December 2025
October 2025
- Oct 23, 2025Work SkillsComparative Overview of Note-Taking SystemsMueller and Oppenheimer's 2014 study is cited everywhere as proof that longhand beats laptops. A 2019 replication and extension by Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson found the conceptual-question advantage did not reliably hold. The useful question is not which medium wins but whether yours forces synthesis instead of transcription. This page compares Zettelkasten, PARA, Cornell, Johnny Decimal and daily notes on that basis.
- Oct 22, 2025Work SkillsTop Tools for Knowledge Work and Their UsesResearch by Qatalog and Cornell's Ellis Idea Lab found knowledge workers spend roughly an hour a day just looking for information scattered across their tools. Five distinct categories cover what anyone actually needs: capturing knowledge, tracking commitments, communicating, managing time, and producing output. Treating them as distinct prevents stacking redundant tools in one category while leaving another unaddressed.
- Oct 21, 2025Work SkillsOverview of Documentation Tools: Accessing KnowledgeIBM introduced the 704 in 1954 with 700 pages of documentation engineers had to absorb, and the underlying problem has not changed in seven decades: how to capture what experts know without the expert standing over your shoulder. Stripe hired technical writers in 2015 and by 2020 Stripe-quality docs was industry shorthand, a deliberate competitive advantage. Documentation splits into four kinds, reference, conceptual, procedural and institutional knowledge.
- Oct 16, 2025Work SkillsExploring Documentation Debt: Causes and ConsequencesAghajani and colleagues examined 878 open-source repositories for ICSE 2019 and found documentation issues reported in three quarters of actively maintained projects, with outdated information the most frequent complaint. Their sharper finding was about timing: debt accumulated fastest during maintenance, not initial development, when feature velocity was high and doc updates got deprioritized. The page covers docs-as-code, the five debt types, and when to declare bankruptcy.
- Oct 16, 2025Work SkillsOverview of Technical Documentation Types and UsesStripe launched in 2011 with API documentation developers called the best they had used, and grew faster than rivals in a crowded payments market because founders could integrate in an afternoon instead of spending weeks. Daniele Procida's Diátaxis framework splits documentation by what the reader needs: tutorials for learning, how-to guides for tasks, reference for lookup, explanation for understanding. Why mixing the four creates confusion.
- Oct 15, 2025Work SkillsDocumentation Systems ExplainedA 2012 McKinsey Global Institute estimate put the share of the workweek knowledge workers spend searching for and gathering information at 19 percent. GitLab's answer was a public handbook that grew past 2,000 pages while the company scaled from 100 to more than 1,500 employees. This guide covers the four pillars of storage, structure, process and discovery, organizing by user task rather than org chart, the Divio four-type model, and why documentation decays.
- Oct 14, 2025Work SkillsKnowledge Writing: Capturing and Sharing ExpertiseNonaka and Takeuchi named the organizational version of the failure in 1995, calling it externalization without internalization, where firms build wikis and procedures that nobody absorbs because reading a document is not the same as forming the mental model behind it. Klein's cognitive task analysis works around this by observing experts deciding and asking them to explain each call as they make it, which captures far more than asking them to write up what they know.
August 2025
- Aug 22, 2025IdeasEffective Solutions for Information OverloadHeavy media multitaskers were expected to have sharper filters. Ophir, Nass and Wagner's 2009 PNAS study found the opposite: they scored worse than light multitaskers on sustained attention, working memory and task switching. Mark, Gudith and Klocke tracked 36 workers interrupted every 3 minutes and 5 seconds, needing an average of 23 minutes to recover. This page sets out source curation, just-in-time reading and batching against that evidence.
- Aug 14, 2025IdeasKnowledge Management Project IdeasHow to build a system that supports work rather than replacing it. The central paradox is that enthusiasts tend to spend more time configuring tools, refining taxonomies and comparing methodologies than doing the intellectual work the system exists to support. The diagnostic move is to start from a concrete retrieval or connection problem, because a storage fix applied to a retrieval problem makes things worse.
July 2025
- Jul 29, 2025IdeasBest Practices for Effective Documentation SystemsDocumentation fails from lack of system, not lack of writing: fragmented wikis, no designated owner, and structures built for writers rather than readers. Stale docs erode trust more than no docs at all, and knowledge reverts to oral tradition that leaves when people do. The four documentation types serving distinct purposes, why each decays, and the ownership, maintenance cycles and workflow integration that keep documentation trustworthy enough to actually use.
- Jul 27, 2025IdeasPersonal Knowledge System DesignNiklas Luhmann kept a slip box from 1951 until his death in 1998, roughly 90,000 linked index cards, and published 70 books and nearly 400 articles from it. He described it not as a memory aid but as a thinking partner. The four paradigms, hierarchical folders, project-based PARA, networked Zettelkasten, and daily notes, each trade differently between setup cost and emergent connection, and networked notes only pay off once the network is dense enough.
June 2025
- Jun 20, 2025ExplainersHistory of Organizational LearningSix decades traced from the behavioral theory of the firm and cybernetic feedback through Argyris and Schon's single-loop and double-loop distinction, Senge's five disciplines and the SECI model. Edmondson's 1999 hospital study found teams reporting more medication errors performed better, because safer teams surfaced the errors every team made. Argote and Epple measured learning rates varying tenfold across organizations doing identical work.
- Jun 4, 2025ExplainersPutting Information Theory to WorkWhat Shannon built and how it applies past engineering. His 1948 paper in the Bell System Technical Journal introduced entropy as the measure of information and uncertainty, and achieved its generality by deliberately stripping away the meaning of messages to focus on statistical structure, so a message about a cancer cure and a random string of characters can carry the same information. Information is the reduction of uncertainty.
May 2025
September 2024
October 2023
August 2022
- Aug 22, 2022ConceptsTacit Knowledge: Understanding Unwritten ExpertisePairing it with structured mentoring and overlap periods retained 60 to 80 percent instead. NASA learned the same lesson the hard way, since the Saturn V drawings survived while the judgment of the engineers who built it did not. Polanyi's point explains the mechanism: a pianist who shifts focal attention onto their own finger movements plays worse, because this knowledge works only while it stays below conscious attention.
- Aug 3, 2022Work SkillsUnderstanding Knowledge Management in OrganizationsThe Society for Human Resource Management found that gap in 2019, and Deloitte put 42% of institutional knowledge in employees' heads rather than in any documented form. Nonaka's SECI model explains why documentation cannot close it, since the tacit-to-tacit transfer that happens by working alongside someone does not survive being written down. Leonard-Barton named the opposite failure, core rigidities, where a process works but nobody understands it well enough to change it.
July 2022
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