Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

Tl;dr: I think personal knowledge management, in many cases, is a fruitless effort and there are generally only very few cases (see above) in which note taking actually makes sense.

The issue isn’t that you’re not taking enough notes. It’s that most systems are built for archiving , not exploration. They encourage collecting over engaging. You highlight passages, copy quotes, or jot down insights, but unless you do something with them, they just sit there—gathering digital dust.

Twitter is packed with thinkbois writing threads about how to 100x your productivity with AI tools I bet they’ve never used. Here’s what the thinkbois won’t tell you: better tools are not the bottleneck to creating great work. A person focusing on one thing the antiquated way - pen and paper or whatever - will beat the tool optimizers any day. A ne... See more

People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use

Many bloggers and “life-hackers” have made a full-time job of suggesting how to organize your journal or how to most effectively Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply. We should take this advice seriously insofar as those practices have helped the au... See more