Since beginning to use PARAZETTEL, my bespoke system for personal knowledge management, I’ve learned a lot about effective systems for taking notes and working, and how to develop them.
In this piece, I’m going to cover why it’s best to follow an evolution model in developing your own PKM system. This is better than changing things all at once. I call this evolution (it relates to biological evolution) and this piece is going to show how you can use the principles yourself.
This piece is going to help stop you from wasting time chasing the perfect system for productivity. It’ll help you instead become comfortable in a system that’s constantly becoming better and better for your personal use.
Let’s get started…
I’ve been studying some form of biology since I started sixth form three and a half years ago.
Through this time I’ve become closely acquainted with the idea of biological evolution — how species evolved from more primitive forms to what we see today.
It starts through a species coming under pressure from the environment.
They’re in constant competition with other individuals for food, shelter and mates. Those with preferred adaptations are better equipped to gain these than other individuals. This means they do so ahead of the poorly-suited, leaving them to die.
There’s not enough for everybody to be successful.
Through the nature of sexual reproduction, these successful genes are passed down to the offspring, who grow up to be like their parents.
Over thousands of years, these changes aggregate and species take on new, more optimised forms, more suited to an environment.
So how does this relate to building a PKM system?
Your system should exist for one thing — to help you create better work to improve your impact on the world.
The pressure to do this exists like the selection pressures that species experience in biological evolution.
This means your PKM system should evolve continuously to give you the optimal experience for creating work at all times. The best way to do this is not to chuck everything away when you don’t feel productive but to have faith in evolution and your system.
Using the principles of Minimal Note-Taking, pay attention to your system and devise one or two small changes at a time that you think might improve it. Put them in place and monitor the changes. If they do seem to work, keep them around. If they don’t, get rid of them.
This way, you aggregate small improvements over time, optimising your environment for work without increasing complexity. Your system evolves, getting better and better for your work, just like how species become more and more adapted to an environment.
We can look at evolution to explain why you shouldn’t renovate your system in one go. If you have quite a change in the type of work you have to create, perhaps the changes might be larger although the changes come at a stability cost.
You have to be careful.
The Irish elk evolved huge antlers quite quickly because at the time it was an adaptation that helped increase fitness (i.e. the ability to survive and breed). However, soon the environment changed, so these antlers became so unhelpful to the species that they became extinct.
This is what will happen if you’re too aggressive with changes to your PKM system. I’ve crashed and burned a lot of times switching apps out of procrastination or moving away from tried and tested file structures.
Adhere to the ideas of Minimal Note-Taking, adding little and often so you’re not overwhelmed, and your system will remain at its most productive and helpful.
I hope you learned something new in this piece. It’s one of my more abstract takes but it’s helped me stay grounded when it comes to making changes to my PKM system.
Thanks for reading!