Curation has been too focused on the information and not enough on architecture; how we collect, store, augment, and utilize what’s already in our minds.
Adam Grant • Check Your Pulse #55
PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.
Worse, the
... See moreJoan Westenberg • I Deleted My Second Brain
What all these category-confusing approaches have in common is that the benefit of note-taking decreases with the number of notes you keep. More notes will make it more difficult to retrieve the right ones and bring related ones together in a playful way.
Sönke Ahrens • How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking
In the old system, the question is: Under which topic do I store this note? In the new system, the question is: In which context will I want to stumble upon it again?
Sönke Ahrens • How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers
If you have more categories, you can categorise things better. I think building these categories is worthwhile. Having a common name for a situation is a chunk you can unpack when needed. That’s what all adages, aphorisms, and proverbs are.