittently over time. Scrapbox is a tool that we would like to focus on for this purpose. Not only can you easily jot down fragmented notes, but you can also flexibly relate and structure your notes. Once a seed of an idea occurs to you, you can throw it away, and later carefully review it and refine it. Scrapbox naturally supports such an iterative thought process.

Kozaneba's electronic KJ method and Scrapbox's interruptable and resumable nurturing process. By using these two tools in the right place at the right time, you should be able to dramatically improve your idea generation ability, which is required for intellectual production in the LLM era. In the next section, I will show you how I myself am practicing intellectual production using these tools in concrete terms.

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(*1):

It is important to repeat the process.

Repeat the KJ method

Regroup past output

conversion to electronics

However, it was difficult to reuse past results if the KJ method was done on paper. Therefore, we created software that can electronically perform the KJ method and save the data in the cloud.

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