A tool decades in the making.

When I bought my first Mac in 1986 one of the first documents I created summed up my year every year in a very concise way. Actually, sitting alone in my first apartment, I started pinning down every old memory I had and placing them in a real timeline. After that I just gave it a little update every new years, if I hadn't added something earlier. In one form or another the document has been maintained ever since. It's my oldest computer file. It was so inexplicably useful it allowed me to remember and manage a weird aggregation of data.

Also in that era I didn't want my resume to look like every other resume, and I considered myself eclectic, so I presented my career as a series of vertical timelines, an idea years later I made more graphical. It was a fun way for me to visualize my weird career and the fun way things connect.

I've always encouraged my (now adult) children to maintain this sort of data, not as a chore but as a practice of reflection and of personal data management. It was more like scrapbooking. It's not everyone's disposition, but it's a labor that's pretty rewarding.

So this week I decided to revisit my issues with LinkedIn, which never struck me as having achieved the dream we had for it when it launched (I was probably in the first few hundred users on it). I had presumed that LinkedIn would become a sort of career CRM, but it never became that tool. I was aware that people ("resume data") were important in networking, but so was context. LinkedIn had no context.

As I started evolving this vision of a "better LinkedIn," I intended to rebuild my resume tool and my annual journaling tool with some cool visualizations. But the AI tools were so powerful that the thing I was building for my kids started getting overlayed with these other ideas — I mean, once you're willing to do the work to input your data, I felt a responsibility to do all kinds of cool things with the data. So this is a data visualization tool — and because your data is private and important, it's not a social tool, it needs to be sequestered from casual glances. And most importantly, it grows in value the more you use it.

So this is what is here, a rapidly evolving visualization tool that has a daily role in your networking and life, but has longer-range benefits that aren't immediately obvious.