Description

On January 15, Martijn suffered suddenly from a stroke. He was hospitalized for more than five weeks. and quickly figured out how to apply PKM in a smart way to make his stay in hospital and capture his learnings in an effective way. This session will be a bit about digital fitness and a bit about PKM.

Notes

Martijn began by addressing each person in attendance, asking them to describe why they came to his session and what they hoped to learn. There was a wide variety of responses.

He then described his recent stroke experience, from the moment his first symptoms began to his five weeks recovering in the hospital.

Even at the very start, when his fingers first started tingling, Martijn leveraged his PKM to track what was happening and keep notes on the progression of the incident. By recording voice memos each time he experienced something unusual, he was able to time stamp when these occurrences happened.

Once in the hospital, he immediately began collecting information on strokes, adding this knowledge to his PKM. He also added specialized stroke vocabulary, which enabled him to better communicate with the various healthcare personnel who treated him. By educating himself about what was happening, he was able to demote his problem to a situation, thus reducing the worry and allowing him to take control and approach his experience with a more playful attitude.

Martijn credits his PKM and being digitally fit with helping him through his time in the hospital. Without these systems in place, he believes he wouldn’t have fared so well. Having this curiosity growth mindset also enabled him to foster a sense of community at the hospital and to offer value to those around him.

The following are some of the ways in which Martijn used his PKM to keep in touch, educate himself, continue to work, and cope with what might otherwise have been a traumatic experience:

• At one point, Martijn shared his room with another stroke victim, who was experiencing extreme headaches requiring silence in the room. Unable to type because of his stroke, Martijn discovered he could whisper into his phone and use Wisprflow to turn his whispers into text. This allowed him to continue working without disturbing his roommate.
• He created a MOC (Map of Content) in Obsidian for all of the pictures people sent him.
• Whenever he received official documents, he took photos of them and copied the text into Obsidian so they would be available digitally in one place.
• He published articles online explaining what had happened, then whenever he received an inquiry asking about it, he was able to refer the person to the articles with a Bitly link, eliminating the need to respond to each person individually.
• He created his own personal pharmacy so that he could keep track of what he was taking, what the potential side effects were, etc.
• One of the most profound ways in which Martijn used his PKM was to capture the names and professions of everyone he met who worked at the hospital, as well as all of the patients in his sphere. This enabled him not only to make connections with everyone he met, but also to connect people with each other, engendering a sense of community and support.

One tool that Martijn found to be especially helpful was the Daylight Computer. It’s an orange light, distraction-free, Android device that Martijn used for a variety of tasks:

• Morning and evening reflection tool using a pen and Todoist
• Reader for news and articles