Knowledge Building

Every morning I sit down, choose an idea then start writing & exploring.Not to produce any particular content. But to find out what's inside me (& unlock it from the depths of my brain)

The ultimate guide to building a personal knowledge platform that turns information into insight & knowledge you'll actually use.

A renaissance practice for the modern information world: How to start a commonplace practice to organise your thoughts & build your knowledge.

For a long time I read a lot of books and never actually did anything useful with the notes I took.

Peek behind the scenes into my workflow for taking notes from articles I read using Matter and turning them into real insights & knowledge.

My Writing Inbox is one inbox I prefer full not empty

Ideas take time to emerge. I rarely go from a new spark idea to a fully formed thesis in one spark writing session. They need time to soak & marinate. Often over days, weeks or even months.

I've been building what I now call my Spark Writing habit for the past 3 years. I'm not sure I've explained this before, but It's actually what set me on the path of becoming a creator and writing online. The more I built knowledge privately, the more I wanted to share publicly.

Even after 10+ years as a content marketer, I still hate that moment at the start of the week when I’m staring down the barrel of a blank screen, wondering what to post.So I swapped a blank screen for a 🏦 Content Bank full of ideas.

Capturing ideas is the single most important thing I do as a creator everyday.It's a cornerstone habit that cascades into every part of my content creation. When I sit down to 'do content' I don't have to spend any time brainstorming ideas. I have more than enough ideas to work with because I've captured them beforehand.

Most creators spend the majority of their writing time... writing content.And at first, this seems logical. You need to create content right? But if the only time you ever write is to produce content - you're on a downward spiral to burnout.Instead, I spend 80% of my time 'Think Writing' and 20% 'Content Writing'

Why do we subject ourselves to so many unwritten rules as creators and writers? One of these unwritten rules I decided to ditch was: If I didn't write it last week I MUST write it this week.

For the past 2 years I have had one morning routine: Wake Up Make Coffee & Write. It doesn’t matter if it’s a weekday or weekend, I'm on holiday, in the middle of a busy time at work, or whatever - I do the same thing each morning.

When I'm not creating content for the internet I'm a marketing coach.It took me a long time to embrace the role of coach in my life. When I first got started I thought I was supposed to have all the answers and that was why my clients were coming to me.

At the beginning of each year I choose a word to theme my year. It's a word that focuses me and provides a lens to make decisions, take action & frame everything I do. It's less of a goal or a 'thing to do' and more of an intention that infuses my thoughts, my actions, my goals & my days.

Most people stop learning when they finish school or university. School gives structure to our learning for the first years of our life. But when we finish school, unless we continue to be intentional about learning & growth, we end up wandering through life, maybe reading a few books (if we're lucky).

Be honest, how many of your tweet bookmarks do you go back and look at?Judging from the tweets I've seen in the last few days the answer is... very little. This is a no judgement zone here! I had hundreds of bookmarked tweets racked up that I never ever looked at.

When I first started using Roam Research I didn't get. I had come from a very rigid system that required a lot of processing and maintenance. And suddenly I was staring at a blank page wondering how on earth is this going to be better at organising my brain?

I currently have over 600 notes in my writing inbox. It's not because I neglect to process them (it's the first thing I do every day). It's because my outcome is not about getting to zero. Just like the number of pages left at the bottom of my kindle books I wish I could simply turn off the constant nagging that I'm trying to get to the end of everything.

Should you really capture everything that comes into your head? We’ve come to take it as gospel that our knowledge management system or our ‘second brain’ should act like our first brain - only better. Our first brain for some odd reason can’t hold a lot of stuff that this modern world throws at us.

I had someone ask me recently how I managed to move all my 10 years worth of notes from Evernote into my new system in Notion & then into Roam Research. The truth is, I didn't. I literally abandoned everything in Evernote and started again.

I don't review my notes in the typical way most PKM gurus will tell you to do. Most people treat their notes like a filing cabinet. Writing them and then filing them away for some later use. But who wants to drag files out of a filing cabinet every week to add to the 'review' pile? How boring (and no wonder people fail when it comes to 'reviewing' their notes).

