Photo: Michael McCauslin

Earlier today, I had bookmarked a post by John Udell on how he had his interest in the idea of tacit knowledge tweaked. I had not paid attention to his original post on the topic or hadn't seen it. However, upon reading a bit about the topic, I felt my own interest resonating deeply.

A quick overview of the concept is that tacit knowledge is the stuff we know, but can't explain to anyone. Some of it is the impulse stuff that Gladwell wrote about and some is more the stuff of regular practice and having a process that you "just do".

Much of my activity on this site (particularly in the tutorial material) is an attempt to analyze that about the things that I "just do", making this concept really interesting to me.

Then, tonight, before I had a chance to write about Udell's post, I had a phone conversation that brought the issue to a more concrete reality. My brother is in the middle of setting up the wireless router at my parents' house (they finally had DSL made available today) and called me to ask for help. After getting his own laptop to work, he was working on my mom's and getting nowhere.

It wasn't seeing any networks, etc. This is the kind of thing I've fixed numerous times. Yet, when asked to explain how to fix it, I drew a complete blank. All I could do was itch to get in front of the monitor and at the keyboard to fix it. I'm confident I could fix it if it were in front of me, but was at a complete loss to explain how I'd do it.

I really do like Udell's appeal to screencasting as a way of revealing some of this knowledge. Garrick's been using them to document for himself and for demo purposes, the new product he's building. I think they really do help share tacit knowledge as well as the explicit knowledge deliberately shared.

To that end, I'm actually doing a couple of screencasts internally at work to document some processes rather than write up documents. For stuff I actually know how to do, this is far easier than trying to write it up. Who knows, once I get a toolchain and process worked out, I may put more of them up here as well.

Photo: Bruce

A couple of weeks ago, someone asked me if I'd done any 30 day experiments lately and I realized that I'd fallen off from doing them. So, with 30 days left in May, today I started another one: daily tai chi and meditation.

My experiment parameters are to do 20 minutes of tai chi in the morning and 15 minutes of meditation in the evening. Initially, my tai chi is just the strength building exercises from my instructor, but will eventually be more form based.

My goals for this particular experiment are to feel more relaxed, sleep better, improve my stamina and flexibility and increase my ability to focus. Long term, I want to continue the drop in blood pressure and cholesterol that my 2005 diet brought. However, those are harder to measure on this timeframe.

My tracking method is going to be to write down my stress level, how well I slept and generally how I feel mentally/emotionally each day. The entries will be "write only" during the 30 days, so I can't easily see or be affected by the previous entries. Ideally, based on the cognitive psychology stuff I've been reading, I'd have something that randomly asks me how I'm feeling in each of these areas. That random questioning leads to better evaluations than the reflective kind that an end of day review does. So, I may write up something to pop up an interface randomly.

I chose these 2 methods of achieving the goals (before officially making it an experiment today) because the use of each has been shown in clinical studies to have positive benefits. I want to avoid anything which is peddled as beneficial, but can't repeat the benefits in controlled experimentation.

As the event of SXSW 2006 itself has been fading, certain principles have been sticking with me and rising to greater prominance. One of them is understanding our own brains and thought processes. It's key to decision making, key to why I want attention recorded, key to lifehacks in general, etc.

How cognitive psychology fits in with an economist-like approach to decision making is something that has always interested me (though I didn't necessarily see it as a single thing until recently). Several of the books I've read recently (I swear I'll update with reviews one of these days) have dealt with how we make decisions, the predictors of happiness and, by extension, how we can use that information to make better decisions.

Dan Gilbert presented on this topic at SXSW in advance of his book, Stumbling on Happiness, which is coming out in a couple of weeks. I almost missed it, but managed to catch almost all of it. Now, with the updated audio from the conference coming out, I managed to catch the rest of it. If you weren't in the room (or even if you were), it's well worth a listen.

I ordered a copy in advance and expect this to be one of the "must read" books of the coming months.