0:04 Hey, what's up y'all? Hope you've been swell. Um, today I wanted to talk to you guys a bit about systems for personal knowledge management, note-taking, and reflection. My summer has been really chaotic. I think I've added several chapters into my lore book, but one of the things that I've managed to keep really consistent is my overarching 2026 goals. One of my biggest goals for 2026 was to become someone who was well read, someone who had better media literacy, someone who could consume pretty much anything and keep the important lessons out of it. Basically, a gentleman and a scholar. And this journey to becoming well read has kind of led me back to my previous rabbit hole of personal knowledge management, um, note-taking, the systems to organize your life. If
0:49 you go on my channel, I've had a ton of previous videos that cover this topic. pretty much always for a specific tool or system, whether that's Emacs or Notion or my stationary, and it's always because I've seen another influencer talk about something. The issue kind of starts there because whenever I try these frameworks, it feels like I'm trying to kind of mold it into the correct shape. It feels like I'm a fish out of water when I'm using them. So this summer I've been kind of doing my own thing and I think I've finally laid out that ground framework for the underlying philosophy behind how I take notes and reflect on them. There's a couple things that I find really important to mention. One of those is data hoarding. Um this is an
1:35 idea I stumbled on that I think is really really important to me. Um I'm kind of I I think I have a really hoarderlike personality. Like when I'm 60, I'll probably end up in a a room full of cats and fish and little knick-knacks that only matter to me. And this concept to me is like real life hoarding. It's the accumulation of dead notes. And in my example, what a dead note is is it's a note that gets created and it's never referenced again or read. And I think the reason for dead notes kind of comes as a byproduct of these systems. I think the name uh second brain is actually really really flawed. The human brain does not work like how the second brain does. The second brain
2:21 is a perfect archive that recollects uh things it remembers I guess. Um but human thinking that's not how it works. Human thinking is fluid. It has emotion. It has more context. it it affects memories that you make in the future, in the past. It's not something that's rigid like a note in our second brain. And I think a lot of knowledge management is just putting actual thinking off. You store the note and then you have to distill it later still. So it's simply a deferral of the problem. The first principle that I think helps counter this is changing how you orient yourself. Um right now I think something like the second braid orients itself uh to have notes as the
3:07 output. When you ingest something uh you then think about it and then you produce notes and the notes go into your second brain. Um which is not the right way to think about notes in my personal opinion. We should reorient our thinking to start with uh a framework or idea. Here I have philosophy um projects work. These are all possible things you can start with. And once you choose that kind of like bounding box and have a goal to work towards, then you can go to ingest, think about that and then produce notes that are then contributing to whatever goal it is you set. Um here the main focus is thinking uh what you're when you think about how whatever you just ingested is related to uh your
3:55 initial goal. I think this is the way it should be. Your note takingaking should be for the purpose of thinking of having human thought and distilling whatever it is you're ingesting. The notes, the written notes are simply a byproduct of your thinking. Um the product should never be the notes. And I think that's the issue with a lot of these personal management systems and second brains. They always consider the note as the product instead of just a byproduct of human thinking. So, my system is basically trying to optimize for actual human thought. Kimmy actually just dropped K3. This is actually a model that beats Claude's Fable 5. Um, and that got my attention pretty fast because one of my recent
4:42 problems has been kind of data aggregation in general. I'm kind of tired of hand sorting data and traditional methods of searching the web are starting to just get really tedious. They're becoming replaced by agents in my workflow. uh more specifically really good harnesses for these agents. I'm really happy that this video is sponsored by Kimmy. Uh their link is in the description, but if you don't know them, Kimmy is a leading AI lab. They're valued at over $20 billion and they make openweight AI models. Um I've worked with their stuff before in my software engineering internships. So, it's kind of insane that they're working with me. And my main uh use case for it is this knowledge aggregation through research papers. And with how far tools have come, um the modern approach to this is just using agents. Um I can use up to 300 agents in conjunction here. And
5:30 they'll browse the web, they'll query data, they'll write into my documents. Um they're able to autonomously work with these databases like archive or scholar, which is crazy. Past just collecting the data, it's also able to turn it into formatted documents or figures. And it has built-in pipelines for like peer peer reviewing it uh with itself or actual analysis. And it's helped me mitigate the steps of engineering that are kind of just getting tedious, I guess. Um and yeah, it's kind of just like having a team that works under me, which is great. Uh it runs the same K3 model that uh is going toe-to-toe with Fable 5 right now. So try it right now at Kimmy. Uh I'll have the link in the description. Like all modern tools, I don't think we should just write off second brains completely. I'm just saying that I don't
6:16 think it's the correct approach for if you really want to develop human thought. Like I think every modern tool has a ton of nuance. Like I let Kimmy sponsor this video because I think AI is a really really powerful tool. Using it for something like data aggregation where I don't want to sort manually through data and research papers to find what's actually important. um it serves as a really really powerful uh force multiplier and I think a similar nuance can be applied to second brains. I think second brains can be really useful especially if I'm working on something like school where there's set topics and uh there's things that I just need to memorize for exams and have down really useful to organize ideas for a context like that. However, when it comes to my
7:03 personal life and storing my ideas and emotions, I just feel like it it reaches a a failing point. It just it feels like I'm making something for a machine rather than for myself. I think the way forwards is more resultoriented frameworks like I was discussing before and to kind of figure out what I wanted to do uh with my personal note-taking system that I was developing. I took a step back and wanted to look at a lot of older uh ways of note-taking. And I think this is when I noticed uh a pretty large gap, right? like these older note-taking methods, they are all on pen and paper, right?
