Post
I took enthusiastic notes at the same talk twice, and the second time it took me ten minutes to realize I had heard it before. That was the moment I decided to get my knowledge under control.
I have been a freelancer for almost 20 years. Even before that, but especially then, I was always learning, and pretty quickly I felt overwhelmed by all that knowledge. I thought: it all goes into my head somehow, but I will never be able to use it again. There is simply too much of it.
It felt like a pile of notes that I keep throwing more notes onto.
Every new note buries the old ones. And what lies at the bottom, I never see again.
At the beginning of my freelance career I went to a networking meeting. There were talks, and one of them was really good. I sat there thinking: wow, if you implement even a tiny part of this, your business goes through the roof. I took notes, page after page. And I walked out of that meeting totally inspired.
At home it was already late. I did nothing more with the notes that evening. The next day there were projects to do, and the notebook just lay there.
At some point I wrote new notes in it, because something else needed doing again. Later I put something on top of it. And the whole time I had a guilty conscience: this knowledge was so valuable, I really had to do something with it.
After two or three weeks it was over. I no longer knew what the man had said. In parts I couldn't even read my own handwriting anymore. And the high, that “I have to do this” feeling, was gone.
A few years later I was at another event like that. I was still convinced that I would take away valuable and above all actionable knowledge. Someone was up on stage, and I thought again: wow, if you implement even a small part of this, your business goes through the roof. I took notes.
It took a few minutes until it hit me: this isn't new to me. It even sounded very familiar. After almost ten minutes I knew. This was exactly the same person giving exactly the same talk I had already heard years before. The one I had said I had to implement. And it had fizzled out.
I did not find that funny. I was furious, mostly with myself. About the time and energy I had thrown away.
That was the turning point. Because it dawned on me that this didn't only apply to those two talks. I was constantly hearing, reading and watching things that never really sank in. How much that added up to, I don't know. Probably a whole lot. That made me angry, and I set off to find a solution.
It became clear to me that simply taking in knowledge from a talk, a book or an article and then applying it didn't work for me. And why it didn't work for me. Above all, that I wasn't alone with this.
Many of us do it the same way: we open our notebook and pick up a pen, write down what matters to us, highlight passages and do everything to make a piece of information stand out. But that approach is wrong: it is not about making the knowledge you took in especially visible, it is about not letting it drown.
Yet that is exactly what happens again and again. The problems behind it are manifold. I only want to name a few of the most important ones here:
On my search for the best solution for me, I took detours, for example I tried these:
But again and again I ran into the same problems and could never keep an overview for long, above all across the sheer amount of content.
Then I read an excerpt from an interview with Niklas Luhmann. He said, roughly, that he hadn't written his books himself, but that his Zettelkasten had done it for him. He was incredibly productive, hundreds of articles, dozens of books. That fascinated me so much that I wanted to look into it more closely.
I dug into all the material I could find and discovered an incredible potential. How could this have passed me by on my search until now? But I was able to answer that question quickly: it was incredibly simple and at the same time incredibly complex.
As a freelancer I needed a different setup and different possibilities than he did for his work as a scientist. So I couldn't just “simply” build his Zettelkasten. I had to examine every principle behind it carefully and invent a version of it that fit me.
I needed a place where my entire life can happen. It wasn't enough to take in knowledge and develop something new from it. I also had to make it usable for my work, so I had to include projects, tasks and a lot more.
I started with Notion and Evernote. I dropped both again. The structure was too rigid and too hierarchical for me. I couldn't break out of that folder thinking. We build silos for knowledge, and that is exactly what happens there too. Without folders I can't find anything again, and linking was too cumbersome for me back then. Maybe that is different today.
On top of that came a move between two systems. I hardly got my data out.
A proprietary format, difficult to export, just cumbersome and annoying. That's when it was clear to me: I don't want to depend on a platform. My knowledge should stay with me.
I ended up with Obsidian, and I have now been there for several years and I am pretty happy. Linking is very easy. Local storage was an absolute must-have for me. I don't depend on the platform, the knowledge is with me.
All my knowledge, all my projects, all my notes, everything I document, fits into seven folders. With a clever tag system and queries I find what I need in seconds.
The start was not easy. I began with atomic notes, meaning small, atomic notes for knowledge. I could then quickly transfer the principle to other things, to projects, to contacts. I rebuilt the structure several times until it really fit me.
Just understanding what an atomic note even is and why mine wasn't any good was tough. The first quarter was exhausting, and I wasn't sure whether it was all worth it.
Then came the moment when I could link something new to something that was already there. Through keyword search I found something I had read in a book somewhere, and I could connect it with what I had just read in an article.
That showed me a gap I hadn't been aware of before. A question opened up that I had never seen before, and pretty quickly I was able to write a trade article for a magazine about it. That wouldn't have been possible before. I had blown up the knowledge silos.
Two sources meet, and something emerges that wasn't there in either one before.
My Obsidian is open all day, whenever I am at the computer. For quick notes or spontaneous ideas I use it on my phone. I make all my notes there. My tasks are there, there is no separate task system anymore. I still always know what I have to do. I can assign everything to projects if I need to. If not, they are just free-floating things.
I read a lot and listen to audiobooks or podcasts. And of course I bring everything I consider valuable straight into my Second Brain. These days AI helps me find connections that I might not see otherwise.
I find new ideas, gaps or questions almost every day. So I can “harvest” what I have sown and tended over time. My Second Brain has become my control center, which I am in charge of, and in which exactly what I want to happen happens.
