Record & Retrieve from a Personal Knowledgebase
Summary
Memory is fine for stuff you do often and useless for stuff you don’t. The article is about the second category: the tasks you figure out, forget, then have to figure out again from scratch six months later (watermarking a PDF, clearing a dishwasher fault). The fix is boring and obvious: write the process down the first time it costs you, keep it in plain text, and name it so future-you can actually find it. That’s the whole thing. A personal SOP library, captured in the moment.
Key Concepts
- The “twice” rule: Once is a fluke. The second time you’re looking something up is the signal to write it down. Don’t wait for the third.
- Interstitial documenting: Write the step down before you do the next one. Do it after the fact and you’ve already lost the fiddly detail that mattered.
- Tool agnosticism: Markdown / plain text. Not because it’s trendy. Because you can still read it in ten years without begging some app to let you export. No gatekeeper.
- Keyword-first naming: Title the note with the words you’ll actually search for later. “Dishwasher F14”, not “Fixing the kitchen machine”. Front-load the nouns.
Main Takeaways
- Intent beats memory. The reason we don’t document isn’t that we can’t. It’s that in the moment it feels less important than whatever’s next. It isn’t. Push through that.
- Capture while doing. No time to write? Talk it out into an audio note. The details you lose are the ones you fought for, and they’re gone the second the task ends.
- One place, one tag. Everything how-to in a single searchable spot, tagged consistently (
#howtoor similar) so procedures don’t drown in general notes. - Name for the skill, not the instance. The title should describe the thing you’ll need again, not this one occurrence. Lead with the important nouns so search finds it.
Personal Reflections & Questions
Worth thinking about
- What have I re-learned three-plus times this last year? Homelab stuff almost certainly. What did that cost me in hours I’ll never get back?
- Writing-as-I-go vs. audio note: which one do I actually reach for? And if I know the answer, what’s stopping me from using it today?
- If I go looking for a note I wrote today back in 2028, what two words do I type? Are they in the title right now, or not?
- Where do my real how-tos live? Obsidian/Markdown, or locked inside some app’s format? What happens to them the day that app dies?
📇 Additional Metadata
- 🗂 Type:: note
- 🏷️ Tags:: pkm productivity
- 📡 Status:: #status/🌱