Over the years, I have made an effort to share the knowledge I have obtained with the community; however, it has come to my attention that my ability to capture knowledge for myself is limited by the fear of posting low-quality work publicly. Writing your first draft of anything with the thought in mind that it might see the light of day is intimidating.
It also means I cannot copy/paste from existing resources for fear of plagiarizing their work or leave facts unverified for the sake of brevity. As a result, the process I had outlined initially which included discrete phases for capture, processing, and retention has collapsed into a monolithic workflow. The only way to ensure success is to free myself from the notion that all of my notes should be working toward a state where they can be posted publicly.
From now on, my notes will not be publicly available. I will share knowledge I have obtained through this blog and any notes included in projects on my GitHub. This transition should allow me to capture knowledge more effectively. With more effective knowledge capture, the process of distilling my notes into something useful should also get easier.
The core of my workflow will remain unchanged. This is mostly an attitude shift (one that I have attempted a few times now). Note-taking should be as frictionless as possible. This means the systems which inform your note-taking should be kept intentionally minimal. There is no point attempting to adhere to any kind of system that will inevitably break down over time or generate needless complexity.
Bearing this in mind, I intend to throw all of my notes into an inbox where they will live until they are processed into more complete notes. At that point, they will be moved to an archive. This should keep things that need attention sufficiently visible and allow me to clear out the backlog of notes that have outlived their usefulness.
The difficult part is going to be organizing my completed notes. I might leave them unorganized for a while to see if that actually impacts my workflow at all. I’d be willing to bet it won’t. For now, I’ll stick to a rough system of directories based on the overarching subject. The important bit is that I’m tagging all of them with a few relevant categories. This allows me to do keyword searches within the metadata of the files to get a much clearer picture of the subject I’m researching.