Defrag

I reflect on the value of defragmenting and unifying our artefacts, our writings and ourselves in a fragmented world. Read on more in this post.

Defragmenting our Arfefacts

For past Winter holidays, I grabbed the Greenlights Journal by Matthew McConaughey. As he introduces:

“Greenlights: Your Journal, Your Journey is a guided companion to the memoir Greenlights, filled with prompts, pithy quotes, adages, outlaw wisdom, and advice on how to live with greater satisfaction.”

Sometimes it is not so easy to map our thoughts when we face the challenges of fragmented writing.

With personal knowledge mastery’s activities and tools I use, I don’t just write on one platform, but on many ones. From Slack to IM messaging tools. From my blog to a book. From Google Workspace to M365 documents and Clickup documents. Less and less on email. #NoEmail

Lately I have also been sharing a few thoughts on Mastodon and LinkedIn, one conversation at a time.

My crumbling of writings through blogging, microblogging, asynchronous and live chat is fragmented. I wonder.

How can I unify and streamline these streams of writing into one river of writing?

Grant Snider’s comic strip is full of stellar insights. Enjoy it.

“To sketch what you observe is to change the tempo of your observation. It necessarily slows your sensemaking down, and sharpens what you see.” – Fiona Tribe

Rewind: The Learning Journey sketchnoted by Klara Loots and moi.

“Slowing down is important for deep observation and learning.” – Dibyendu De

Defragmenting our Writings

The other thing I notice is that my writing time is still an unplanned activity.

I don’t do it consistently. I’m aware of it.

“I thought of myself as like the jazz musician: someone who practices and practices and practices in order to be able to invent and to make his art look effortless and graceful.

I was always conscious of the constructed aspect of the writing process, and that art appears natural and elegant only as a result of constant practice and awareness of its formal structures.” – Toni Morrison

How do things work for me?

If I notice something, I might think about it. Do some research or not at all.

Then I would make a draft and sleep on it for a while. When I come back to it, I will refine the post before sharing it with my network on social or in person and through the online communities I engage with.

But it all starts with why I am writing.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment & in retrospect.” – Anais Nin

We write to reflect and to practice.

I have a blogroll to engage with and read deep thoughts, shared experience, reflection and musings from bloggers around the world.

Being aware of ourselves. Noticing ourselves and trying to unify ourselves could begin by blogging on our own blog. But the challenge is to unify or defragment ourselves in a fragmented world. As I noticed in this old post:

In a fragmented world, we need to go deep; as Nilofer Merchant said:

“It’s a fragmented world. And it’s only becoming more so. It used to be that when people wrote, they wrote more deeply. In the early days of the web (pre-twitter), I remember hand picking the few voices I would listen to and then putting them into my RSS feeder and checking for their essays.

Essays, not tweets, were the way we shared what we were thinking. But as “content” has become more important to maintain a standing online, more and more people are entering into the fray. More and more people who may not even have a point of view to advocate but just want to participate in the conversation. ” —  Nilofer Merchant

How can we go deep and defragment ourselves in a fragmented world?

Defragmenting Ourselves

Like this post you are reading, I wrote a first draft a while ago. Then I slept on it until I got my blogging mojo back. Because I read a good recent post by Meredith:

“That put me in mind of this quote that I found somewhere on my internet travels:

“Each person is to build his or her soul by bringing the widely scattered elements of experience into a unified whole.” – Ilia Delio

How do we unify those widely scattered elements of experience? We all have our own way of coming at that challenge, and, for me, I always turn to creativity and the arts” – Meredith Lewis

I carry on the conversation on Mastadon with Meredith on the topic of unifying/defragmenting ourselves.

@dangerousmeredith A fine piece, Meredith. You made me think. My pen pal, Daniel Durrant wrote in a conversation in 2015 this:

“A network of fragile fragmented selves gains from disorder and evolves as we become aware of their failures.”

Your latest and his thoughts made me mull over.

How can we defragment our fragmented selves in a fragmented world?

As Daniel wasn’t on Mastodon for this conversation, we’ll continue it with Meredith on Twitter. Especially as I revisited this oldie “A Networked Community of Fragmented ‘Selves” by Dibyendu De, which is fully of nudges to ponder:

“What happens if the ‘selves’ weren’t aware of each other?

What happens if the selves simply knew each other well enough to form a community of strongly networked selves that help each other grow?

What happens if a person tries to create or design synergy between different selves?

How does one become a better spectator and player in the networked community of human society that constantly interacts with nature – both within and without?“

March is a very special month for me. Every year a cascade of deep thoughts, events and movements happen at the same time. As I have blogged:

March. Is it the month when I am in motion, exploring, activating, rewinding my journey, updating my toolkit, staying curious, colliding, asking myself why, innovating, developing new capabilities and mindset, and embracing the unknown.

Keep it real.

Happy Spring.

Defragmenting with the Tapestry Book

Did you enjoy this post? Check out The Tapestry Book.