In both, many people value the output (product) more highly than the process of getting to the output. That’s a mistake. Often, the process has as much (and in the case of PKM, more) value than the final product. Let’s examine how this applies to each discipline.

The point of personal knowledge management isn’t capturing and managing information;... See more

Tech-enabled tl;dr certainly has a place. There’s more content than ever and most of it is too long. But when everything is mediated by a summary, layers are being built between our brains and the thing itself, allowing something else—increasingly, AI—to interpret things for us.

I find it hard to imagine Leonardo da Vinci or Sherlock Holmes spending so much time with summary. I suspect careful thinkers do not gain a mastery of mystery, or attention to detail, by scrolling Reddit or listening to current event podcasts or asking “AI” to summarize anything. Instead I imagine they spend their time with primary sources,... See more