Time-Stamped Reasoning
Email threads in Outlook as a collective knowledge repository – does that make you shudder like it made me shudder?
The thing is, it's quite revealing as a serious context of use.
Let me explain:
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Most of us, when we take notes, take them...whenever. And we don't record _exactly_ when we take a particular note.
At least I'm not when I'm scrawling into the margins of a paper book.
But when you're sending an email, you're not only recording what you're thinking – but when.
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(This is a great hack to ground your weekly or monthly reviews in reality, by the way.
Go through your email's SENT folder and see what you sent to people. Higher signal-to-noise than your inbox, that's for sure.)
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WHEN you thought something can be extremely important information.
For example when you're dealing with highly volatile situations, where things can change on a dime.
This is the first thing shareholders want to know when investigating incidents in a firm. Who knew what, when?
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But knowing the temporal context of a thought also has productive benefits: you can re-evaluate decisions after the dust has settled.
One example that told me about the other day:
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A financial business in the early days of COVID. Markets moving heavily, day by day, hour by hour.
Analysts sharing their thinking and models in email threads. AND LIKING IT.
Well, that's me overselling something I heard second hand. But still: they recognized a key feature...
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Which is that by publishing their thinking in internal email threads, they timestamped their reasoning about the then-current situation.
And they could go back and evaluate: given the information we had AT THE TIME, did we reason correctly?
Not "were we right", btw!
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But _did we reason correctly_?
Things can always turn out differently than you think, because of factors you didn't or couldn't know about.
But as long as your thinking given the info you have is sound, you'll mostly be okay.
And thus: the value of time-stamped reasoning.
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Because only if you have timestamps to your thoughts can you go back and accurately evaluate your thinking.
That's why I'm a huge fan of Daily Notes Pages in our tools for thought. Because they give you this at high granularity – for free.
So I encourage you: think on your DNP!
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A feature suggestion that might be necessary for the finance folk to do this might be timestamps and immutability. Because they need to know down to the minute what the price (+ price movement) was, to evaluate what they were thinking. Daily pages don’t have that … yet!
/time in roam = time stamp plus if you hover over a block it says when it was last edited
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