Start With a Daily Note

💎 Begin keeping a daily note to harness the power of a personal knowledge management system.

🤔 Why it Matters:

People get overwhelmed at the idea of organizing EVERYTHING. Starting with a daily note lets' you begin by organizing a few things, and build the habit of capturing, then organizing, and later, referencing, and expressing your ideas. This is the CORE habit to building an effective Where not What PKM system.

🎥 Big Picture:

Sometimes it is hard to know where to start a big project, and sorting through a bunch of old stuff can be daunting. Why? Because anything can be a priority depending upon how you look at it.

• Start small, by capturing daily note.
• Each day a clean new note sheet pops up in your system, ready to hold ideas, links, recipes & clippings.
• Name the note by the date.
• Treat it like your inbox of ideas.

It gives you a head start on building an effective PKM. Why? Because this first step associates your ideas with a priority system that is objectively unchangeable - time.

The human mind is an association engine. The simplest associations we can make is to connect ideas with when we came across them. The daily note starts a habit, and immediately connects an idea to a moment in time!

🛠️ How To:

To make effective use of the daily note, you can use a system like Obsidian which will generate a Daily Note for you automatically. I recommend setting up a template, so you can have a check list for your morning (and evening) routines. But this is not necessary. You don't even have to use Obsidian. You can make a daily note in what ever note app you use by naming it today's date. I recommend using a consistent format, and naming it in a way that it will sort latest to most recent. I name my daily notes: YYYY-MM-DD. For example, today, the day I am writing this blog post my note is: 2023-11-25.

My Daily note template provides sections for my morning routine, tasks, and notes. I even have a spot to capture new quotes.

💬 show me your HABITS, I'll show you your FUTURE. - Mark Batterson

🗝️ Key Idea:

The fastest easiest way to start a personal knowledge management system is to begin keeping a daily note.

🔗 Go Deeper:

📺 https://youtu.be/eKiWjWxOO6k?si=dMXUNPohc_oqtT5D