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!"I realized over time that the collection wasn't the hard part. It was the categorizing and simplifying. The author hits on it a few times:"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."In my experience, the simplifying is really where you get all the gain.What is simplifying?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.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?The parallel to programming should be obvious. When you name things well, they become very easy to find and use.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.It's like learning the law of gravity rather than cataloging every time an apple falls from a tree.The following unintuitive conclusion arises: you should be looking to make your "Personal Knowledgebase" more difficult to grow because it forces you to go through the simplifying process sooner.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.