How I Manage What I Learn
Collecting isn't learning. A personal knowledge system — Capture, Curate, Crunch, Contribute — for turning what you read into what you do.
A personal knowledge system for anyone who has ever confused a full notebook with a full mind.
Updated 10th September 2026 – added Department of Interesting Things, studio membership, edit.
The answer to abundance is not velocity
There's a rather wonderful bookshop in Winchester called P&G Wells. It has been selling books since 1729, which means it was already old when the Georgians were young. (Let that sit for a minute.)
I was standing in it one rainy afternoon, trying to get my camera gimbal to work — a sentence that contains rather more technology than was available when the shop opened — when I had an intellectual thought, which doesn't happen often.
There were more books in that one small shop than I could read in the rest of my life. Not all the books in the world. Not all the books on the internet. Not even all the books in Winchester. Just the ones in this shop — floor to ceiling, shelf after shelf, thousands of small rectangles full of other people's ideas.
The modern instinct, faced with that abundance, is simply to read faster. Summaries, speed-reading apps, the twelve-minute version, the hundred titles you "simply must read" before the year is out.
We have somehow decided that the answer to abundance is velocity.
This piece makes the opposite case. It's about managing what you learn – building a simple system for turning what you take in into something you can actually do.
Because for years I mistook the collecting of information, at speed, for learning. I had a beautiful, well-catalogued library of other people's thinking and startlingly little to show for it in the one place that counts: my own behaviour.
Which brings me to the good news, and it really is good news. A system that helps you learn, is remarkably straight forward, personal and helpful – if you keep the purpose – knowing how to do something better – at its heart.
Collecting is not learning
We are the first people in history for whom gathering information costs essentially nothing. A tap keeps the article. A click buys the course. A tired scroll adds a book to the pile and a package to tomorrow's doorstep. The podcast joins the queue. Perhaps we even read the thing.
It's a small miracle, and it has become a small trap – because the gathering started to feel like achievement, like productivity, like learning itself. Saving a piece of information feels a great deal like reading and understanding it. Owning a book feels rather like having read it. Reading it feels like we know all about the subject.
And so, without noticing, we've slid from having access to information to believing we've acquired knowledge. Those are not the same thing.
Buying a book isn't reading it. Reading it isn't understanding it. Understanding it isn't knowing how to do it. And knowing how to do it isn't the same as being any good at it.
There's a name for what this produces, and you'll recognise it instantly. Fluency without competence: the ability to speak with real confidence about a thing you cannot actually do.
I once worked with a man who wanted to give better talks. He had read, by his own count, most of the books on the subject – including Zero to Keynote – and kept an immaculate notebook of what they said. He could describe the anatomy of a fine speech in loving detail: the opening, the turn, the character arc, the pause before the point.
He had also, in his entire career, given exactly one talk – and by other people's account, it wasn't much good. He knew a great deal about speaking and remained, in the way that matters, a man who could not really speak from a stage. I say this with enormous affection, because we are all, in some corner of our lives, exactly that man.
Here's a small and rather perverse law I've come to believe: the easier a tool makes it to keep and organise something, the less likely you are to learn it. The note you struggled to write is the one you remember. The book you argued with in the margins is the one that changed you. Convenience, so welcome nearly everywhere else in life, turns out to be corrosive to understanding.
Which is why I'd carve this line into the start-up screen of every note-taking app in existence, if they'd let me: knowledge is information in action. Anything else, however beautifully filed, is storage. A full notebook is not a full mind, and a tidy archive is not a changed mind either.
What a personal knowledge system is really for
A personal knowledge management system – PKMS, since the internet insists on an acronym – sounds like something you'd need a degree to use. It isn't.
It's a few containers to hold information, a few rules and habits for processing this information, and a single purpose. The purpose is the point of it: a different you – better judgement, a sharper decision, a skill you didn't have last month, improved behaviours.
It helps to know there are two ways to learn a thing, and that they aren't equal.
The first is to gather information about it – read, watch, take the course – information acquisition. The second is to do the thing and let the doing teach you – task acquisition.
You may become a considerable authority on the drums and remain, to the disappointment of everyone in the jazz café that night, quite unable to play them. The whole art is in the marriage of the two: good information, chosen with care, put deliberately into action to create knowledge and behaviours.
Which raises the one question a knowledge system has to answer. You have three things to spend on learning, and not one of them is ever refunded: your time, your energy, your attention. So what is worth them?
That sounds rather stern. It's really a wonderful invitation. Because, choosing what to learn is one of the pleasures of a thinking life.
