On the Fahrenheit 98.6 Problem -- Stop burning every book you read

[19 March 2021]

Guy Montag kicks in the door of the small house. He is a fireman. But instead of putting fires out, he's at the house to burn it down, including all of the books it contains. Books, you see, have been outlawed as being too dangerous for American society.

Ray Bradbury's 1953 dystopia Fahrenheit 451 is ostensibly about censorship and the destruction of knowledge. The title refers to the temperature at which paper will auto-ignite. Guy Montag, the novel's protagonist, has a redemptive story arc, ultimately leaving his job as a fireman and then working to preserve knowledge rather than destroy it.

As knowledge workers, we start every day like Guy Montag. We destroy knowledge. It's a tragedy and a tremendous waste of effort. We read something and then, other than some fleeting impressions, it's gone. We can't refer to it again or use the details to inform our writing. The relevant information might live on our desktop for a while but, far too frequently, it retreats into the distance only to be forgotten.

We invest time and energy into a work meeting but then, seemingly within hours, everything we heard is gone. There might be a recording of the meeting… somewhere. Or maybe the presenter sent us a deck that now lives in SharePoint or in our email or… somewhere.

The net effect is the same. We burn all of the knowledge presented to us and we don't have to raise the temperature to 451F! All it takes is a bit of apathy and we can quite easily burn knowledge at the average body temperature of 98.6F. The Fahrenheit 98.6 problem is simply our persistence in destroying all of the information and knowledge to which we're exposed due to our reluctance to practice discipline.

What we need is a way to ensure that those meetings that we attend, and those books that we read, live on and that we can refer to them again in the future. I think back to all of the reading I did in graduate school -- those books, those papers. But now, it's all gone. I don't have a good way to go back and leverage everything that I read. The wasted effort is stunning.

What I needed then was a way to actually preserve what I had read in a way so that I could use it again; I still do.

Overcoming the Fahrenheit 98.6 Problem

Improving our ability to maintain and capture information requires some discipline and training, but not a whole lot of either. We do, however, need some basic skills that aren't generally taught in school:

• Listening. How to engage with speakers and colleagues.
• Reading. How to read and how to maintain marginalia. Adopting appropriate practices for articles, online resources, and books.
• Note taking. How to take notes in an effective manner so that you will be able to use them in the future.
• Cataloging and Indexing. How to manage the notes and resources that you've got so they maintain their relevance for your future self.
• Writing. How to use that store of knowledge and information to create new notes and documents.
• Staying productive. How to stay productive in our modern environment by managing our tasks, meetings, and the other challenges that we address every day.

?I will continue to present a collection of essays that I've written to address the Fahrenheit 98.6 problem. Specifically, I focus on the kinds of skills that are never part of the core curricula of universities, colleges, and high schools but which everyone should know.

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