Knowledge codification is the act of representing and arranging your knowledge in a systemic form, such as adhering to specific formatting (like tags or headers) or creating collections of notes (like folders or indexes). This is done to make the exploitation of knowledge easier
Knowledge exploitation is the act of leveraging your knowledge to further your goals. This of course involves knowledge retrieval: When you have a question, how easy is it to find an answer? But it also involves knowledge emergence: How easily can entirely new knowledge be created from within your existing system? The best knowledge management systems will make this easy.
If you’re looking for one lesson to take from this essay, let it be this: Your perfect knowledge management system is discovered, not planned. When starting out, prioritize simplicity and flexibility at all costs. Only formalize a system when it’s absolutely necessary. In other words, pavement follows dirt.
I like to use tags as metadata. My tags denote either the type of note or the status of a note. I could use notes to do this, but I appreciate having an entirely separate level of information for these high-level categories. It makes scripting and searching easier.
Source notes are for taking notes on primary sources of information, such as books, podcasts, meetings, conferences, videos, etc. My most common type of source note by far is meetings (#meeting).
Here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to get super excited and take a bunch of notes. You’re going to set some basic formatting ground rules to stay organized. And one day you’re going to realize that something’s just not working well. Maybe your note titles are too vague. Maybe your tagging system is too confusing. Maybe your formatting is too cumbersome. You’ll want to make a change to your system.