I recently came across Karen Uhlenbeck's problem-solving and note-taking processes, which had me rethink some of my own workflows.

Karen is an award-winning mathematician who has worked on several mind-bending math problems throughout the course of her long career.

However, unlike many of us, who take notes while solving problems so that we have an anchor point when revisiting our work, Karen's process is different.

She takes notes, but they are ephemeral.

Her note-taking could be considered a form of “napkin math” that helps her work on a problem in the moment, and when she's stuck, she discards her working notes and moves on to something different.

This works in her favour because later, when she returns to the problem she was stuck on, she can look at it through a fresh perspective, without any bias or past anchoring.

I believe this is a fantastic approach, because often, we get too fixated on a single direction and keep grinding even if that road might not lead to somewhere fruitful.

Without past anchoring, we can work with the minimal but extremely important set of information that our brains have chosen to preserve for context, and approach the same problem with a shoshin mindset.

I'd like to try Karen's approach in my future problem-solving. Maybe it's worth a try for you, too?

Now, before you move on to the rest of this newsletter issue, here are a few words from: