Designing a Personal Knowledgebase
I used to think I had this problem, too. I developed an elaborate categorizing and indexing scheme. I tried to apply it outside of my personal knowledge, creating a crawler/indexer for research and web sites in one my areas of interest. I thought "if only we organize things better we can change the world!"<p>I realized over time that the collection wasn't the hard part. It was the categorizing and <i>simplifying</i>. The author hits on it a few times:<p>"It is the extraction and organization of the information that takes time...
I know full automation is not feasible, since the imposition of meaning onto the raw information is something that I must do, not the computer."<p>In my experience, the simplifying is really where you get all the gain.<p>What is simplifying?<p>It's distilling a complex research paper into a few key data points.
It's naming files well so that you can search them with Spotlight.
It's learning to write more clearly.
etc.<p>That last one -- clear writing -- should have been obvious. Good writers manage to convey so much information in so little space. How do they do it?<p>The parallel to programming should be obvious. When you name things well, they become very easy to find and <i>use</i>.<p>We can expand this to a bigger point: if you really want to get smarter, you need to be learning to simplify because your brain can only hold so much at once.<p>It's like learning the law of gravity rather than cataloging every time an apple falls from a tree.<p>The following unintuitive conclusion arises: you should be looking to make your "Personal Knowledgebase" more <i>difficult</i> to grow because it forces you to go through the simplifying process sooner.<p>I stole this idea from someone on HN: anytime I find an idea or quote that I think it important, I clip it into a Word Document and print it out. I keep these in a binder. I have gone back to these notes so many more times than anything that I have in any digital form. More significantly, these bits of information have influenced my life more often and more deeply.