A quick recap…

Before diving into the third pillar, let's revisit the five pillars:

• Purpose - Your identity, vision, and core values that guide everything else
• Preparation - Setting up the right conditions to ground your activities
• Planting - Capturing information effectively
• Propagation - Growing your knowledge and taking action where required
• Probing - Reflecting and course-correcting

With your purpose as your North Star and your system prepared with thoughtful structure, we arrive at what many consider the most familiar aspect of personal knowledge management: actually capturing information.

Planting: The art of capturing without knowing what you'll need

Planting is deceptively simple—it's the act of entering information into your database. Yet this simplicity masks a fundamental challenge: you need to capture information in order to work with it, but you don't always know what you'll need.

This uncertainty is precisely why you need approaches that are lightweight enough to capture things "just in case" while still being structured enough to help you resurface materials later. The goal isn't perfect organization—it's creating a system that works whether you're deliberately building a reference library or quickly jotting down a fleeting thought.

This pillar transforms random information consumption into a flexible knowledge repository. It's where your prepared structure meets the unpredictable reality of daily information flow, creating the raw material for future insights and actions.

Often, information is stored "just in case." We think we may need something later, but we're not sure exactly what for or when that need will arise. In an analog world, this is onerous and messy, but digital tools make it manageable and searchable.

Your knowledge garden as a digital commonplace book

Your knowledge garden can also be thought of as a digital commonplace book. A commonplace book is a central resource for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations and information you come across during your life and learning pursuits. The purpose is to record and organize these gems for later use—in your work, writing, speaking, or whatever you do.

It might sound like a fancy term to get you to buy a Moleskine notebook, but this isn't a new concept. Isaac Newton called his version a "waste book." Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, and Friedrich Nietzsche all kept them. Stoic philosophers Seneca and Marcus Aurelius encouraged keeping journals of thoughts and meditations. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were taught this practice at Harvard.

Leonardo da Vinci described his notebook exactly as a commonplace book should function: "A collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they treat."

Why does this matter for you? Think about it—you likely write and speak for a living too, whether research papers, memos, emails, or presentations. You speak in meetings, brainstorming sessions, conversations with colleagues. Having a resource of snippets you can build from is as simple a life hack as there ever was. You're not starting from a blank slate, but from a digital memory bank you've built for yourself. It's actually the original "building a second brain", before Tiago Forte popularized the concept with his course and book.

Capturing thoughts, ideas, and reminders on the go while building up a wiki of personal reference materials, meeting notes, and writing outlines—in addition to your reading highlights—creates a resource that will serve you for a lifetime. These form the seeds from which long-term insights will emerge.

What information should you plant in your commonplace book?

Your commonplace book needs to handle two fundamentally different types of information: structured information that you organize deliberately, and unstructured information that you capture in the moment. Both are essential, and your system needs to accommodate each without forcing everything into the same rigid format.

Here are four types worth cultivating:

1. Reference materials (Structured)

A repository for documentation or useful snippets—essentially outsourcing your memory to your system. This includes code snippets, images, website links, how-to guides, and technical documentation you'll need to reference later. These benefit from consistent organization and metadata.

Examples: Migration guides, technical notes on tools you use, font resources, or business process documentation.

2. Source-based writing (Structured)

This is how you take notes on external content—books, articles, podcasts, videos. Organizing sources under standard metadata templates provides multiple data points for triangulating specific references when you need them.

Examples: Notes on educational content, article repositories, or curated collections of resources on specific topics.

3. Free-form thinking and writing (Unstructured)

Your journal, stream of consciousness, and personal reflections. This captures your raw thinking—unpolished but authentic to your current state of mind. Personal journal entries often mix daily reflections, emotions, observations, and future plans. These don't need rigid structure; they need easy capture.

Examples: Daily journal entries, emotional processing, random observations, or fleeting thoughts.