Most creators still take notes like they are in Miss Buckman's 6th grade class summarising that book they only half read and wished they had watched the movie instead. If you want to create your own unique ideas that stand out, here's how you should be taking notes instead. Great creators are great consumers. But they are not summarising every single word they read & hoarding it away for when they might need it.

Do you journal at work? When most people talk about journaling they do it in the context of their personal lives. You don't often hear people talk about journaling when it comes to work. But I've found that work journalling can actually make you a more productive, happier employee.

I've often wondered if I wasn't a creator would I still be so bullish on building a knowledge library? And the answer is a resounding YES. It might look a little different with different kinds of knowledge stored. But I believe building a knowledge library can help accelerate whatever you are pursuing in life.

For years I clipped notes from things I was reading & consuming and put them into a notes inbox to process. I was under the impression like many people that notes were some static thing that were meant to be stored away for safekeeping in case I might need them sometime. I was optimising the process of note-taking for storage.

In the last 2 years, I can't tell you the number of courses I've signed up. Some I've finished, some I've completely forgotten about simply because life is busy and there's always a lot going on. No matter how good they are if they are not front and centre in my system they just get left behind.

Your note-taking system will never be as valuable as just the act of note-taking itself. Whether you subscribe to Zettelkasten or PARA or GTD or something in between, the emphasis in the productivity & PKM space is usually on the systems of storage.

I coach clients for a living. Both one on one & in group situations. Every coaching call clients jump on, ask questions, get clear and I send them away with an action plan to work on.

If you've been following me for a while you'll know I've had a few things to say about Readwise. Not always good. But last month I signed up and I'm ready to say I might be wrong. I'll always be outspoken on the subject of highlighting without taking notes.But if you are taking notes then Readwise can be a helpful conduit to get those notes into your PKM.

I have more Kindle books in my library than I care to admit to you. It's not that I don't read. It's that there is more to read than I can keep up with. If I could spend my days curled up on my favourite chair reading and taking notes, I would. Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of time and I doubt you do either.

Writing notes is cool. But building those notes into a library of useful content is even cooler. I see a lot of creators (& I used to do this as well) throw notes into some kind of database give it a category like 'mindfulness' and then move on. Or use bi-directional linking to just link a bunch of words and hope they'll find them again later.

I've never run out of ideas in the year I've been writing online. My ideas list is always overflowing with new things to write about & I often get asked where I get so many writing ideas from. The truth is much simpler than you might think. Every one of my ideas comes out of my daily note-taking practices.

Do you constantly feel like your note-taking is lacking? You take notes & you highlight. You have databases filled with quotes. But your notes are a chaotic mess and rather than being helpful to your creator life they are a constant cause of stress and anxiety. The more you consume, the more chaotic it gets.

I'm giving up on the Zettelkasten Note-Taking method. Two years ago I read the book How To Take Smart Notes. It changed how I think about notes forever. I diligently started taking fleeting notes & literature notes & permanent notes. I spent hours figuring out how to implement it, watching youtube videos on how other people did it and creating products to help others understand it.

Are the world's best writers also the world's best note-takers? If you've been knocking around the creator world for a while you've probably had someone tell you that you should be keeping some kind of note library. But why? Why should you waste your time writing notes when you could be writing content?

Our phones can be a huge distraction when it comes to not only productivity but also being fully engaged with life. Most advice I hear when it comes to phones is just to have more self-discipline. But what if instead, we turned out phones into the ultimate knowledge management device? And instead of getting distracted by Twitter, we instead reached for a book or podcast or article?

I'm obsessed with looking under the hood of other people's systems. No matter how good my system is, how happy I am with it, or how well it is running I'll always jump at the chance to see how somebody else is doing something. This used to lead me into spending days re-arranging my whole system or switching tools.

A year ago I didn’t know what the heck a Zettelkasten was. Permanent Notes? Literature Notes? Now I’ve made hundreds of notes that have turned into published content. It’s how I stay so prolific. But there is still so much confusion around the Zettelkasten system, and even when you understand it in principle, it’s often hard to grasp practically how it works. Often the best way to learn is by watching someone else do something, so here’s a real-life note I’ve taken from consuming all the way through to permanent note.