---
aliases: ["Knowledge Management Is Not Filing"]
Is A: Evergreen
Topics: ["[[topic-productivity-systems]]", "[[topic-reading-books]]"]
Status: Published
---
# Knowledge Management Is Not Filing
The dominant metaphor for personal knowledge management is the filing cabinet: put things in labeled folders, retrieve when needed. This metaphor is mostly wrong.

Knowledge becomes useful through connection, not storage. An idea you've filed carefully but never connected to your other ideas is almost as useless as an idea you forgot.

The goal of a note-taking system should be to maximize the probability of unexpected connections — serendipitous collisions between ideas from different domains. This is why spatial proximity (notes near related notes) and links matter more than tags or folders.

I spent years building elaborate folder hierarchies in Evernote and Notion before realizing that I almost never retrieved notes through the folder structure. The notes I actually used were the ones I stumbled across while working on something adjacent, or the ones that were linked from a note I was already reading. The filing metaphor assumes you know what you need before you need it. In practice, the most valuable moments in a knowledge system are the ones where you discover a connection you did not know existed — where a note about newsletter subject lines surfaces next to a note about cognitive load and you suddenly see the relationship between attention management and email engagement.

This insight reshaped how I think about note-taking tools and led directly to building Laputa. The system should optimize for collision, not retrieval. This means flat structures with rich linking, evergreen notes that evolve over time rather than static captures, and an interface that makes it easy to see what is adjacent to what you are currently thinking about. The four-panel layout exists because context matters — seeing your current note alongside related notes, topics, and people creates the conditions for unexpected connections that a single-document view cannot.

The practical implication is that the "writing" part of note-taking is more important than the "storing" part. When I process a book or an article, the act of writing a note in my own words — connecting the new idea to ideas I already hold — is where the value is created. The note itself is almost a byproduct. If I just highlight passages and file them, I have created the illusion of knowledge capture without the reality of knowledge integration.

## Key insight
Knowledge management systems should be optimized for connection density, not storage efficiency. The most productive knowledge workers are not the ones with the most notes — they are the ones whose notes are most densely connected to each other. Every link between notes is a potential path for future insight. The filing cabinet metaphor fails because it treats knowledge as static objects to be retrieved. The better metaphor is a garden: ideas grow, connect, and produce unexpected fruit when tended over time.

## Related
- [[the-compound-effect-in-knowledge-work]] — Connected knowledge compounds in value as the network of links grows
- [[reading-more-by-reading-better]] — Writing after reading is how knowledge integration happens
- [[procedure-evergreen-note-writing]] — The practical procedure for writing notes that connect rather than just store
- [[on-consistency-in-creative-work]] — Consistent note-taking practice is what builds the connection density over time
- [[topic-productivity-systems]] — Broader thinking on productivity and systems
