Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought interview series, where we meet with founders on a mission to help us think better. Dmitriy Fabrikant is the founder of Knovigator, a tool to write with re-usable knowledge building blocks, designed to offer effortless creativity and collaboration. Knovigator uses threading and branching to help users … Read More
Most productivity methods will encourage you to focus on one thing at a time. The idea is to avoid multitasking and to concentrate all of your energy one one goal until you achieve it. There is a lot of wisdom behind the “one thing at a time” principle, but is it always the best approach? … Read More
FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this edition of our featured tools for thought series! In this interview with Julia Pierce, we explore a hugely popular tool: Scapple, a virtual sheet of paper that lets you make notes anywhere on the page and connect them using lines and arrows. If you have ever scribbled ideas onto a … Read More
I’m obsessed with thinking in maps: discovering and creating connections between ideas, adding nodes to a knowledge graph, finding patterns across distant areas of knowledge. However, the traditional way of exploring connections between research papers is fairly tedious: read the paper, scan the references, search for any relevant title, rinse and repeat. Connected Papers aims … Read More
Plato, Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Mary Shelley, Frida Kahlo… When we think about the most famous thinkers, inventors, and creators in history, we often picture one specific individual—a genius who uncovered something new where nobody was looking. However, this poetic vision of the innovator as a solo explorer doesn’t reflect the reality of humanity’s … Read More
Humanity has lived through several cognitive revolutions already. The development of various writing systems around the world; the invention of the printing press; the formulation of the heliocentric hypothesis by Copernicus; Darwin’s theory of evolution; Einstein’s theory of relativity—all of these discoveries have fundamentally reshaped the way we think. While nowadays the spotlight is on … Read More
As Einstein wrote in 1936: “All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.” Why is it that a skill as important as thinking is not a key focus in traditional schools? Why don’t we have classes on decision-making, cognitive biases, and mental models? Can we learn how to think better? It’s … Read More
We often see creativity as something that happens to us. There is a thought every knowledge worker or creative has had at some point in their work life: “I don’t feel inspired.” But this idea of creativity as something we either have or we don’t is a myth. In fact, creativity can be programmed. The … Read More