Personal knowledge management is note-taking on steroids. It’s an essential system for learning.
The keyword being learning, not gathering notes and bookmarking everything just for them to gather dust and never see the light of day again. Without further blabbering, here are the tools I currently use to capture notes, connect seemingly disparate ideas, and create content to learn.
Capture
As a self-professed lifelong learner, I regularly consume content in the form of blogs, newsletters, videos, and courses.
But I don’t simply consume — I also take notes, which are seeds that eventually bloom into content pieces. Here are the tools I use for capturing interesting bits and bobs of content.
Matter
This is my newsletter and online article reading companion.
Aside from reading emails and blog posts from my favorite writers and brands in one place, my favorite feature is being able to highlight and take notes — and sync all those to a Notion database!
Mymind
For visual content (think Instagram posts, tweet screenshots, Pinterest pegs), I’ve been using mymind for a couple of weeks — I’m liking it so far.
Its built-in AI categorizes everything for me, so I don’t have to manually curate everything I save. Huge time If I type “marketing” in the search bar, every item I’ve captured that is about (or mentions) marketing will be pulled up and ready for me to read. Plus, it’s aesthetically pleasing (say hello, fellow visual learners).
My favorite feature is the “Clear my mind,” which pulls up a note, asks you to swipe left to forget and swipe right to keep. Pretty cool, huh?
Notion
The notes and ideas I’ve captured from Matter and mymind are all funneled into my Notion knowledge base, along with my notes on courses and highlights from physical books, I also use Notion — the app I use for almost everything in my life.
Simplenote
Before Notion, Simplenote was my note-taking sidekick.
I still use it because most of my capture tools do not have full offline modes yet. Simplenote is reliable for recording notes I’ve taken while offline. It automatically syncs these notes in all my devices the moment I’m back online.
Connect
This is the art of thinking and processing content well. Through the notes I’ve written, I dig up odd and interesting connections that can spark content ideas and become the bare bones of my next article, podcast, or digital product.
All of this work happens on a Notion database, which makes it easy for me to link my notes together and make them the springboard for future content.
Create
“Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about anything at all.” — William Zinsser, On Writing Well
Again, I use Notion for this (dropping a free Content HQ template soon, so follow me on Gumroad to be the first to know!). Once done writing my atomic essays, I use Typeshare (affiliate link) to publish my work on Medium (on Twitter and LinkedIn too, if I choose).
Typeshare is the secret weapon of every prolific digital writer. It has great templates so you never have to face a blank page again, and you can get a free 30-day trial AND 50% off your first 3 months when you sign up here today.
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