Personal Knowledge Management 🌱

Two in-depth editions about note taking and organizing your knowledge.

One of the most frequent questions I get from readers is a meta question — that is, how I study, do research, and prepare for articles.

I have written other times about this, but not in full detail. So, I am now publishing a massive, two-part series on my whole note taking and organization process, including templates and workflows that you can start using right away

But before we dive into this, I want to answer two questions:

1. Why this should be useful to you

2. Why you should listen to me

These are the core questions I ask myself before I start writing any article, and, for this one, I feel I need to answer them explicitly.

The first thing I want to say is: I am not special.

Sure, I have a decent experience with startups and software teams, but I was never the CTO of a billion dollar corp, I never worked in big tech, nor raised money from a16z. Yet, Refactoring today is among the top 10 biggest engineering newsletters out there, with almost 60K subscribers, 1400 paid members, and 170+ original articles.

I am extremely proud of all these numbers — but in particular the 170 articles.

There is no way I could pull this off from my experience alone. Sure, I could probably coast the first 20-30 articles, but what made a real difference, over the distance, is process.

As of today, I am very happy with my organization and note taking. This is not only about Refactoring: I use the same systems for running my life in general, which is why I believe this can be useful to you. Whether you are a newsletter writer, an engineer, a manager, or whatever, the right workflow can supercharge your personal growth.

So here is what we will cover today

• 🎯 Notes == getting things done — a practical mindset about taking notes.

• 🪣 Capturing notes — how to optimize for quick saving.

• 🏷️ Organizing notes — projects, responsibilities, and topics.

• 🌱 Evergreen notes — a special kind of notes that forms the backbone of my writing.