One of the first and still best reasons I blog is to keep an outboard brain – a place to jot down ideas, in this case related to my job. I’m about a third of the way through Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (recommeded on some other blog I read), and have just read a layman’s definition of “distributed cognition”, which the author, David Allen, describes thusly:
“It’s as if your mind were to say, “Look, I’m only going to give you as many ideas as you feel you can effectively use. If you’re not collecting them in some trusted way, I won’t give you that many. But if you’re actually doing something with the ideas – even if it’s just recording them for later evaluation – then here, have a bunch! And, oh wow! That reminds me of another one, and another, ” etc…. It’s getting things out of your head and into objective, reviewable formats.”
Doesn’t “distributed cognition” sound a lot more official than “outboard brain”? Apparently I’m not the first to make this connection between blogging and distributed cognition. 🙂
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