Information Overload
Have you ever struggled to find information inside your knowledge base or note-taking app? When you did find what you needed, was it after a long time searching and wading through lots of results?
If so, this is likely because of information overload - when every human being has access to the sum of all human knowledge, finding any specific bit of it becomes a daunting task. (View Highlight)
The problem with these tools is that the more information we put in, the harder it becomes to get it back out. This is because existing tools lack the capability of organizing large amounts of information and why most of us rely on search to find what we need. (View Highlight)
Search is great when you are looking through the internet, know what you’re looking for and need a good result. For example, a google search for “the height of Mt Everest” will give you exactly what you need.
Search fails when you are looking through your knowledge base, might not know the exact query, and are looking for a highly specific result. For example, say you saved an article about government tax breaks. Searching those exact terms together might yield no results but searching for “government” or “tax” individually might flood your screen with non-relevant data. (View Highlight)
The most common way that people organize information is to group related concepts into topics. By grouping related information, you reduce the cognitive load required to keep track of individual items.
The psychological term for this is called chunking and it is something that the brain is naturally good at. Even unconsciously, we will create associations between things. This process is so powerful that we now have unconcious bias training to train ourselves not to do this when it results in discriminatory behavior. (View Highlight)
Creating a Better Tool
What if we could create a tool that made it possible to organize and find the information we cared about, no matter how much information we had? What could we do with such a tool?
Thinking about such a tool is something I’ve done for much of the last decade. More than think about it, I’ve built such a tool and used it to manage a personal knowledge base of +20k notes. This tool has become my second brain and I use it for just about everything that I do.
A year ago, I left my job at Amazon to build a consumer-ready version of this tool. It is called Dendron and will be entering into early access in early May and is now out in preview.
Note that using Dendron will not magically make information overload go away. You still have to do the hard work of organizing your information. But Dendron finally gives you a sane way of doing so.
This post is not a sales pitch and I’d be lying to say we got it all figured out. Rather, it is an invitation to come along on a journey to find answers to what I consider to be one of the biggest challenges of our age. How do we make sense of the world we live in?
If this message resonate, lets connect. You can join the conversation on dendron’s discord server or contact me directly at kevin@dendron.so.
It is said that life is about the journey - what greater journey is there than the one to make sense of it all?
Notes
Thanks to Luke Sernau and Ilana Lin for proofreading drafts of this
Special thanks to Ilana Lin for creating the beautiful illustrations in this post (View Highlight)