Capture

The first stage is capture: gathering and consuming information. I'm going to talk about three types of capture:

• Capturing ideas from your own mind

• Capturing the knowledge and ideas of others

• Capturing your past work

Capture/Ideas from your own mind

Our minds are always working, and thoughts and ideas pop into our heads. You want to capture these thoughts in the moment before they fade away and are replaced by other thoughts.

This is where a quick-capture inbox comes in. You want to have a readily available method for capturing fleeting thoughts. You can use a phone app like Drafts, voice memos, or a notebook if you always carry one. An easy-to-use quick capture system is a foundational element of a PKM system.

A key practice is regularly processing your quick-capture inbox. You might capture things you want to save as a task (send to your task management system) or a note (save in your notes system). There may be fleeting notes you don’t want to save, in which case, archive them.

Below is an idea I captured in my quick capture inbox. I had an idea that naming things is part of the craft of design systems. This was an idea I might want to develop, so I created a note for it in Obsidian (my notes system). In Obsidian, I’ve linked this idea to two other notes in my system: Component Naming and Token Naming. I’ll demonstrate later how you can use this type of linking.

Capture/The knowledge and ideas of others

Capturing the knowledge and ideas of others involves content consumption: reading, listening, and viewing.

Here, people can fall off the tracks because so much content is available. What you don’t want to do is sign up for a read-it-later service, add a bunch of stuff to it, have it all pile up, and then just give up on the whole idea of it because it's so overwhelming. Let’s look at ways we can manage what we consume.

The first strategy is to allocate your attention intentionally. Think about your highest priority topics and engage most deeply with them. The diagram below illustrates my priorities. At the top are design systems and AI. Topics on the lower end of the scale are still of interest, but I engage with them less deeply.

Next, consider how you want to engage with content. For the content that is most important to me, I engage deeply and actively by taking notes. For other content, I might be fine skimming or reading an AI summary.

In this age of algorithmic feeds and AI-generated content, it’s important to curate a set of trusted sources you explicitly follow. I have a note in my notes system (Obsidian) listing the folks worthy of my deepest attention, as shown in the partial screen capture below.

My other piece of advice is to time-box and prioritize weekly content consumption. In Eisenhower matrix terms, PKM is important, not urgent. You need to intentionally make time for it.

For example, I target 30-60 minutes on weekdays and 1-3 hours on Saturday mornings. During the workweek, I usually spend most of my time scanning feeds and doing short-form reading. Early Saturday mornings are spent doing deeper reading outside of the demands of the work week. I’m also ruthless about clearing out my read-it-later queue. If I haven’t read something in two weeks, I remove it.

Small, consistent habits are the key to personal knowledge management. Cultivating new habits can be challenging. If you need help with habits, I recommend James Clear's great book, Atomic Habits.

How I like to take notes

I am a devotee of handwritten notes for deeper engagement with content. Substantial data shows that taking handwritten notes engages you more deeply and leads to more effective learning. Because I think handwritten notes are so important, I will discuss how I handle them.

There are two main options for handwritten notes: paper or a digital tablet, such as an iPad (using apps such as Goodnotes or Notability) or an eInk tablet (such as the ReMarkable, Onyx Boox, or Supernote). I’m a big fan of the ReMarkable because writing with it has a very paper-like feel while offering all the advantages of a digital tablet.

I take two different types of notes:

• Learning and idea notes have enduring value.

• Meeting and research notes (mostly) have time-delimited value.

For meeting and research notes, I’ve developed a set of “note helpers” that make it quicker and easier to process my notes. As I write my notes, I flag actions for myself, action items for others, questions I need answered that I can’t ask at the moment, key points or ideas, and anything surprising or representing a project risk. The illustration below shows colored highlighting: I add this as part of process my notes after the meeting or session.

After taking these notes, I process them as soon as possible to identify action items and key takeaways. While my action items go into my task manager, key takeaways go into a shared workspace, such as a FigJam board or Coda document, to share with the team.

Book and long-form content notes have more enduring value to me. The photo below shows my setup for taking book notes. On the right are some notes from The Accidental Taxonomist, which I read to learn more about taxonomy as a discipline.

Here is how I processed these notes: First, I reviewed them and identified key ideas and insights that I thought were worth including in my notes system. Because taxonomy was an area I felt I needed to learn more about, this process helped me reflect on and process what I’d read. I also included a PDF of my original handwritten notes in my notes system for reference. If you use a tablet, you can easily export notes as PDFs. If you use paper, you can use an app like Scanner Pro to scan your notes and have them auto-send to the cloud.

One final workflow I want to mention is that most tablet note-taking applications have good handwriting-to-text conversion. I will use that when I want to import something I have handwritten more directly into my notes system.

Capture/Your past work

Some of the most essential learning you do is through personal experience - capturing your past work to leverage this experience is crucial!

As a consultant, I work on a project basis, so I maintain a project diary for each project. This diary includes daily project notes, a summarizing case study that I prepare at the end of the project, and links to all deliverables.

Another category of work you’ll want to capture is anything you’ve published, including social media posts, articles, and conference presentations.