7:48 Like back in the Renaissance, they didn't have anything like um a computer or or text databases. So, all of these are on pen and paper. And what this causes is um it makes it less easy to kind of have this archiving. It makes note-taking be much more of a thought cultivating practice rather than a simple archiving. Um, I think Silicon Valley and Hustle culture has oversimplified what note-taking is. Um, in my opinion, I think a lot of these older note-taking methods worked even if they were a reference based system. like something like a commonplace book. A commonplace book was a method with let's say you split your journal into like a ton of
8:33 categories and then whenever you come across something you sort it into the categories and it makes it really easy to reference in the future. The reason that is not as bad as the as the second brain method. I think the reason that is not bad is because it's on paper. It's constrained. You have to write it in manually. You have to sort it to where it goes. I think that part still cultivates thinking. I think what doesn't cultivate thinking is something like copying the full original text into your second brain and then linking it somewhere and then hoping that in the future you'll retrieve that note and distill some use out of it. You can't store all of the original text inside of your commonplace book. It's pen and
9:20 paper and that was expensive back in the day. So yeah, it's still cultivating human thinking. Um, my favorite framework from the past is called Zubaldon. Uh, I think it stands for something along the lines of mixture in Italian. If anyone knows more specifically, feel free to let me know, but this is off the top of my head. And Zaldon, the journal is it's tracking the movement of the mind. Uh, as you go about your everyday life, stuff goes in, stuff goes out. And I think that's the most important part. I want my notetaking to be a reflection of my mind, a workplace for my mind rather than a second mind. So um yeah, I've
10:05 been structuring a lot of my routine I guess after the zebal don um albeit with some differences because I do have access to a lot more modern tools. So, I'm pretty certain that this is the section that most of you guys have been waiting for, but um I guess I'll show you the devices that I use for my notes. Uh these are both devices by Supernote. Uh that's their logo right there. This is the Nomad. Uh I think also called the A6X2. And this is the Manta. This is known as the A5X2. This is about an 11in screen. And I think this guy is an 8 in screen. But I usually show this this tablet a
10:51 lot in my videos. So, I'm mainly going to focus on this one. The workflows are pretty similar between the two. It's mainly just uh a matter of form factor. Use case is the same on both of these because they all sync together and they also sync onto my computer. Um, it's right there. I got this back in December actually, but I didn't really use it that actively and I've just started using it actively probably like this April and I really like this device. All Supernote devices, they have just a pretty simple sidebar. I have these two notes pinned because I use them very often. And besides that, I'd say my most used functions are Mihon and Moon Reader, Moon Plus Reader. So, Supernote has a built-in side loading feature. You
11:37 can pretty much put any APK you want. I guess it's pretty important to explain my selection of these devices. They aren't really that cheap or accessible, but um I really like to spend a lot on stuff that matters to me. And I'm pretty sure I'll be using this for a very long time into the future. It's basically a piece of digital paper. I mean, these guys, if you put them in the dark, uh you won't be able to read them. It's like it'll behave to light as any normal piece of paper would. You can get uh ink readers with a front light, but this one doesn't have one, so it's only usable as a normal piece of paper would. B I've read a lot of papers about how handwriting actually helps you remember things. I don't know how true it is, but
12:22 uh it's how it feels to me. I really enjoy handwriting, and it's the most friction frictionless medium that I actually have to journal with other than actually carrying around a piece of paper. I do have those Midori journals right there, but um this is much more convenient. And it's because even though this is all handwriting, I'm actually able to index all these notes like I would if it was just a normal text file. So yeah, let's kind of get into my organization. I mainly just use two notes. This is my days note and my consume note. The days note, it's this one. Um, I kind of just write a record of every day and kind of use it as a I guess spam spot. You can kind of see
