Climbing out of the digital hoarding trap

Moving from collecting ideas to creating my own

When you realize you have gotten yourself into a hole, the first thing you should do is stop digging.

I fell into the trap that so many do with Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). I became an information hoarder.

It is so easy to do - an interesting article here, a thoughtful quote there. Over time you realize you have piled the ideas of others all around you so much that you forgot why you were collecting these things in the first place.

Several years ago I started using Obsidian and Readwise to pull together all of the things I found interesting in books and online articles. The plan was to help remember these ideas and to use it to fuel my thinking. Instead I accidentally built up an endless list of other people's ideas that was not inspiring anything new in me.

I kept thinking I would use them one day and didn't want to lose these ideas in the meantime. But that day never seemed to come.

I had built the cluttered attic that Sherlock Holmes warned of. All these ideas stacked on top of each other so that the best ones were buried under the ones that were kept 'just in case.'

How am I going to fix this problem?

I'm going to start with a few small actions - one for the output and one for the input:

1. The inspiration at the start was that I wanted to write and create. So I am restarting my writing with a new series called Marginalia. I will share a highlight from a book or article along with my thoughts and ideas on it. These will often be short posts to keep myself in the habit of writing and thinking.
2. When capturing a new highlight, I have to think about how it will be useful to me in the future. In Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte talks about having 12 questions that you find yourself coming back to over and over in your life. I will use my questions to make sure the things I am collecting resonate and aren't just adding clutter.

I look forward to getting back into the habit of creating. After all, an idea that I never share is worth as much as if I never had it at all.