Managing Information: A Travel Planner’s Perspective

Data Overload

My mom is in her 80’s and she is the most orga­nized per­son I know. When I say orga­nized, I don’t mean that her socks are fold­ed more ele­gant­ly than yours. (They might be. I don’t know.) For me, orga­ni­za­tion is the abil­i­ty to access and exploit infor­ma­tion when you need to. My mom doesn’t use com­put­ers. She writes every­thing down. Address books. Cal­en­dars. Lists. She keeps scrap­books with doc­u­ments and pho­tos. When I query all of my fan­cy soft­ware, and I can’t find Aunt Betty’s phone num­ber, guess who I call. My mom grew up with paper, and she knows how to use it. My nephews and nieces on the oth­er hand, have nev­er suf­fered a paper cut, espe­cial­ly giv­en the for­mat of their new vir­tu­al edu­ca­tions. Me? I’m 55 and I got caught in between. I don’t own a print­er any­more, but I remem­ber the paper world, and for the first decade or so of my pro­fes­sion­al life I had actu­al inbox con­tain­ers on my desks. I sup­pose I must have had a rea­son­ably good ana­logue work­flow that got me through it, since I don’t remem­ber being fired. (Just yelled at a cou­ple of times.)

As a pro­fes­sion­al trav­el plan­ner, I deal with a lot of infor­ma­tion, and with very few excep­tions, it’s elec­tron­ic. I deal with email, text mes­sages, data­bas­es, elec­tron­ic tick­et­ing, a pletho­ra of elec­tron­ic forms, and even elec­tron­ic pay­ments. With so much infor­ma­tion com­ing from so many dif­fer­ent sources, I would say that man­age­ment of infor­ma­tion is a greater chal­lenge now than ever. And I mean this in both per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al contexts.

With a back­ground in pro­fes­sion­al project man­age­ment, I want­ed to let you behind the cur­tain and share my thoughts with you about man­ag­ing infor­ma­tion in the third decade of the 21st Cen­tu­ry. I hope that even if this dis­cus­sion does not apply direct­ly to the chal­lenges that you face, there may be bits and pieces that pro­vide val­ue. Let me begin by say­ing that I have zero rela­tion­ship with any of the soft­ware prod­ucts that I men­tion below, oth­er than the fact that I have used or do use them personally.

Let’s start straight away by kind of dividing this world into two pieces: productivity and knowledge management. This divide is slowly melting away as technology allows us think about them both as different sides of information management. By productivity, I am referring to the process of (stealing a phrase from David Allen), “getting things done”. By knowledge management, I am referring to the process of capturing, organizing, exploiting, and sharing information.

Let’s talk about how computers can help us tackle productivity. There are dozens and dozens of personal productivity tools (software applications) available online. Some require you to download software while others simply operate as web applications. A majority of these tools are what we call cross-platform. In other words, if I use the software on my desktop computer, the tool will work on my smart phone as well. At the very simplest level, these tools allow us to record a task that we need to accomplish, assign a due date, perhaps attach some notes to it, and see our task on a timeline. After using a variety of these tools over the years, my favorite is Evernote. For a very general overview of how the application works, click here.

My Evernote user interface earlier this morning

Evernote is marketed as a note taking application. When I begin planning a new trip, I open a new “notebook” (really just a digital folder), where I am going to store all of the information for that trip. I will generate trip notes for the trip folder in a myriad of ways. I can forward an email to Evernote to include in the folder. I can capture a screen shot. I can take a photo or a web clipping. I can capture an audio recording. I can simply type a new note. Some of these notes simply contain information about the trip that I may need access to in the future. However, other notes require action on my part. For those notes, I will assign a due date to the note and they will subsequently be displayed in Evernote as “reminders”. The first thing I do in the morning is to access my Evernote reminders. These will show me all of the notes/tasks that are due on a given day, regardless of what notebook (which trip) they are associated with. Evernote is exceptionally powerful in a conventional sense. It provides many options for capturing, and for accessing my information over time. Furthermore, as mentioned previously, I have access to Evernote on all of my digital devices (computer, tablet, phone, etc). Everything is stored in the cloud, meaning that I could lose all my devices, and my information is still safe. All this being said, Evernote is still just a filing system with some neat tricks. Although I can search for information across all of my folders, information is still filed in an old-fashioned hierarchy. (That’s one of the things that make Evernote so easy to grasp and use for my semi-digital generation.) 

Although I intend to continue to use Evernote as a productivity tool well into the future, the digital landscape is changing. As tools evolve, we are going to see much more powerful applications, that require much less action on our part. Some of this is due to the emergence of AI, but much of it is simply the evolution of bringing our information management processes in line with how our brains function. Many of these approaches are not new. Mind mapping, for example, was around long before the information age, and is available to us now via a wide range of software applications. Mind mapping can serve as both a brainstorming and productivity tool, allowing the brain to build the kind of connections for which it is inherently designed. However, a new field of software is emerging that promises not only to make us more productive but to help us manage and leverage our information in ways that were not previously available outside of your own brains.

