My Personal Knowledge Management 🌱
An in-depth edition about note taking and organizing your knowledge.
One of the most frequent questions I get from readers is a meta question — that is, how I study, do research, and prepare for articles.
I have written other times about this, but not in full detail. So, I am now publishing my whole note taking and organization process, including templates and workflows that you can start using right away.
But before we dive into this, I want to answer two questions:
Why this should be useful to you
Why you should listen to me
These are the core questions I ask myself before I start writing any article, and, for this one, I feel I need to answer them explicitly.
The first thing I want to say is: I am not special.
Sure, I have a decent experience with startups and software teams, but I was never the CTO of a billion dollar corp, I never worked in big tech, or raised money from a16z. Yet, Hybrid Hacker + Refactoring today count 140K subscribers, 1700 paid members, and 300+ original articles.
I am extremely proud of all these numbers — but in particular the 300 articles.
There is no way I could pull this off from my experience alone. Sure, I could probably coast the first 20-30 articles, but what made a real difference, over the distance, was process.
As of today, I am very happy with my organization and note taking. This is not only about newslettering: I use the same systems for running my life in general, which is why I believe this can be useful to you. Whether you are a newsletter writer, an engineer, a manager, or whatever, the right workflow can supercharge your personal growth.
So here is what we will cover today
🎯 Notes == getting things done — a practical mindset about taking notes.
🪣 Capturing notes — how to optimize for quick saving.
🏷️ Organizing notes — projects, responsibilities, and topics.
🌱 Evergreen notes — a special kind of notes that forms the backbone of my writing.
Let’s dive in!
🎯 Notes == getting things done
I have always liked to take notes, and I have always kind of thought I was good at it.
When I studied computer science at university, few courses relied on actual books — professors mostly used presentations they created themselves, which meant taking notes was crucial.
During those years, I worked a lot on taking good notes.
I organized notebooks religiously and I made experiments to bridge the gap between physical and digital, including using the unbelievable (back then, but kinda still today) Livescribe smart pen.
In hindsight, what fueled this process was that it was attached to a real purpose. I could measure how well I was doing by means of how easy it was to study on my notes, plus what grades I would get at the end.
Why am I telling this story? Because I believe the #1 reason why people fail at personal knowledge management is that they don’t have a real purpose for it. Taking notes and organizing them is expensive — if you don’t have a good reason for it, you will eventually just give up.
One of the core themes of this article is that notes are, primarily, an aid to getting things done, as opposed to, I don’t know, a repository of your knowledge for some abstract future use.
Fast forward to today, my whole work entirely depends on notes. My note taking has three precise goals:
🧵 Publishing one original, long-form essay — every Thursday.
💡 Publishing three short-form interesting ideas — every Monday.
🐦 Publishing one good idea on social media — every day.
So let’s look at what I do for this.
🪣 Capturing Notes
I have found that useful stuff can come from literally anywhere: a website you visit, a bit of wisdom from a friend, a sign on the street — so you should have a reliable way to capture any kind of source.
This capture stage should be optimized for minimal friction. You should be able to capture anything super fast, otherwise you just won’t do it.
Also the capture step should only focus on exactly that: capturing. Don’t bother about organizing anything at this stage, or figuring out where to put things. This only makes the capture more cumbersome, and makes you do less of it.
In my experience, separating capture from organize is a key element of good note taking. Some people corner themselves into unsustainable workflows where whenever they e.g. take a picture of something they immediately have to send it to e.g. Notion, put the right tags, etc.
This doesn’t work in the long run — you only end up capturing less stuff. So, whenever you capture something, only capture it, and review it later (more on that below).
To be able to capture things fast you likely need multiple methods, each optimized for a different type of source / input.
Here are mine:
🖥️ Websites — Notion Web Clipper. I use this unofficial Notion saver to send any interesting websites to my Notes database. The chrome extension allows to create various templates for different types of websites, and is able to fill database fields automatically. I also use the default share to Notion action on my iPhone and iPad.
💭 Casual thought — I create a new note on Bear, on my iPhone/Mac. Bear is super fast, is offline first, and has good sync across devices. Those are my only requirements, so Bear works fine but I would probably do just as well with Apple Notes and other similar apps.
✏️ Article passage — I highlight passages on Readwise, which automatically creates a note on Notion for that article with all the highligthed parts. I wrote a full piece about how I read online.
📗 Book passage — I usually read on a Kindle and highlight passages there. These are also sent to Notion automatically by Readwise.
🎧 Video / Audio passage — I use Bear, transcribing the passage manually — I don’t like this, it is slow and cumbersome, which is one of the reasons why I don’t listen to many podcasts.
📷 Misc life stuff — I take photos with my iPhone.
I also make heavy use of AI-generated summaries. For articles and videos (especially videos) that I am not sure I want to consume in full, I go straight to the summary first and decide based on that. About 50% of the time, the summary is enough and I simply copy parts of it into a new note.
🏷️ Organizing notes
The organize part is where you take all the mess that you have captured and figure out what you should do with it.
I do ~80% of my organization in big batches, and very little on the spot. In particular, I have 1h 30m (three pomodoros 🍅) blocked every Monday afternoon, during which I organize notes from the past week and plan my tasks for the next.
This review covers three areas, which roughly take 30 mins each: