When I first started writing and drawing comics about the year 2120, I saw it as a personal exercise to intentionally read more positive news, and think more critically about what could get better over the very long run. What could be the future of human progress?
Fast forwarding a few years, I’ve likely read north of a thousand different insightful articles. I’ve learned more about the strengths and weaknesses of different data sources. I’ve built dashboards for myself and re-learned how to do regressions.
My bad habit in all of this: having literally hundreds of tabs open across my laptop and phone. As some have suggested: declare tab bankruptcy in 2023!
Indeed, Twitter is the source of many of these articles I hope to read again later and just can’t quite let go…
Yes, I’ve heard of OneTab. And bookmarks. And good old-fashioned saving links in a doc.
The problem with all of these methods is that they are two-dimensional. Links can only fall under one category, unless I save them multiple times. Folders of bookmarks grow increasingly deep and un-navigable. Where did I file that fascinating interdisciplinary paper that I read that could have fallen in a few different places? I needed a real knowledge management system.
There are many tools out there that can do this— Notion, Airtable, etc. I might at some point try a few alternatives out and give them a review. But professionally, I’m most familiar using Google tools, and I needed something quick and mobile-friendly. So, I started building my own knowledge management system in Google AppSheet, which uses simple Google Sheets as a backend.
Of course, deciding on a system is only one piece of the puzzle. The real work is figuring out an organizational scheme that satisfies one’s needs. My area of focus— “what does daily life look like 100 years from now?”— is admittedly pretty broad, which has made this especially challenging.
At first, I was listing links to various things I had read in a draft file under a proposed title of each piece I wanted to write.
But what to do if I changed the scope of that piece somewhat, such that there were a few “orphaned” articles I still might want to reference later? Ideally, I’d have articles with my notes about them within easy reach of my drafts, whether now or in the future.
I needed a relational database.
The database I started building actually has a fairly straightforward structure.
The first table is filled with my priorities: what I hope to write about in the future and when. I’ve filled this out with a few dozen ideas, which will keep me busy for the next year at least.
The next important table includes all of the interesting things I read, complete with my notes: I call these my Research & Insights
But I don’t link my research directly to my writing ideas/priorities anymore. Instead, I link both of these tables to another table of Questions & Concepts.
What’s in a question?
Everything I write should answer a few of your questions (I hope!) And everything I read should answer a few of my questions, even if it includes answers to questions I might not get to today.
How does this help me stay more organized, you might ask?
It forces me to be more thoughtful and intentional about the questions I explore in a number of ways.
20 Questions?
First, I think back to how long it took me to write some of my early pieces about the history of the workweek— sometimes a month or more!
Part of this was because I was so new to the topics. I spent a lot of time learning about data sources, and building dashboards for myself to better understand the material.
But a significant part of this was because, looking back on these pieces, I was attempting to answer too many questions at once. My July 2022 piece which asked “Would you rather have more free time or more stuff?” touched on 19 different pretty broad questions! The future pieces I’ve outlined are going to be shorter and more to the point.
Zooming out for better questions
I’ve also had to be more thoughtful about the level of detail addressed by each question. For example, I originally had a question in my database which I phrased as
"How did women's labor force participation change during World War II?"
This is a great question. But how often am I going to return to this in future explorations?
Perhaps if I were focused more specifically on women in World War II, I might accumulate quite a few sources to be able to answer this question in great detail. But since my ultimate goal is to make broader predictions about the distant future, I needed a similarly broad question that could be more inclusive of other sorts of exceptional events, and other reasons why the labor force might grow or shrink. I later updated my question to read:
"How does the size of the labor force change during a crisis?"
A question like this covers possible events like a war or an energy crisis potentially increasing the amount of work that needs to get done, or a pandemic or stock market crash which might decrease the number of jobs or workers.
Broad, but precise questions
Not only am I configuring my research questions to be at the right level of detail, I also need them to be as “scientific” as possible. Specifically, I am hoping to predict how much time people in 2120 will spend on various activities as I build out the universe of 2120 Hindsight. Ultimately, that means extending my charts like this one out to the year 2120:
Life has clearly changed quite a bit over the past 58 years since 1965. Is a more “scientific” projection possible, and how might a “scientific” question help?
Predicting what working hours, and any other activity we spend time on into the far future is admittedly a tricky business. I could end up being just as wrong as Keynes!
Trying to make a more precise prediction means entering into the world of correlations between variables. We can start with our working hours, a variable that might depend on a few more predictable factors, as our dependent variable. Are there some constants in human nature that we could consider as independent variables that could help us envision where we might end up?
I think back to this Jeff Bezos quote:
“I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?'
And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible.”
A core hypothesis I have is that people are always striving to be more satisfied in life. As technology and social progress make us materially wealthier, we will in theory continue to increase the amount of agency we have in our lives1.
This drive towards satisfaction, and potential for more agency (represented by whatever increase in GDP per hour worked that might come from a combination of more capital, education, or technical efficiency), could potentially be quite predictive. With this in mind, I have some precise questions I can look out for as I continue to organize my research:
“What is the relationship between working hours and satisfaction?”
“What is the relationship between satisfaction and GDP per hour worked?”
Consider these questions a sneak peek of my next post where I will make a tentative prediction about what the average workweek might actually look like in the year 2120— these ones are in my outline!
Bringing it all together, towards more tab sanity in 2023!
Thinking of these precise, scientific questions doesn’t just help me write outlines— I think it will help me focus on what really matters in terms of making the best predictions I can. And more importantly, it helps me filter out what might sound interesting but is ultimately less relevant, at least for now. If I read something but it doesn’t seem to match a question I had planned to write about, I can feel good just letting it go. Anything that I keep should be answering one of these “scientific” questions in a reasonably robust way.
While I still have a lot more tabs to either file away or close, I’m feeling closer than ever to having a manageable amount of things in my head. And an increasing number of things in this AppSheet tool that I could begin to describe as a second brain…
We will of course continue to encounter challenges: environmental destruction, the potential for increased inequality, and the negative aspects of new tech. However, I’m more optimistic than ever that on balance, individuals in 2120 will have more agency over their daily lives than we do today, and will operate based on that assumption while considering important threats and any compelling evidence that suggests otherwise.