Work Processing: The Tools We Use to Think, Write and Remember
Over the last few years we've seen the rise of work processing tools like Notion, Obsidian, Roam Research, Loqseq and Microsoft Loop. In this, the first of a three-part series exploring the history, motivations and market for work processing tools, we look back at their history — starting with note-taking and the transition from analog to digital technologies to support it; the core concepts driving today's explosion of work processing tools and how they differ from conventional office document tools from Google and Microsoft, which have defined how the world thinks of document-centric work coordination and collaboration. In later installments, we will answer two key questions: Who needs work processing tools and why? and What is the state of the market for work processing tools, now and going forward?
Introduction: Taking Notes
At some point in my childhood I was introduced to the practice of taking notes in class. Little did I know that I was joining a long line of artists, writers, scholars, engineers and musicians, reaching back to the Renaissance, who share the discipline of writing things down in notebooks.
Because I diligently kept notes, I could rely on these notebooks as a (relatively) reliable record of my work: all the sorts of information I created, captured or copied and which supported my efforts at school and at work.
Personal computers were still on the horizon while I was in college, graduate school and the first years of my career. It was only in the '80s that personal computers emerged and started to overlap with my analog note-taking. It wasn't until long after the internet and web entered the mainstream in the early part of the 21st century that I transitioned away from note-taking during meetings and calls, and adopted digital note-taking exclusively.
In the analog era, I tried different approaches to organize journal content. Creating an index at the back or front of a notebook, for example, to quickly find critical information. Tabs to separate different projects, classes, or kinds of information. To-do lists on designated pages. Calendars, based on dedicated pages for days, weeks, or months. Specialized notebooks like Filofax, with all of these approaches implemented in a modular fashion.
Fifty years since computers appeared, people have attempted to carry forward the patterns of use developed for notebooks. We've seen several generations of technologies that seek to support these activities, basically creating digital journals in one form or another, and often adopting the models of organization, more or less digital Filofaxes. And while some attempted only to emulate a point-for-point implementation of notebooks, we've pretty much left that behind, and are now doing things that commonplace journals never could.
Related Article: Is 2023 the Year of the Workspace App?
Early and Core Concepts: Hypertext and Office Apps
Perhaps one of the oldest breakthroughs in digital note-taking is the notion of hypertext, generally attributed to Ted Nelson and the research he did in the '60s. Basically, hypertext is a document model in which documents can include references to text in any other document. The web, which is a hypertext system first released in 1990, is likely the first thing that comes to mind here. But where web links are unidirectional, the most powerful hypertext systems are implemented bidirectionally, which opens up great possibilities (about which more later).
The early success of personal computers, however, was not due to hypertext-based digital notebooks, but the enormous impact of the early business applications, starting in the early '80s: word processors, spreadsheets, database apps and presentation tools. Many of the features of these early apps have been carried forward into modern hypertext-based systems, particularly the conventions embodied in work processing applications. For that reason, let's call these modern hypertext systems work processing tools. A wide number of other terms are basically synonyms, like Tools for Thought, Tools for Thinking and Second Brains.
The transition to the cloud in the past 15 or so years has had a large impact on note-taking. In particular, cloud-based office tools — especially the offerings of Google and Microsoft — and the widespread adoption of other sorts of work-related information management, such as work management solutions (Asana, Trello, Monday, SmartSheet, etc.), outliners (Dynalist, etc.), diary tools (Day One, etc.), note-taking apps (Evernote, Simplenote, Dropbox Paper, etc.), and writing apps (Ulysses, Scrivener, etc.) have influenced note-taking's trajectory. All of these have built on the patterns of journaling going back hundreds of years. But a surge of interest in work processing tools in the past few years incorporated many of the attributes of these various kinds of software, and brought all of those capabilities into potentially unified work processing platforms.
Related Article: How Whiteboards and Digital Hubs Are Shaking Up Collaboration
Work Processing: The Tools We Use to Think, Write and Remember
The discussion surrounding work processing systems often swings into hyperbole, comparing these platforms to second brains or claiming that they augment our intelligence.
Learning Opportunities
I prefer the metaphor of an infinite library: I have access to the world's knowledge and can collect and collate writing, pictures, volumes, and sketches. Any page can expand into another volume, ad infinitum. But I can always find my way back to where I was reading and writing, yesterday, last week or 10 years ago, because the library has an infallible card catalog, and all my marginalia is perfectly preserved.
But this is just a metaphor, akin to Jorge Luis Borges's Library of Babel, since despite all my scribbling and reshuffling, my journals will always be finite. A more practical approach is to put aside metaphor, and start with the core concepts that we find in today's work processing systems, so we can begin to grasp how work processing works.
