The 5 Ways To Organize Information

How do you understand something? How do you organize information in a way that makes it memorable and comprehensive so you can better assimilate it? The goal is not just to read and remember faster – it’s to understand what you’re learning.

Let’s look at Wurman’s Ode to Ignorance:

‍To comprehend new information of any kind – be it financial reports, appliance manuals or a new recipe – you must go through certain processes and meet certain conditions before understanding can take place. You must have some interest in receiving the information; you must uncover the structure or framework by which it is or should be organized; you must relate the information to ideas that you already understand; and you must test the information against those ideas and examine it from different vantage points in order to possess or know it.

The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don’t understand something. Striving to be the dumbest person in the room.

Being able to admit that you don’t know is liberating. Giving yourself permission not to know everything will make you relax, which is the ideal frame of mind to receive new information. You must be comfortable to really listen, to really hear and absorb new information.

In our first episode, we talked about how one of the keys to learning anything FASTer is to Forget. This is all about the attitude you need of your beginner’s mind to help you learn faster and achieve faster.

When you can you admit to ignorance, you will realize that ignorance isn’t exactly bliss, it is, however, an ideal state from which to learn. The fewer preconceptions you have about the material, and the more relaxed you feel about not knowing, the more you will increase your ability to understand and learn. When you can admit that you don’t know, you are more likely to ask the questions that will enable you to learn. When you don’t have to filter your inquisitiveness through a smoke screen of intellectual posturing, you can genuinely receive or listen to new information. If you are always trying to disguise your ignorance of a subject, you will be distracted from understanding it.

All learning is state-dependent – and our ego sometimes gets in the way of learning.

By giving yourself permission not to know, you can overcome the fear that your ignorance will be discovered. THe inquisitiveness essential to learning thrives on transcending this fear.

Yet this essential prerequisite to learning is a radical concept in our society. As there are few rewards and abundant punishments for admitting ignorance on a personal or professional level in our culture, we go to great lengths to mask a lack of understanding. Most of us have been taught since childhood, at least implicitly, never to admit ignorance. We live in fear of our ignorance being discovered and spend our lives trying to put one over on the world. If we could instead delight in our ignorance, use it as an inspiration to learn instead of an embarrassment to conceal, there would be no information anxiety.

The 5 Keys for Organizing Information: LATCH

Organizing information helps you find, understand, and remember it better. There are only 5 ways to organize information. The method you choose will permit a different understanding of the information.

L stands for Location

• If you were reporting on the automobile industry, you could organize cars by place of manufacture.

A stands for Alphabet

• A dictionary is a list of words organized in alphabetical importance.

T stands for Time

• If you were reporting on the automobile industry, you could organize cars by year.

C stands for Category

• An almanac is organized by categories.
• A newspaper is organized first by categories, then by hierarchy.

H stands for Hierarchy

• Emergency rooms are organized by a hierarchy of importance AKA a likelihood of need.

If content is king, context is the kingdom

• Let’s say we ask a company to create a set of full-sized stuffed dogs of the 189 breeds accepted into the American Kennel Club.
• We ask them to create one male and one female of each breed, so we end up with 378 stuffed dogs.
• You could organize them by smallest to largest, tallest to shortest, lightest to heaviest, length of hair, etc.
• You could also tie ribbons around their necks, colored according to which of the six major breed types they belong to (sporting dogs, hounds, etc).
• This is important because each time the dogs are arranged in a different way, you see new information created by relationships independent of the subject of the arrangement.
• So you can discover that, for example, the most popular dogs are big dogs.
• But while the organization of the information gives us new information, the dogs themselves never change.
• When you’re learning new information, how can you organize information using LATCH?