Greg Korgeski
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Here’s an example of a project that I’ve started that might be useful. Having done a dissertation eons ago, this method would have been helpful to me back then. This project is loosely conceived as a possible book at some point.
I do psychological assessments as a consultant on disability for a government agency. I was asked to provide some advice to a colleague who is starting to do these exams.
My first idea was to write out a “top ten” list of suggestions. I started it as a single note in my main Tinderbox doc. But when that list of “ten” items had tribbled into 30+ suggestions, and given that I’ve noodled around with the idea of an eventual book on this topic, I copied the list as a first note into a new Tinderbox doc.
I exploded that note. Now I had 33 notes in an “inbox” container. Of course, each of these notes could become a paragraph or a topic to research. It could be linked and grouped with other notes in the collection, and so on. But so far it’s a simple, unsorted list in an outline format.
Over the next few days, I had other ideas that I added to the inbox list. (Of course, the fact of having done this much work tended to prime the unconscious: I became more likely to notice interesting topics and dilemmas in my daily work and drive home from the office, and added them to the list.) Now I have over 50 notes of all sorts: questions, suggestions, a copy of an email discussion with agency officials about a dilemma that we were wrasslin’ with, etc.
Without having devoted any time to “working on a manuscript” at this point, I’d started to get some spontaneous ideas on structure, a possible outline if one use for this list were to be a book. The next step was to do a new top level container note for an early outline, beginning with an idea for an introductory section of a manuscript.
Writing all these notes and thinking about them started to enlarge the project in my mind. It suggested a sort of “big picture” perspective on the possible value of this kind of consulting. I started to think about how disablity consulting is a kind of “mountaintop observation platform” for developing first-hand exposure to many of the political and social issues we face in constructing our society: how we treat the poor and less able, political arguments about “entitlements” programs (the “takers” vs “makers” arguments), medical controversies (e.g., does “fibromyalgia” exist as a physical condition, or is it a psychological condition?), moral/psychological issues (is substance addiction a “moral” or “medical” condition?), urgent medical problems (assessing PTSD vs TBI effects in returning war veterans), etc.
This seemed like the kind of insight that, while early and unsorted, has potential for enhancing the value of what was going to be just a list of suggestions on doing reports for a colleague.
I wrote a rambling, brain-dump paragraph listing those kinds of examples. I could have exploded this paragraph again, but instead (mostly for the fun of it) I added new notes to the “inbox” container on each of these topics. Returning to the brain-dump paragraph, I started highlighting each topic with my cursor, and used the link tool to connect each topic in the paragraph to its corresponding note.
This process of writing “insight paragraphs” can be repeated a number of times as my “big idea” collection develops. If this were a dissertation, I’d be developing it into lists of possible topic ideas to discuss with an advisor or colleagues (or perhaps, for a writer, with my editor or agent), along with gradually developing a pretty nice in-depth level of expertise on my topic, which could be more easily shaped into the final book or dissertation or whatever.
This is as far as it’s gone so far. But after a minimal amount of work, this is already a large, growing Tinderbox document which can become the nucleus of a blog post, essay, book or dissertation, an ongoing writing program, a research program for an academic, a project for a journalist or business team, and so on. You just keep adding sources, tags, references, organization and so on, often in dribs and drabs.
One way to go, anyway. Hope it’s useful.
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