breadcrumb thinking

My best thoughts – the ones that make the most difference in my life – are rarely the byproduct of thought.

A-ha moments.

Epiphanies.

Inspirational insights.

They rarely arise from thinking hard.

They are, instead – a byproduct of leaning back.

Finding flow.

Letting go

The backward step.

A clearing – for me - is where clarity calls home.

On the surface, I realize, that looks a lot like adding a hashtag to a document. In practice, though, I found myself using bidirectional links much differently than tags. In Roam, I created bidirectional links to concepts that I wanted to explore, like “the internet is too fast” or “social networks have been a boon to the conservative movement.”... See more

When I'm on a journey through a dark swamp of information, I want that same sense of reassurance that flight map gives me. I want to know:

• Where I am right now


• Where I'm going (and how long it's going to take to get there)


• Where I've been and how I got here

Patryk Adaś' published a set of speculative design ideas in 2017 that hint at a more Git-like, branching way to view browsing history. Adaś argued we should move away from the concept of tabs in browsers, and instead present histories as a set of trails.

But very few interfaces do a brilliant job of the third need: showing me where I've been and how I got here. We can do it at small scales. Patterns like breadcrumbs help us navigate through website or wiki with lots of subpages, but those don't scale well beyond ~7 steps.