13:09 uh a collection of random stuff that I've been doing. So, my consume note. My consume note is where all of my media goes into. I've been keeping track of everything I've been watching. Um, anything I've been making myself. Like, I have a couple ideas about my note-taking video actually here. This is my third time trying to film it. But yeah, it all goes into this note. It's kind of how the idea of Zaldon happens. Mismash of all my media and my thoughts, and it all goes into here. And what's really cool about these notes is that you can search for stuff inside of them, and it'll recognize it. So, let's say I'm curious about my obsession review. I'm able to immediately find it. And yeah, I rated this a 4.75 five out of
13:56 five. So, what's really cool is that you can pretty much just use this like a normal journal and then index it like how you would a a text database. So, that's what really makes this system so powerful. Um, right now I only have my days note and my consume note here, but for my entire workflow, basically I would have one of these notes for every prominent project in my life. Um, right now it's just this consuming. Um, I have another project note, but I can't show you it because it is a little super top secret, but you get the idea. I basically make a Zeldon note for every single project that I'm working with, and then I have one overarching journal that I can kind of link to these other notes in where I reference them in what
14:41 I did that day or something of the sort. So yeah, I think uh a lot of note-taking videos make systems super complicated, but I've been using this for the past two months without running into any issues and it's really handled all the projects I've thrown at it really well. So I'm really happy to share it with you guys. Finally, going into the consumption apps. If you guys have heard of Tatiomi, I think Mihon is a Tatiomi fork. Most recently, I've been reading Solanin again. I've read pretty much all of these. These are really my favorites. So, I I like to keep them all downloaded. Like, for example, I've read
15:28 Pom Pun at least five times, but I have every chapter downloaded. And if I wanted to reread it ever, I can just use this like uh like I would use a normal book. So it kind of helps me keep all of my favorite things all in one place. If you guys haven't read Pon Pun, I'd really recommend it. I love Ino Asano. This is one of his works. This is one of his works. This is one of his works. But also, uh I think this is the most lesser known. I don't know. I don't know what the least known manga on here is. Maybe Noise. This is a horror manga about a fig farmer that I really like. And this one is a romance manga. So maybe you guys will find something you like. Going into Moon Plus Reader. This is just a a tra traditional reading app. Um
16:16 this is some of the recent stuff that I've been reading or rereading. My friend Bronty showed me this book, Life for Sale by Yukio Mishima, and it's honestly one of my favorite finds of probably like the past few years. Um, I've really fallen in love with this book. Fun fact about it is that it was actually serialized in Playboy Japan, which is really cool. And Yukio Mishima is a super interesting character and his writing is really fun to read. This is kind of a It's a very easy book to read, so I' I'd look into it. It reminds me a lot of a lot of um I sold My Life for 10,000 yen if you know that light novel or or manga. So yeah, check it out. Oh, and if I'm just taking this out, I have a new special spot for this pen.
17:02 Actually really proud of it. Uh or not proud of it. I think it's just cool. I got a new pair of double knees recently and there's a little pocket on the side and I can can tuck it in and I feel real uh cool and blue collar even though I'm not. Like I said at the start of the video, I don't think uh the medium is really that important. You can do this on pretty much anything. You could do this on like two sheets of paper and just physical books, right? The library is free, but this is a really uh scaled up version of that, I guess, cuz I'm a bit of a bougie guy. I'm broke, but I like to have nice things for what I care about. So yeah, there you go. So yeah, I think that's about everything I had for this video. Um, this is about my fourth
17:49 time trying to put this together into something that's coherent. So hopefully it's something that provides value to you guys. This video isn't really meant to share a really deep customized note takingaking system. I kind of wanted to provide you with this baseline out of um how I feel that people should be taking notes so that you can use that knowledge to kind of adapt your own workflow. I think that note-taking and knowledge aggregation and all this is something that should be very customizable. It should be a workflow that fits the user. It shouldn't have to be the user that tries to fit themselves into the workflow. Hopefully, you can take this with its core principles and apply it to your everyday life. Um, as always, thank
18:35 you so much, guys, for supporting the channel. And let me know if you have any critiques. Uh, leave them in the comments or on my Discord. My DMs are open. And let me know what more videos you guys would like to see. Thanks. Good.
