Ulysse Pence

Personal Knowledge Management

Show Notes

November 1st, 2020

Tools

Concepts & Frameworks

Music

Transcript

Ulysse: Hey, this is the Growth Podcast with your hosts, Ben and Brendon. This episode we'll be talking about Personal Knowledge Management, or: what do I do with all these notebooks?

Ulysse: I feel like everyone sort of has their own style for how they organize their notes. For years I just had these notebooks that I would just take a lot of notes in from school and then at the end of the year I would just throw them away. And over the years I sort of transitioned more into doing more digital notes and then at some point my friend introduced me to this personal Wiki software called TiddlyWiki. I think you had that as well, Brendon, right?

Brendon: Oh yeah, I've tried TiddlyWiki before.

Ulysse: I think we wanted something more from it, but TiddlyWiki was just so weird. So basically TiddlyWiki is this software where you have a bunch of separate pages, sort of like Wikipedia and then they all can connect to each other and there's some form of templating. It was really confusing and this is coming from someone who a software engineer. So that didn't last very long. I sort of put a bunch of information in that and then abandoned it and then my friend introduced me to this text editor called Emacs, and Emacs is something people use to code, but it's also something that people use to write, whether it's essays or books or whatever. Emacs is basically this text editor, if you're on Windows, you might be using Notepad++ or VS Code or on Mac OS X there's TextMate and Sublime and Emacs is not too dissimilar from those, but one of the biggest standouts for it is that you can sort of change your environment. So you can use text files as a way of viewing data such as the calendar or calculator.

Ulysse: It's all basically just buffers as they call it on Emacs, but you can do very dynamic things and since you can change the environment in Emacs, you wind up with this very customizable and pluggable sort of software. So Emacs has this major add-on called org-mode and org-mode among other things allows you to have a personal Wiki. So that's what I used for number of years as well. And then my friend ... it's always the same friend, introduced me to this way of taking notes and keeping track of what you're working on called P.A.R.A., P-A-R-A. And this is something from Tiago Forte who is a big productivity notes taking personality online. One of the big differentiators about Tiago's approach is that Para forces you to put things further away from the touchpoints of your day-to-day work that are less important. A lot of these ideas actually stem from David Allen, who originally wrote Getting Things Done. Are you familiar with David Allen or?

Brendon: Yeah, I'm familiar. I haven't read Getting Things Done, but I'm pretty familiar with the basic concepts of GTD, like the two minute rule and the inbox and all of the associated parts of the system.

Ulysse: I think David Allen in the Getting Things Done book has some diagram that shows the flow of information into your notes and I think that was, what's that phrase? The sail that launched a thousand ships. Is that a phrase? Did I make that up? Anyway. I'm sure David Allen wasn't the first person to think of every single one of these ideas, but I think he was one of the people who popularized a lot of these ideas and gave people a solution that actually helps them organize their tasks and their notes and all these things together. So PKM, Personal Knowledge Management is just the part of it that has to do with how you track all your notes and stuff like that, whereas a lot of people will offer a full monolithic solution for how to do tasking, how to do projects, how to do this and that. I'm curious what your progression has been Brendon, because I feel like we've talked about whatever I'm working on, whatever you're working on. I know you've used WorkFlowy.

Brendon: I did use WorkFlowy. I can get into a bit of the background. So growing up I read a lot of books. I had this bookshelf in my room and it was full of all these different books and a lot of it was nonfiction books. I even remember reading entire Almanacs for Kids, they had all these great details about all the areas of knowledge and I was like, "Wow, I'm gaining so much knowledge." But then I realized that I would learn new instruments. I would read new books. And then I just realized I would actually completely forget what I was learning. No one had ever told five-year-old me, "Hey, there's this Spacing Effect where if you keep reinforcing something it'll stay in your memory, but if you don't reinforce it, you'll just lose most of it."

