I am starting to realize that I have been influenced by the personal knowledge management community. And I hate it. I've always been a bit of a librarian. I loved saving things in the early days of Evernote. Eventually, I got intrigued by concepts like PARA, Building A Second Brain, Linking Your Thinking, and so on. I find the ideas presented in those models to be absolutely fascinating. But it has taken me a long, long time to realize that they are not for me.
Outside of my job, where I write infinite amounts of business correspondence as a matter of necessity, almost all the writing I've done in my life has been private, personal, and reflective. I started keeping a journal when I was 12 years old. I value the practice of journaling because it's an incredible tool for crafting and editing the narrative of my life. Crafting and editing the narrative of my life has almost nothing whatsoever to do with personal knowledge management.
I have spent so much time collecting notes from articles and books I've read, creating bibliographies, writing atomic notes, and linking them together, that I've completely ignored the most valuable source of information for me...my own personal experience! Lured by the promise of brilliant ideas synergistically arising from my network of linked notes in my zettelkasten, I kind of just stopped writing what I was actually thinking.
I really hate that I did this.
My recent post about designing a system for capturing insights smacks of personal knowledge management indoctrination. Why do I need a system for writing down thoughts that I have? Can't I just...write them down?
And you know what? It doesn't really matter where. Yes, I concluded that I'd write them down in Day One. What that really means is that I'll be writing them in my journal.
So it's taken me a decade of neurotically building and rebuilding and factoring and refactoring "note taking systems" to get back to the conclusion that I should basically just keep a journal.
There's something...deeply hilarious about that to me.