4. Project-based thinking and writing (Mixed)

Professional workflows and outcome-oriented work. This includes meeting notes, decision tracking, and draft writing. All your initial writing—important emails, scripts, work ideas—can happen in your commonplace book before being refined elsewhere. Some elements benefit from templates (meeting notes), while others need flexibility (brainstorming).

Here it's also worthwhile to differentiate between action-oriented workflows (anything that you need to track, e.g. project management and task management, or even decision tracking) and knowledge management, e.g. reference materials and documentation for projects. These can all be in one system, or you can separate them and add links where necessary.

Examples: Meeting notes, writing dashboards, project briefs, or decision logs.

Practical planting strategies

Reduce friction through templates: Structure accelerates capture. Having templates for common information types—meeting notes, article summaries, project updates—reduces the mental overhead of deciding how to format information.

Develop capture heuristics: Not everything deserves permanent storage. A simple test: "Can I imagine a reasonable context where I'd need this information again?" If not, it might not be worth capturing.

Use contextual tagging: Tags should serve retrieval, not perfection. Focus on how you'll want to find this information later rather than creating comprehensive taxonomies. Think about the topics that you might want to resurface this around, and add links to that.

Embrace the daily journal: When in doubt, capture information in a daily journal format. It provides natural chronological structure and can always be organized later if patterns emerge.

Words of caution

Knowing where to put things

Here's where most knowledge management approaches fall short: they fragment your thinking across multiple tools without any clear system for how things connect. The more you default to adding information into one primary system as your single source of truth, the more rewards you'll reap. However, your system might comprise multiple tools. But developing a framework of what goes where is super helpful.

This doesn't mean cramming everything into one tool regardless of fit—you might use different tools for action management versus knowledge management. The key is knowing where everything lives and having clear systems for how different tools connect. When you consistently return to the same primary place for captured information, you start to see patterns, connections, and themes that would remain invisible across scattered, unconnected systems.

While advocating for single-source-of-truth thinking, recognize that no tool does everything perfectly. Your knowledge management system should excel at connection and retrieval, but you might use specialized tools for specific functions—then link to them from your central system.

For example, I have a clear separation between my knowledge management and writing workflows, which are stored in Logseq, and my project management workflows, which are stored in Tana.

When perfect becomes the enemy of good

The biggest trap in planting is the pursuit of comprehensive capture. The collector's fallacy suggests that capturing information feels like learning, but it's just the first step. If you're capturing more than you can meaningfully process, you're likely consuming too much.

Resist the urge to organize everything immediately. This connects back to the Preparation pillar—remember that building structure is an iterative process, not a one-time setup. Sometimes information needs to sit in your system before its proper place becomes clear. As patterns emerge in your captured information, you can refine your organizational structure accordingly. Use placeholder tags like "#scraps" for information that doesn't yet have a clear home, treating these as signals for future structural improvements rather than organizational failures.

The compound effect of building your commonplace book

Good planting habits compound over time. Each piece of information you capture thoughtfully becomes part of a growing web of knowledge. Random observations from six months ago suddenly connect to current projects. Meeting notes become the foundation for strategic thinking. Journal entries reveal patterns in your growth.

The key is developing judgment about what deserves your attention and a place in your system. Not everything that's interesting is important. Not everything that's important is relevant to your current projects or questions.

Planting bridges the gap between consuming information and creating knowledge. It transforms your prepared system from empty structure into a living repository of your thinking and learning.

With thoughtful planting—guided by your purpose and supported by your prepared structure—you create the raw material for the next pillar: Propagation, where captured information becomes actionable knowledge.

Next in this series, we'll explore how to grow and develop the seeds you've planted into insights that drive real outcomes.

Thanks for reading 🙏

Questions to consider: What percentage of the information you currently capture do you actually revisit? How might more selective planting improve the quality of your knowledge work?

If you’re more interested in mastering the tools to support you on this journey, have a look at Logseq Mastery or Unlock Tana