Brendon: That wasn't explicitly conveyed to me. So I think over the years I just began realizing, "Wow, I've been reading all these dozens, maybe even hundreds of books and not a single one of them is actually sticking." So that was the initial realization that got me really interested in Personal Knowledge Management, because what was the point of reading all of those books? Of course I was retaining fragments of knowledge, but I didn't really like that that was happening. I think that most people's first experience with Personal Knowledge Management is probably in school, because you're taking notes, you're writing reports, you're taking information from knowledge sources and you're aggregating them. But while I was in school, I started exploring different systems. I think that TiddlyWiki might've been one of the initial systems that I was exploring.

Brendon: I was going online looking at a bunch of these systems. I remember using TiddlyWiki in middle school. I also remember looking into Cyborganize, which was this complicated system that use a lot of different things including a text file for all the digital work you are doing. Whenever you did any digital work the idea was you would keep it in this big text file and then in the future I think you would go back and you would move some of that information into an outlining tool. Those were a couple of the systems that I tried in the Personal Knowledge Management space. I did try a lot of specialized software and systems and I don't think a lot of it was necessarily sticking. I think the first one that I used with a significant degree of success might've been WorkFlowy. That was when I began in college so that's probably why you remember me using it, because that was a knowledge management system I was using at that time and I thought it was really interesting because it was an infinite outliner.

Ulysse: Right. I think WorkFlowy is actually pretty similar in a lot of ways to the org-mode in Emacs, the text editor.

Brendon: Have you used WorkFlowy?

Ulysse: I've only dabbled a little bit with it. No, I've never used it for doing anything serious.

Brendon: So WorkFlowy was working pretty well. I was using it to store a bunch of web links, thoughts, ideas, and those are some of the basic functions of a Personal Knowledge Management tool. It's for example, storing informational resources, some of them even store an entire copy of the informational resource inside the knowledge based self, for example, Evernote and its web clipper. That's a really good example of that, where it's literally saving a complete copy of the original information source. I think knowledge management systems sometimes store long form content. There's different progression of writing progression of your own knowledge, where it might start off in a really short and disorganized format, maybe just as bullet points in let's say WorkFlowy, which is sort of a bullet point based outliner. And then you might advance that to paragraphs and even fully fleshed out articles that are meant for private or public release, which represent a significant development of your thinking on a certain topic and an aggregation of a lot of your thoughts in a lot of different sources.

Brendon: So basically Personal Knowledge Management tool span that entire range. So WorkFlow is definitely on the earlier side of that. And then I think the next major system I switched to was Notion, which I believe you introduced me to Ben and that was pretty interesting. That was a little bit tailored more for, I would say paragraphs. Everything was organized in pages that were stored in this infinite hierarchy. So I think it was really interesting using that system. And then what I currently use is this tool called Roam Research, which has recently become extremely popular and that's organizing knowledge in a, almost a completely new way rather than organizing knowledge in an hierarchical manner, like almost all of the previous knowledge management tools. This is one is organizing information in a more networked fashion. So you have these notes that are linking to a bunch of other notes. It's kind of like a knowledge web. There's not necessarily a central point in the hierarchy. You can just jump into one note and then bounce around from there to other bits of knowledge.

Ulysse: I would actually argue that Roam Research is not actually doing anything crazy new. I think one of the big things that Roam Research did right is it's really streamlined. I'm sure if you talked to the founders they'd have a different opinion, but it's amazing how different it feels. One is so fast and all the features that you'd want in a personal wiki kind of software for note taking are just part of the primitive set of tools you can use in it. The fundamental things you can do in Roam Research, at least up until now have basically been what's already available in wiki software. It's just that it's just so trivial to do it I think in Roam. I guess one of the cool features they added, which is not very common or I haven't seen anywhere else is that you can take individual bullets or a tree, sort of like a whole hierarchy of bullets and then embed that in other content. I think that's pretty cool. Do you have a specific framework that you're following with it or do you just sort of invent it as you go?

