I have never made any meaningful headway in deliberate note-taking, or knowledge management, or second-brain creation. Not for a lack of trying! There just seems to be something in my mind that resists this kind of rigor.

So a lot of points made in Joan’s piece here really resonated with me.

PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

When I first started using PKM tools, I believed I was solving a problem of forgetting. Later, I believed I was solving a problem of integration. Eventually, I realized I had created a new problem: deferral. The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold.

If some small scrap of information doesn’t stick in my mind, maybe it’s OK to forget it. Maybe recording everything is not the best way to engage with it.

I’m terrible at remembering to take photos. I just get so caught up in the moments that I don’t think to record them. But honestly, I prefer just being able to experience my life for myself, rather than always keeping a phone between me and the rest of the world.

My son’s kindergarten class put on a performance for parents in the spring. The parents were cautioned beforehand that in past years, adults were so busy photographing that nobody remembered to clap for the kids. I imagined being in the place of the kids, looking to see your parents’ faces and just seeing a sea of phones instead.

The kindergarten also hires a professional videographer and you can buy a DVD later. The prices are absurd, but it’s worth it if I can keep my phone in my pocket and make sure my son can always see my face. Every time our eyes meet, he beams.