Very simple mind map example. As with our actual thought processes, ideas and plans are interconnected.

A New Approach

This new field is built around the con­cept of Per­son­al Knowl­edge Man­age­ment (PKM). Let me explain it through my expe­ri­ence in mil­i­tary. There have been (and remain to some extent) var­i­ous cat­e­gories of infor­ma­tion that pro­vide val­ue to deci­sion mak­ers. These cat­e­gories include human intel­li­gence, geospa­tial (loca­tion) intel­li­gence, tech­ni­cal intel­li­gence, imagery intel­li­gence and sev­er­al oth­ers. Infor­ma­tion is gath­ered in each of these cat­e­gories. Think of the cat­e­gories as silos. So, for exam­ple, we could search through the silo of infor­ma­tion on human intel­li­gence to per­haps dis­cov­er infor­ma­tion about a per­son. We could search through the geospa­tial silo to find data about a place. How­ev­er, it was (and still is in many cas­es) up to a human ana­lyst to be able to make the asso­ci­a­tion between that per­son and a giv­en place. That asso­ci­a­tion is what makes the two pieces of pre­vi­ous­ly sep­a­rat­ed infor­ma­tion valu­able. And with all that infor­ma­tion avail­able, but stored in dis­tinct silos and for­mats, can you imag­ine all of the poten­tial asso­ci­a­tions that are missed? This same type of infra­struc­ture con­strains not only the mil­i­tary, but indus­try as well, as lead­ers of large com­pa­nies strug­gle to make sense of data that can­not read­i­ly be con­nect­ed. Recent­ly how­ev­er, new approach­es and tech­nolo­gies have evolved that have start­ed to break down the bar­ri­ers between these silos of infor­ma­tion. We are now able to take infor­ma­tion that was stuck in spe­cif­ic silos and throw it ​“unstruc­tured” into one big buck­et where it can exist togeth­er and can be exploit­ed in new ways.

To under­stand this new approach, it’s impor­tant to under­stand the con­cept of ​“enti­ties”. An enti­ty can be a place, or an idea, or a per­son, or a col­or. It could be a soc­cer team, or a book. All of these are enti­ties. Once we define our enti­ties, the soft­ware (appli­ca­tion) can show us all of the rela­tion­ships that exist between those enti­ties in this com­bined buck­et of data. This allows us to draw new con­clu­sions about our envi­ron­ments because it is show­ing us con­nec­tions that we often did not know exist­ed, hid­den lines between peo­ple, ideas, places, etc. These asso­ci­a­tion expo­sure capa­bil­i­ties can be excep­tion­al­ly valu­able in a num­ber of fields, espe­cial­ly sci­en­tif­ic research. Recent­ly, these new tools have start­ed to trick­le down from indus­try and gov­ern­ment and are now avail­able to us (in a crud­er form) at the per­son­al level.

One exam­ple of this is the Roam Research (RR) appli­ca­tion. Like Ever­note, RR is a note tak­ing appli­ca­tion. In oth­er words, it’s a place where you store stuff you think is impor­tant. Maybe a phone num­ber. Maybe your dai­ly jour­nal entry. Maybe a reminder to stop by the post office tomor­row. Maybe even your thoughts on a bot­tle of wine. The dif­fer­ence is that, unlike Ever­note, there are no fold­ers and no stor­age hier­ar­chies. Every note is just that: a note. All notes are equal. RR finds the con­nec­tions between the enti­ties in your notes. These pre­vi­ous­ly unseen lines between ​“things” will sur­prise you and give you remark­able insight, allow­ing you to lever­age what you already know in new ways. This, as I men­tioned ear­li­er, is how the brain works. It is con­stant­ly mak­ing these asso­ci­a­tions among enti­ties in your con­scious and sub-con­scious. Like your brain, the more you put into RR, the more asso­ci­a­tions it will dis­cov­er. (For advanced users, RR offers the avail­abil­i­ty to fil­ter revealed asso­ci­a­tions as well, allow­ing us to cus­tomize the asso­ci­a­tions that are most impor­tant to us.)

One of my RR note collections. This diagram is referred to as graph. In this case, I have asked RR to highlight (in blue) all connections with my nephew.

Roam Research offers a free trial followed by a $15 per month subscription. For a similar program at no cost, consider Obsidian. At this point, I am using PKM tools mainly for research, while I use more conventional tools like Evernote for productivity. There is something comforting to me about having all the information about a client’s trip in a specific folder. At the same time, I know that these emerging “flat” PKM systems will allow me to maintain the relationship between the documents in a given “trip file”, while also allowing me to gain new insights regarding my clients’ destinations, travel providers and many other features of a given trip. Eventually I will make the transition, but as I said, I am 55. I remember paper. I’m just trying to keep up.