Systems that promise to help you keep everything have misunderstood the assignment and point. Capturing, collecting and storing information is not the hard part. Putting what you study into action is.
So resist the urge to adopt someone else's system wholesale – mine included. To copy another person's setup down to the last folder is to borrow their way of seeing instead of building your own, and it tends to fit about as well as a coat borrowed from a four-year-old.
Take what suits your mind, your habits and your energy. Leave the rest.
Capture, Curate, Crunch, Contribute
Here is the structure and shape I have used, in one form or another, for most of my working life.
I gave the stages names beginning with C – partly because it is honest, and partly because I was going through a rather self-indulgent phase and naming things with a C felt, at the time, like an affiliation to my company name, Cultivated.
Capture. Curate. Crunch. Contribute.
They are not tidy steps, and I would ask you not to picture a flowchart or staged gate approach as such. They behave more like waves – they come and go, overlap, blur into one another, and on a good day you are doing three at once without noticing. But naming them helps you see where your energy is actually going, which is usually not where you think.
Capture is catching a thing before it escapes – a line, a phrase overheard on a train, a book covered in highlighter fluid, a video that was interesting, a research paper that you wish to study.
The rule worth keeping here is a balance: it should cost almost nothing to put something in. The reward is on the other side – being able to find it again. It is also the stage every one of us overdoes, because it feels like progress, productivity and learning, and asks nothing of us in return. Capture is the easy, flattering part. Be a little suspicious of how good it feels.
Curate is the weekly reckoning with what you caught, and it comes down to three very boring but important questions asked of each thing you capture: do I still want it, where should it live, and what happens to it next?
Most of what you caught will not survive these questions and that is precisely the point. Throwing things out is not waste; it is clarity about where you really want to spend those finite resources of time, energy and attention. A curated shelf is worth more than a full warehouse, because you can see what is on it.
Crunch is the heart of the whole business, and the stage nobody puts on a thumbnail on Instagram, because it looks an awful lot like work. It is work. It is the turning of that captured information into action, and it is finished only when it has done the one thing that counts – changed what you do and who you are.
If a thing you claim to "know" has not altered how you behave, you have stored it. You have not yet learned it. This is the least glamorous sentence in the essay and by some distance the most important.
Contribute is where the loop closes and, subtly, where it earns its keep. You hand what you have learned back into the world – a conversation, a note to a colleague, a talk, or simply a better way of showing up on a Tuesday at work – and in doing so you discover, occasionally to your alarm, exactly how well you understood it.
Explaining or showing a thing is the fastest way to find the edges of your understanding and ability. There is nowhere to hide in a sentence you have to say out loud, or a new behaviour you are showing to others.
That is the system entire. Everything else – the particular notebooks, the software, the rhythm of a working week – is only the how, and the how is a longer story I keep for elsewhere. (The Department of Interesting Things No. 006 - below, for studio members).
Why paper still wins the argument
People want this to be a war, with sides. Notebooks against apps; paper the honest philosopher, the screen the villain. It is not that, and I would rather be truthful than pure. Which is tricky given stationery and analogue tools play a large part of my life.
The tool, however, is NOT the system. Believing the right app will fix your learning is like believing the right pen will write that best selling novel; the pen is delighted to be asked and cannot help you in the slightest.
But paper does one thing a screen cannot, and it happens to be the very thing learning needs most. When you write by hand you cannot copy and paste. You have to drag the idea across the page and through your own head and out again in your own words – and that is the moment it stops being someone else's information and becomes, at last, yours. The friction you are tempted to remove is the part that was providing the reward.
None of which is nostalgia.
I am not asking you to weave your own baskets or take up being a court Jester. Paper earns its place on the merits: it does not interrupt you, it will not let you hoard, and it insists you understand a thing before you can keep it.
So I have settled somewhere unfashionable and thoroughly comfortable – analogue is where the thinking happens; digital is where the archive lives. Paper for the effortful work of understanding and learning; the screen for storing it and finding it again at an airport lounge three months later.
Use both, cheerfully, and change your allegiance the day something better arrives.
How to begin
If all this sounds like a great deal, begin really small – one turn of the loop, and no more.
One notebook, into which goes everything worth a second thought. A carved out fifteen minutes at the week's end, keeping only what has earned its place. A single idea taken out of the notebook and put to work this week, with a line written by hand about what it changed in you. And then one person told or taught or shown, what you found.
That is the entire system at its smallest, and it will teach you more about your own mind than any amount of reading about other people's. You will discover, almost immediately, that you likely capture like a magpie and maybe don't crunch as much as you'd like. Most of us do. Then you go round again.