Related Article: Reboot Knowledge Management for the Post-Pandemic Workplace
Core Concepts of Work Processing Solutions
While the spectrum of work processing solutions is broad and growing, a set of core concepts are increasingly shared across the many offerings in the space. Here are those core concepts:
- The fundamental concept is that of writing and editing of 'pages' — individually named and addressable containers of information. Work processing tools have to support digital writing with styling, headings and other capabilities inherited from word processing. Here's a simple note from my Obsidian:
- Work processing tools' editing capabilities need to match word processing capabilities, like embedded images, tables, charts, diagrams, Kanban boards, checklists and other useful content management elements. (Below is an Obsidian Kanban board page, with lists from 'probable' stories to write about, through to ongoing long-term 'projects,' for example. The complexity of this construction is high, involving links to many other files, and indicates how work processing tools can digitally achieve information management that is functionally impossible in an analog journal.)
- Work processing tools need a system of organization. Usually this is based on named contexts, such as folders and files, inherited from operating systems like Windows and MacOS. Other approaches are sometimes used, like tags.
- Work processing tools have to provide the ability to search across contexts to find content. At minimum, this means a search capability, and probably some below the hood indexing of content to make it efficient. Other capabilities can also support search, such as rich queries to allow searching for file names and other file attributes (date of creation, for example), and boolean capabilities (as in, find all files the include the terms "Apple" and "Microsoft," or find all files created in "2023" with the tag "#work-processing").
- Work processing tools need to support several kinds of links. The simplest is being able to reference a location on the web by URL: a web link. However, work processing tools are based on the model of hypertext, so cross-referencing from any file within the work processing tool's file system must be supported — forward links — and additionally, backlinks showing the complementary backwards connection are needed.
- The most sophisticated work processing tools support block references, so that forward links can refer to a specific section — like a paragraph — within another note, rather than to the entire file.
- Work processing tools may implement some form of transclusion, where one file's content or a piece of its content can be referenced in another file, and displayed and possibly edited there. For example, I might create a table in Microsoft Analysis and transclude it into Market Analysis, so when the table is updated the changes reflect in the second, transcluded file.
- Because work processing tools support a network of files connected by forward links, there is an underlying graph where files are the graph nodes and the links are the graph arcs. Many work processing tools present a visualization of the graph, and allow search and navigation across it. (Below is a subset of my Obsidian graph: those files that mention my newsletter, 'work futures,' and I selected the 'work futures kanban' file.
- Most work processing tools provide a sharing model so that contexts can be shared between individuals, and comments and other annotations can be created. (Note that this all has to interact with work processing tools capabilities like synching, access controls and information ownership. These are areas of great variability across the various implementations.)
- Some work processing tools are fully cloud-based, some are desktop/mobile based, and some are both. For example, Notion is cloud-based only, while Obsidian is desktop/mobile, only. This leads to different approaches to synching and sharing.
- Most work processing tools support a plugin architecture, so that the work processing tool developer or members of the user community can implement additional capabilities built upon core functionality.
- Most work processing tools support task management, ranging from simple checklists, to rich work management capabilities, building on abstractions like Kanban boards, or sophisticated application of other work processing tools capabilities, like task management plugins or integrations with third party tools (Asana, Todoist, Trello, ...).
- Most work processing tools provide a variety of techniques for visualization of the information and structure of work processing tools, such as the graph and Kanban views shown above, but also including diagrams, presentations, charts and mindmaps, Here's a section of a mindmap I created for this writing project using Obsidian’s new Canvas features:
- The most sophisticated work processing tools support spreadbases: spreadsheet-like database tools, found in tools like Airtable, Notion, Coda, Podio and others. These are based on the notion of database rows and columns, as in spreadsheets, but also incorporate capabilities like creating typed attributes in the tables (date, text, numbers, etc.) and transclusion, so a set of linked spreadbase tables could represent a company's project dashboard and for each project a linked table of tasks.
The set of core work processing concepts is growing as vendors push the boundaries of what the tools can do, an increasing number of users request new features, and third party developers experiment with new plugins. It is a time of massive innovation and experimentation.
Related Article: Knowledge Graphs: Add the Human Factor to Unlock Real Intelligence
Writing vs. Work Processing
Working with these platforms can be, at the simplest and lightest-weight use, simply a matter of writing notes, perhaps an every day journal entry, an occasional essay, or scraps collected from the internet. However, as more of the core concepts are incorporated in the user's thinking — and those features realized in the tools — we start to quickly diverge from something that is a digital journal to something much more like a digital library, with an infallible card catalog, the ability to find everything, annotate at will, and make expanding connections across independent volumes, chapters and pages.
In the next installment, we will address the question, Who needs Work Processing tools and Why? and I will start with my own long history exploring these and earlier platforms, on a 20-year odyssey searching for the perfect home for my notes.
About the Author
Stowe Boyd has been studying work and the tools we use to adapt to the future for the past three decades. He is the chief scientist of Work Futures, a research group. In the past he was the head of research at GigaOm, president of the social media pioneer Corante, a software entrepreneur, a computer scientist and a magazine columnist.
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