Personal knowledge management is stupid

personal Knowledge Management is stupid it's a solution to a problem we've created costing us hours each day to maintain perfect little notes for our own satisfaction and then when faced with any real world questions those notes crumble leaving us a scrambling to finding the answers we thought we had but can't find so it's time to stop lying to ourselves and embrace a simpler way to manage information now there's an old quote that says half the money I spend on Advertising is wasted and the trouble is I don't know which half note taking often feels the

same way half the notes you make are wasted but you don't know which half and while this uncertainty might be acceptable in advertising where you can't always pinpoint who your audience is in no taking the audience is clear and that's you now the interesting thing that happens is we start making systems we're adding tools adding automated processes thinking we're making things easier for ourselves but in reality we're making things harder the whole idea of capture now and organize later is a lie it doesn't help if I told you that for every hour you spent reading

a book you need two hours to sort through and organize your notes then shouldn't you be rethinking that approach especially once you start time blocking and realize you don't have that much time in a day when it comes to making notes there's the concept of diverge and converge while it's important to gather enough information during that diverge phase we often end up collecting everything creating a vast desert of knowledge with occasional rocks of insight but because we are so busy exploring that desert we don't have the time to look up and see the mountain in

the distance and well basically walk in that general direction to get to some actual results so shouldn't we be taking notes then I don't think that's the issue the real problem is being real realistic about the amount of information we can only process so much and one of the things I see happening often is that we have so many systems and so much data that we spend way too much time trying to distill it all down to its core so start filtering information and be ruthless about it what value does it add is it something

you'll need in the future something you find interesting or are you just writing for yourself which is also a value sometimes the goal isn't to capture everything but simply to write and that's okay be okay with not capturing everything because you don't have to we miss things every day if you skip a day on social media you'll miss post and that's perfectly fine and it should be the same for your note taking so the first rule when making notes should be what am I doing this for when you stop taking notes on everything and limit

your input something magical happens you realize that you don't need all this personal Knowledge Management stuff once you're okay with missing a few things you'll find you can quickly search for information online whenever you need it so what value are your notes really bringing towards your workflow when I started diving into productivity I tracked if people got back to me and then I discovered that a lot of people never responded they just forget about you because they are not constantly thinking about you in the real world people forget things all the time and that's fully

accepted you only notice because you started taking notes and became aware that they were skipping it but it's okay to forget stuff people don't really care I used to get frustrated when people didn't respond and felt that I had to chase them and then I realized everyone does this all the time and it was me that was being the weird one because I was keeping track and never forgetting less notes mean less maintenance like many aspects in your life for example stuff around your house if you have less of it it's less work to organize

and find stuff and as you cram less things into your day less tasks less notes fewer actions all those structures you build are less needed now these productivity systems you build can still help but you only see real benefits When instead of trying to add more you start slowing down a little bit and start freeing up time time to think time to relax time to be human in our frenzy to do more in less time we often lose our Humanity another thing I've noticed is that we need to accept the chaos you shouldn't spend a

lot of time organizing your notes to the point of trying to create this perfect polished set instead focus on taking notes and accepting that organizing them is a task for future you you don't know which notes will be useful so don't stress over it now now I split notes into topic notes and journaling and for topic notes it's very simple I just have a notepad with the topic name and I put stuff in there or with loek I just Mark notes in my journal and then link them towards a topic and organize later and then

my journal I care even less about get that more about keeping track what I do throughout the day and I'll probably won't be referring to that it's simply getting it out of my brain and writing it down and being able to scroll back in time and see what I've done in the last couple of days I don't need to organize those they're already organized by dat and another thing with Journal notes is that it's not so much about what I'm writing down but sometimes it's more about the process and if I don't care about the

process and I don't care about the output one of the things I like is just sitting down with pen and paper or my books and just going towards a couch and relaxing and enjoying the writing process that's not fast that's not speedy I can type really fast on my keyboard compared to writing but it's about relaxing about you know reflecting back while I'm writing down so notes don't have to be perfect those can be a bit messy it's a brain dump my brain's messy so my notes will be messy and I'm not going to then

go back and organize those notes because the goal of the notes wasn't to get like pristine organized the goal of those notes were just to relax and basically have a conversation with the paper to think about what's in my head and sometimes while I'm doing that of course there will be some followup things that I want to write down but you know that's the joy of paper I'll just Chuck it to the side and I'll process just those few gems that pop up later and then the rest I discard because I'll never look at it

I have a whole bookcase full of paper journals that I keep I don't know from a nostalgic perspective but when am I ever going to read those sometimes maybe for the fun of it you know open one up from 5 years ago and see what I was doing on Wednesday the 26th of June great you know awesome that you can but is that really adding value to my life and does that need a system now if you're thinking about what would be the best app or that your app will solve this you haven't really been

paying attention it's not about the app it's about the workflow when your workflow eliminates unnecessary steps information everything just becomes easier you could use something as simple as notepad and still have a workable solution some people do of course some software like lseek which I personally love obviously can help streamline that process but it's not essential I could do my notes perfectly well without lock seek because I limit what I write down and this is why some people can effectively work on paper while digital tool users would wonder how they keep track of everything they

keep track of less and know where it is because it's confined to just a few pages writing stuff down by definition limits you in what you can write so you have to focus on the highlights and to me that is like the first step to Enlightenment in note taking letting go of the obsession with finding the best app and instead focusing on what you actually want to write down think about what your future self will find valuable most of the time you don't need to write it down either it's important and you'll remember it or

it's not important and you won't look it up the key is to be selective about what you capture Ensure it truly adds value so as a conclusion when you're thinking about no taking what you're writing down are your thoughts and one of the things that I just see too much is people trying to basically make a cheap ass copy of Wikipedia on their own system don't do that we have search and yes search has become worse over time but we can still find information that's relevant so write down your thoughts your notes the things that

you were thinking while you were seeing or reading it and Link back to whatever is there because then you write down less you don't need a copy of the internet what you need are your personal thoughts and ideas and less of them because we don't have time to solve all the world problems and you don't have time to make notes of the all whole internet as a thing because it's just too large focus on what you find really interesting and just take notes on that and for the rest be okay with you know accepting that

you might have to do a Google Search and do some research if you ever need that specific topic which you probably won't and your life will be better for it stop trying to make complex systems to get all the information to work and just take less notes and abandon those systems or and that's the most important part of it if you do have those systems make them work for you instead of you working for the system now remember you're awesome keep it up and see you in the next one okay so in this video I

took a bit of a different approach with a more essay style format I hope you find it insightful if you watch till the end then thank you so much because that helps the almighty algorithm a lot and if you got any takes or feelings about this then be sure to drop them in the comments down below