Creative Soul Projects
A short film on the original system, on Creative Soul Projects. Same person, same observation — just followed on camera instead of on the page.
Note: When this video was created, I was using a different set of capture tools and notebooks. It's still the same 4 C system. That's the thing with a PKMS - it should change as you do. For the most recent tools and approach, see the Department of Interesting Things (below).
A few questions people ask
What is a personal knowledge management system?
A few containers to keep what you notice, a few rules and habits for moving things through them, and a purpose: turning information into action you can actually use.
Analogue or digital – which is better?
Both, for different work. Paper is where the thinking happens, because writing by hand makes you put an idea in your own words. Digital is where the archive lives, because it stores and finds things no notebook ever could. The system stays the same; the tools are yours to choose and to change.
How is this different from a "second brain" or a Zettelkasten?
Most of those are, at heart, magnificent storage – brilliant at holding and connecting what you collect. This one is built to end somewhere else entirely: in changed behaviour. Keep as much as you like, but the only scoreboard here is what you can now do that you could not do before.
A last word
I will end where I always seem to. The more I learn, the more clearly I see how much I never will – and I have made my peace with it, because it is true and there is nothing I can do about that. We are, all of us and permanently, in draft form.
A personal knowledge system is not really about knowledge.
It is about care – for your own thinking, for your growth, and for being a little more use to the people who have the good fortune to share their lives with you. It is also care for those finite human resources – time, energy and attention – ensuring you spend those learning things that really matter.
You will never read every book in the shop. You aren't meant to. Chew a few of them properly, and grow, slowly, into the person you are trying to become.
Go and fill a notebook.
That is the idea.
But if you would like to see exactly how I run it in practice – the actual notebooks, the weekly rhythm down to the Friday reckoning, the software that does the dull but important parts, a worked example of a single book becoming six months of changed behaviour, and a printable pack for building your own version – I have gathered all of it in one place.
It is this month's Department of Interesting Things, and it is included with Studio Membership.
Pages: 45
Word Count: 10,020
Some images from The Department of Interesting Things, No. 006 - The Notebook.
The Kit
And for those of us who love the stationery and tooling aspect of this, here are the tools of the trade that I use.
The kit · what I actually use
The tools of the trade
Because the stationery-minded among us always want to know. None of it is the system — it's just what fits my hands. A quick word of warning: yours should fit yours.
| Item | What it's for | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Notebooks | ||
| Dingbats Reporterpocket, reporter-styleCapture | Everyday capture, out in the world — pocket, bag, train, plane. | The net I reach for the second something lands. Low friction is the whole point. |
| "Rough Capture" notebookAmazon A5 hardback, unbranded — or an A5 MoleskineCapture | Live, messy notes while reading, watching or listening. | Cheap on purpose — I burn through them. Neatness is not the job. |
| The Learning Notebookcurrently a Hobbycraft A5 sketchpad, blankCrunch | The master source: information synthesised into my own words. | Past lives: a Ted Baker A5 (a gift) and the lovely Mark+Fold Everyday. |
| A3 sketchpadHobbycraftCrunch | Big, visual, single-sheet topics — connected ideas seen at a glance. | For when a thing is better drawn than listed. |
| The book itselfmargins, underlines, turned-down cornersCapture | Capturing straight onto the page as I read. | The capture tool most people forget they already own. |
| Writing | ||
| Penac Protti 0.5mechanical pencilCapture | Rough capture — fast, forgiving, erasable. | A thing of beauty. (Penac gifted these through Stationery Freaks — see below.) |
| A decent pen, ruler, highlightersnothing preciousAll stages | The rest of the desk. | Whatever glides and feels good. That's the entire spec. |
| Digital | ||
| Zotero+ browser plug-inCurate | The archive: citations, tags, and collections (Inbox → !To Process). | Technically a citation library. Secretly the engine room of the whole thing. |
| Apple Noteson whatever's to handCapture | Quick catch when there's no notebook nearby; seeds for articles. | The fallback net, not the home. |
| KindleoccasionalCapture | The odd digital read. | Used less these days — I'd rather mark up a paper book. |
Where this sits in the Atlas
Orientation·Idea to Value·Communication·Creativity & Climate·Learning
The following letter – The Department of Interesting Things, No. 006 - The Notebook – is available from this point forward for Studio Members.
Included below are also 4 printable PDFs, designed to help you get started building your own Personal Knowledge Management System.
Previous editions of The Department of Interesting Things, including two free editions, are on the main Studio page.
Enjoy.
