The Architecture Of Ideas

A field guide to the rituals, routines, and workflows of creative thinkers.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been having a tremendous amount of fun curating the notebook for the new Planet of the Barbarians series. Notebook curation is a remarkably creative exercise in its own right: building out a comprehensive knowledge base on a specific topic, layering in scholarly papers, key quotes, and supplemental research—and then deciding how best to represent that knowledge through the studio artifacts like Audio Overviews and my new obsession, Slide Decks. The intellectual work that goes into it shares some properties with the kind of work you do when you are writing an essay or a chapter in a book: you have to assemble knowledge and figure out the best way to present it to others. But it also flexes different creative muscles, like art directing the Slide Deck presentations. To give just one example, in the latest addition to the Barbarians notebook, there’s an amazing deck about the history of the Corona spy satellite program, styled as though it were a collection of declassified documents from the CIA:

Curating is really the exact word for the work that goes into assembling these notebooks, given the existing association the word carries with museum curators—it feels like I am preparing an exhibit to be explored rather than writing an essay to be read in a linear fashion. I really encourage everyone to try it, even if you are just assembling a knowledge base for your own personal edification. (We are actively working on improving the publisher tools at NotebookLM for those of you who are interested in sharing your collections more widely—more on that as it develops over the next few months.)

In my post announcing the Barbarians series, I explained that while the essay series and notebook would only be available to paying subscribers at Adjacent Possible, I was planning on assembling a notebook for all subscribers based around my earlier series from 2022-2023 on creative workflows, which had previously been paywalled. But when I sat down to start porting over those old posts into NotebookLM, I realized that I actually had a much more extensive body of work, scattered across several sites, that covered the same general topic, including a collection of interviews with people like Liz Phair, Kevin Kelly, and Rebecca Skloot talking about their own creative workflows. So I ended up assembling a much more comprehensive notebook than I had originally planned, with about two dozen total sources. I think it’s maybe 30,000 words all in—roughly half the length of one of my books. In a way, it’s a continuation of the themes that I covered in Where Good Ideas Come From, just more explicitly focused on practical advice. I’ve jotted down a few more notes on the content below, but you can also just head over to NotebookLM and experience it yourself. The link is publicly available so feel free to share if you want.

The Architecture of Ideas notebook has a custom chat mode that instructs the AI to give you advice almost as a creativity coach would, drawing on the insights and stories in the assembled sources; you should be able to describe whatever you’re working on, and the model will devise novel instructions tailored to the needs of your project. But I’m sure there are many more inventive ways to engage with the notebook as well. (As with the Barbarians notebook, and indeed all our Featured Notebooks, there’s no way for you to create your own artifacts—hopefully that will change soon as we update the publisher tools.)

In one of the Slide Decks I created, Notebook came up with the title The Architecture of Ideas. I think it’s a pretty fitting description for the entire collection. While there is a little extra emphasis on the craft of writing in the notebook, in general the material is all about the intellectual infrastructure we build around ourselves to make discovery possible. In other words, how can we build the most effective work environment for creative thinking, in any field?

“Environment” is used broadly here. It encompasses the physical architecture of a workspace—like Dan Pink’s converted-garage office or the “bedroom composer” solitude Liz Phair seeks after midnight—but it also refers to the digital and conceptual infrastructures we inhabit: software stacks we use to manage our “outboard memory,” the specific guitar tunings used to trick the brain into new melodies, and even the social networks we cultivate to inject useful noise into our thinking. Whether it is a slip-box system, a years-long Spark File, or an AI-powered research tool like NotebookLM, these are all ways of designing a space where ideas can collide in unpredictable ways.

The notebook draws on three different threads of my work to give you a complete look at how ideas actually come together. The backbone of the collection is the original “Creative Workflows” series from Adjacent Possible. These essays move through the entire lifecycle of a project: how to capture those fragile “slow hunches” before they disappear, how to build a “serendipity engine” to force those ideas to collide, and how to use systems like Walter Benjamin’s “convolutes” to turn a mess of fragments into a coherent shape. I even get into the more physical side of the process, like the “thinking paths” Charles Darwin explored on foot while working on Origin Of Species.

I’ve also included a series of in-depth interviews I published at Medium with some of my favorite creative minds. You’ll find Dan Pink talking about his hyper-organized system of analog Redweld folders and his ritual of pruning his idea files every six months. There’s Rebecca Skloot explaining how she managed the dizzying complexity of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks using a literal wall of index cards, and Liz Phair on why she captures raw melodic “noodles” on her phone in the middle of the night. It’s a great reminder that while the underlying principles are often the same, the actual tools we use can be delightfully idiosyncratic.

Lastly, I’ve pulled in pieces from an earlier series I wrote at Medium called The Writer’s Room that focused on the specific tactical habits and software stacks that make this work possible for writing. There’s a long piece about why I think standard word processors are actually comically unsuited for complex, long-form thinking, and why I prefer tools like Scrivener that let you treat text as moveable blocks. I also share some of my favorite defensive writing strategies—like the “Shadow Plot” (where you treat distractions as seeds for future books) and my “Don’t Look Back” rule, which is essentially a strategy for avoiding the trap of over-reading your own work, ensuring that when you finally sit down for a first full edit, you are able to approach the text with fresh eyes. And I’ve included an updated essay about using NotebookLM as a research platform that walks through the best practices for integrating with tools like Kindle books, ReadWise, and Google Keep.

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you may know one of my favorite quotes about the creative process, from Thomas Schelling: “One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.” At the most elemental level, that is the goal of a creative work environment: it should help you have ideas that would have never occurred to you. I hope this notebook helps you build out your own “idea architecture”, and more importantly helps you stumble across a few gems that would have otherwise gone undiscovered. Let me know what you find there.

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If you’d like to keep up with the Barbarians series, consider signing up for the paid edition of Adjacent Possible.

In the meantime, here’s a preview of some of the Slide Decks from the Architecture of Ideas notebook: