As an educator, I believe that every student has different needs. Materials should be tailored to address these needs. In the ideal case, this can mean rearranging my materials for a sequence which lowers the extraneous cognitive load. It can mean insert or removing sections to provide a different learning experience.

What if we don’t have the blocks to shift around?

Playing a more general role, we create things all the times. Ideas, actions, information, documents, media. Some, we even create multiple times, because they are used repeatedly.

What if, we saved the effort on re-creating, and put some of that effort into saving it, the rest into creating new things?

We then need a system that is able to:

  1. Capture what we have created.
  2. Help us retrieve our creations without friction.

Tiago Forte, founder of Forte Labs describes this idea as intermediate packets - a tangible output from creative work that can be reused and synthesised into others.

One analogy he uses is the Lego block. The Lego by itself is a tangible piece by itself, but can be rearranged with other blocks to create beautiful structures.

Something I am struggling with is how to organise my work, so that they are Lego blocks, instead of the ruins of a dismantled structure. If I am reusing Lego blocks from an airplane to build an Eiffel tower, the wing of the airplane doesn’t contribute much value. Such remains take additional time to dismantle. That goes against my philosophy of maximising the reward-to-effort ratio