Knowledge system

I'm a knowledge worker and most of my time is spent reading, writing and thinking. As a consequence, I'm exposed to many, many new ideas and concepts each day. Some things I forget. Which is fine if concepts were not worth remembering, but often I wish I would remember more. So I created (you guessed it) a system 🙂 well a series of them.

If you check out my library, you'll find that my reading interests are all over the place: economy, business, global politics, investment banking, cognitive science, physics, productivity, self-help, software, management, ...

Why? I find it "important" to read on topics across the whole board. I was raised around knowledge workers and lived among piles of books (some piles were taller than me). From a very young age, I was thought about the value of knowledge. My dad always told me:

Knowledge is the only thing that no one can take from you.

As I was acquiring all this knowledge, one of the biggest issues I faced was that obtaining knowledge isn't a linear process but more of a:

twisted path of dead ends and wrong turns. Due to the nature of the learning process, it's not easy to build a good maintainable knowledge system. Can we even create one?

Path towards a system

I've been struggling for a while to find a system in which I can "keep" all my knowledge. I came across techniques like:

• Spaced repetition
• Zettlekasten

But the available solutions didn't fit my needs. So I decided in 2013 at the end of high school that I'm going to build a custom personal knowledge system. The first step was to learn how to code.

Over the years, I tried many things. But I didn't get pretty far until I systematically tackled:

Digital & mental clutter

I wrote about digital clutter before post , and I've been dealing with it pretty successfully.

The next thing to tackle was mental clutter:

• What's on my mind?
• What I'll do today?
• What's distracting me?
• What's today's priority?
• ..

To comb through those thoughts, each morning, I do one hour of clarity writing. I usually write one or two A4 pages each day to gather my thoughts. Yup, there is that much mess in my head.

Writing helps, but writing isn't the last step in the process. Something called Digital brain is.

Digital brain

We forget stuff. Our brain is built out of neurons (so they say) and those neurons (solid points) form bits of our knowledge bank:

If we don't use a neuron for a while, it slowly "dies out". It becomes less accessible to us (dotted point). We don't lose just a neuron we also lose all of the connections associated with it.

The logical next step is then:

How can we build a digital brain?

After a few iterations, I came up with an approach that allows me to systematically build my knowledge bank out of small bits called neurons.

Digital brain is a folder on my PC with the following structure:

digital_brain/
    00001/
    00002/
        ...

where each folder 00001 represents a neuron.

Neurons

Each neuron is a digital note with few pictures:

00001/
   img/
   README.md
   metadata.JSON

README.md contains the text of the neuron and the metadata file is where all information is stored about how the neuron is connected to the rest of the knowledge/ neurons.

To find something in the digital_brain, you then simply use the file search of your operating system (as far as I know all operating systems have it: Windows, Linux and Mac OS).

Neuron creation

So how do we approach neuron creation? Simple. You get across a new topic, write a note, assign it a number, connect it to the rest of notes, and that's it.

For example, recently, I attended a physics seminar where the lecturers explained the concepts behind the 2020 Physics Nobel prize. I learned around 30 new concepts. So I created 30 neurons. Since it was a bit messy to connect them all I made a sketch:

• green numbers represent the neuron number,
• grey paths are connections to be created,
• black ones are the connections that are already created.

Once I had the sketch on paper, I created the neuron connections on the PC.

Why linear folder structures?

You'll notice that digital_brain is built as a linear folder structure. Neurons are not sorted by category or type. I tried solving this problem with folders and mind maps, but it turns out that there will always be a neuron that belongs to two different categories. So now what? Shortcuts? No that's messy.

Linear folder structure and search, and that's it. If you're a bit technically talented, you can write a custom search engine:

With the linear structure and powerful search, you'll be able to find results pretty quickly.

So how to get started?

Simple. The moment you learn a new concept:

Write it down. Add a picture. Write down why it's important to remember this.

And that's it.

Then once you master the above you sort of completed level-0, then start going deeper and deeper based on your needs. Iteratively build your knowledge bank. Reinforce connections.

In a span of few weeks, months, years you'll suddenly be left with a treasure trove of knowledge sorted to your needs that you can use.

We'll cover more details of this approach in the upcoming posts.