Personal Knowledge Management for the Perpetually Curious

The Problem with Learning Everything (And Remembering Little)

It was probably my second year of teaching myself how to program when I realized I had a problem.

My list of lessons, articles, and tutorials I wanted to check out? Miles long.

The list of ones I’d finished? A sad little stump.

What's worse, half the time I was Googling things I knew I had already learned. I'd follow a tutorial, finish the project, and six months later have no memory of the how or the why. It was like trying to build a house with tools I kept losing.

What I needed was a system. A second brain. Somewhere to offload all the pieces I was learning: snippets of code, key concepts, little breakthroughs, and resources. So I could stop relearning and start building on what I knew.

So, I did what any self-respecting learner does: I went down the rabbit hole.

The PKM Spiral

I started researching how other people manage their knowledge. Zettelkasten. PARA. Second brains. Tags. Backlinks. Obsidian vs. Notion vs. pen and paper. Every blog post I read convinced me to start over. I spent way more time optimizing the system than using it. Losing time importing notes into one app after another.

Here’s what I wish I’d realized sooner:

A personal knowledge management system is, first and foremost, personal.

Someone else’s perfect setup might feel like a straightjacket for you. You don’t need the “best” tool, you need a starting point that feels natural and lets you grow into it.

Start Where You Are

Eventually, I stopped chasing the perfect system and just started writing things down: code snippets, summaries, questions I still had, notes from blog posts.

A few weeks in, I noticed patterns in how I thought. I started grouping notes, linking them, tagging them. A system started to emerge, not because I planned it, but because I used it.

So if you’re where I was, learning a ton but remembering too little, here’s my advice:

Start small. Write things down. Let your system evolve as you go.

Your second brain doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to work for you.

Try This

• What’s something you had to Google twice this month? Capture it.
• What project are you proud of? Write a “post-mortem” about what you learned.
• What questions do you keep asking? Make a list. Add to it.
• Have a list of bookmarks you revisit multiple times spread across devices? Consolidate in a note.

The best knowledge systems don’t start with tools, they start with experimentation and curiosity. They evolve over time.