After my grandfather passed away, we got access to his computer and his files. We were amazed by what we found. We knew he liked to collect notes but had no idea how much he had gathered during the last years of his life.

A goldmine of information but without any structure and impossible to navigate.

Personal Knowledge Management is the practice of capturing the ideas and insights we encounter in our daily life, whether from personal experience, from books and articles, or from our work, and cultivating them over time to produce more creative, higher quality work.

By storing all this stuff in a centralized and digital place outside of my forgetful brain, I can rely on the benefits of searchability, backups, syncing between devices and sharing with others.

For me, it’s about having systems that make me as organised, proactive and creative as possible.

My files are organised using the P.A.R.A. method, a digital filing method developed by leading productivity expert Tiago Forte. It stands for Projects, Areas, Resources and Archive.

In Notion, I only use P.A.A.

The main goal of all this collecting and storing of notes should be to have a wealth of content at your fingertips for creating whatever it is that you want to create. In my case, that would be writing articles.

I don’t do the actual writing in Notion, but I like to use the databases to keep track of the ideas and articles. The great thing about databases in Notion is that you can view them in different ways depending on your preference— lists, tables (like the Tasks screenshot), boards (like the P.A.A. screenshot) or kanban boards, like my Content Tracker.

Compared to Notion, the interface looks very simple. You don’t have all the fancy design options, no emojis. To me, that’s what makes it perfect for learning and writing.

The human brain is non-linear: we jump from idea to idea, all the time. Your second brain should work the same.

I don’t want to worry about folder structure or hierarchy, as that’s not how our brain works.

One of the main benefits to Roam is how quick and easy it is to create new pages as you’re writing, just by using the “[[]]” command.

These are my books (using Kindle) and online content (using Instapaper) highlights that automatically get imported by Readwise. Readwise is one of my favourite apps with many great features to help in the creative writing process

Book highlights: Kindle → Readwise → Roam
Online content highlights: Instapaper → Readwise → Roam
Newsletters / Emails highlights: Email to Instapaper → Readwise → Roam
My own notes, ideas, thoughts: Directly into Roam (Daily Notes)

Every couple of weeks, I go through the Readwise highlights that have been imported into Roam. The intention is to engage with my notes as much as possible through tagging and notes design.

Just collecting and never looking at the notes again wouldn’t be useful, and the more you intentionally link your notes together, the more valuable your web of ideas becomes.

I’ll first go through my notes, searching appropriate tags to collect pieces of content. I think you can already see where I’m going with this. Without a system like Roam, it would take me forever to look for relevant notes and resources.

Use Notion for building productivity and project management systems, as well as storing documents and digital data.

Use Roam for capturing and organising notes and as a thinking/creativity tool.