Why notes? There are a series of problems in the world, why am I spending my precious brain cycles on building another note taking app? There are literally dozens, and some are doing a pretty good job!

I want to answer that, but before I do - let me tell you why I started to get into ‘Personal Knowledge Management’.

It was the end of 2019, I’d spent the year dabbling in machine learning, running a nascent start up & moving homes. I’ve always been an avid journaler, and I found myself doing an annual review. During this, it donned on me that one of the essential skills which would determine my future success would be my learning rate. While building my start up, I was surprised by how little I knew about it dispite the feeling that I’d prepared for ages for it! I had read dozens of books on the topic, I felt that I should be an expert - yet I hadn’t retained any of the information in these books, and I couldn’t really put them to good use. Worse, I felt that I couldn’t possibly keep up with what I would have to learn to keep this venture from being a failure.

I decided that 2020 would be different! (For a much different reason it turned out!) I would commit myself to being a better learner; I would need to learn more about the process of learning, and how I can improve my learning rate.

I read Taking Smart Notes, I joined a Building A Second Brain cohort, in the following year I even joined a start up that was focused on solving an adjacent note taking problem for developers!

I learned a lot about personal knowledge management during this time:

• The hand writing connection is essential so your mind compresses the information as you receive it in order to ‘decrompress’ it later upon it being read.
• What you learn needs to be applied in order for it to stick.
• Forgetting is actually most of the battle of learning, we forget 90% of what we read. If you can retain even a small percentage of that, your knowledge grows expontentially faster.
• Concepts that you learn which are like concepts you already know are much more likely to be remembered.

I’ve been diligently crafting my digital garden. Pruning weeds here and there. Planting seeds. Coming in with water here and again… but the reality is - nothing is really growing.

It has helped in a lot of ways:

• I’m more attentive to what information I take in; if I’m not willing to take notes on it, I don’t even read it. It’s a nice filter and keeps me engaged in what I do decide to read.
• Overally, I’ve found that I’m better at remembering; I can recall frequently needed pieces of information more easily.
• To some extent, it has allowed me to learn faster which has helped to grow my software engineering (& start up founder) skills.

But it still feels like I’m pushing it along. It takes a lot of effort. It takes manual remembering of “Oh yeah, I’ve got something for this.” I’ve got to dig for that information still.

I’m manually going through notes I’ve made about books I’ve read to refresh those memories & re-distill that information.

When it’s time to produce something, it’s still a consuming process to distill the information I need from my notes. I feel like I’m a gold panner, shifting through the river silt hoping for that little nugget of gold but turning up empty handed most of the time.

It’s time consuming. I feel like it’s effort that should be spent in other ways - like on the hard parts of actually learning or creating things!

What really pushes me is that this could all be so much better given the shift in technology of LLMs. In the coming articles I’m going to share my vision for what I believe the future of note taking could be - and I’d like to invite you reach out and share your note taking & learning experience with me. You can find me at derrick [at] wonderpkm.com