Brendon: I'm not using a particular framework at the moment. I'm basically just making a bunch of notes and then sort of haphazardly connecting them with each other. I think that approach has been working pretty decently so far. I might experiment with some additional methods in the future, but right now I would say one of the problems I was having with Personal Knowledge Management tools is, I think it was a little bit difficult to have myself record everything into them in an organized manner because I have this problem with my Apple Notes where I know that there's this folder system in Apple Notes, but for some reason I've just been accumulating thousands of these notes basically, and they're completely unordered, so I have to rely on search to find any information and that's really, really inefficient, things get lost or not organized.

Brendon: And what I like about Roam is I think that's just a system that I found that works for me where I can just launch Roam immediately on web or mobile. I can just type in a sentence and within that sentence I'm typing I can instantly tag multiple associated notes or concepts. If I type a sentence down that sentence is organized by default immediately based on the words that are contained inside the sentence. And I think that feature itself, I have not found in other systems. I have experienced, as you mentioned, like a wiki for example, you have a bunch of pages and those pages link to each other, but I would say it is a little bit a higher effort to do that linking. You've got to-

Ulysse: Totally.

Brendon: Find where in this wiki structure should I insert this bit of knowledge? And I would say I also use this niche knowledge management software called TheBrain. This was also back in middle school and that was also a networked sort of graph-like knowledge structure. The friction was too high to add information because in order to do the network thought system I had to put effort into organizing the content. So I think Roam is the first knowledge management system that I found where it was just really easy for me to add information and I think that's extremely important. Then maybe if I was going to have a more organized collection of information, I might even have, I'm not sure if this is the most efficient way to do it, but I might even consider having multiple systems where I have Roam for all of my ideas, all of that stuff is just going directly into Roam and then perhaps that will get translated into a more structured long form content and perhaps that would go into Notion or something.

Ulysse: I think you said it right when you said the structure of it is just sort of emerging as you're doing it, or I forget what word you said, ad hoc or something, or haphazard. Was that the word you used?

Brendon: Yeah, haphazard.

Ulysse: I think that's actually really a good way to go. I think that is why this is sort of a different approach than things that came before because it's trivial to create new pages basically as you're heddling another page and you don't have to add any content to them, but you just have this reserved spot for when you want to add content, if you ever do.

Brendon: Yeah. And they use the same syntax actually that you would use if you were editing Wikipedia or actually using MediaWiki, which is just double brackets. I would say one of the major innovations in Roam ... well, there are a couple of major innovations that make it work really well for me. One of them is unlike a traditional wiki, there's this sort of daily notes page where every day you log into Roam, they have this just empty note waiting for you. And basically right there you can just record information directly in it. Whereas in a wiki, you might have to load up the wiki and then create a new page and then you would have to organize that page somewhere. It would take, who knows, you would have to do at least, I don't know how many seconds or maybe even minutes of thought to decide where that information should go or not even in a wiki, just in any knowledge management system you're trying to organize. There is that overhead, the instant entry.

Brendon: And then I would say the only reason why that works in Roam is because whenever you link to something, when you go to that page, it shows you what pages are linking to it. So in that way you can associate one bit of information with all these different pages. Whatever content that you're inputting is automatically organized just by linking to other pages, but if you go to that other page in the future, let's say you go to the pet page that you linked to from a note about dogs, do you write in daily notes, in five seconds you can go to that pet page in the future and you'll see what you wrote on that day in the past about dogs. The date is there, the fact that it was about dogs is there, the exact content of the thought is there. And so, boom, that information is associated with pet, that information's associated with dog, it's associated with whatever page you link it to almost instantly and that speed I would say is just unparalleled.

Ulysse: Thanks for listening. Brendon and I didn't go into a lot of detail on each tool. So we recommend that you check them out for yourself. In a future episode we hope to dive into the Holy war that is note-taking methodologies. The beautiful intro music to this episode was created by Oliwia Orłowska. This relaxing melody is by Neighborhood Vandal. Links to both of these songs can be found in the show notes.

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