Preparation - Building a foundation for sustainable knowledge work

A quick recap…

Before diving into the second pillar, let's revisit the five pillars that guide this exploration:

• 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, preparation becomes the critical foundation for everything that follows. Just as a gardener must prepare the soil before planting, you must create the right conditions for your knowledge work to flourish.

Preparation: Creating structure in your database

Preparation in personal knowledge management is about creating structure in your database that supports your workflows without constraining your thinking. Think of preparation as creating grooves in the ground—channels that guide your work but don't force it into rigid patterns.

This pillar transforms the chaos of disparate inputs into an organized ecosystem where ideas can connect and grow organically. You may have heard the term "ontology" —this is part of preparation. It's about defining the standard types of information in your database and capturing how the different pieces relate to one another, establishing clear pathways for retrieval and development.

Preparation is arguably the most challenging part of knowledge management. It's difficult to see through the fog of the future when you start thinking through what you may require. But it’s not necessary to have all of the answers in advance, and building with flexibility in mind will come in handy later down the road.

This post aims to bring awareness to the structural elements of working in a personal knowledge management system, without forcing a specific approach.

The four foundations of effective preparation

1. Defining your information types

Start by identifying the standard pieces of information in your system. What are your typical inputs—articles, meeting notes, research highlights? What outputs do you create—essays, reports, project summaries? Understanding these patterns helps you design consistent capture and processing workflows.

It’s also important to build in a habit of adding meta-data. Meta-data can be thought of structured descriptions of your units of information, and are often referred to as properties or attributes. Having a consistent method of defining meta-data will help you resurface your notes down the line.

2. Creating high-level navigation structures

Your system needs clear entry points—places where you can quickly orient yourself and pick up where you left off. These might be project dashboards, topic overviews, or question-based pages that aggregate related work.

This is where the popular idea of “Maps of Content” comes in. They are notes which house other notes at progressively higher levels of abstraction, allowing you to navigate the information in your workspace. They serve both as landing pages and organizational hubs, but also allow you to develop and edit your thinking at these different levels of abstraction.

I have historically used outlines as my primary structuring tool. Outlines enable you to build hierarchical structures that keep related information together, rather than creating multiple outbound links to separate pages, which might scatter your thoughts. This reduces cognitive overhead and makes patterns more visible, although this is very much up to personal preference.

3. Developing an effective linking strategy

While outlines are often an effective way of capturing information, some information naturally spans boundaries. Strategic linking creates pathways between related concepts, projects, and insights. The goal isn't to link everything, but to create intentional bridges that support your thinking.

It’s not just about what you're capturing, but how that connects to your broader goals and questions. It’s good practice to add context on why you’ve created a link, to help your future self remember the potential pathways of insight that inspired a connection in the first place.

Focus on connections that serve a purpose: reminders you'll need when working on specific projects, meta-data that helps with retrieval, or conceptual links that spark new insights. Don't try to link every word—instead, focus on linking the salient concepts that truly add value to your knowledge work. Effective linking is about quality over quantity, creating meaningful pathways rather than a web of superficial connections.

4. Designing workflow triggers (when needed)

For more complex systems, consider what events or conditions should move information through your workflow. These might be time-based (weekly reviews), data-driven (tagging systems), or triggered by external inputs (client feedback, research findings).

Most personal systems don't need elaborate workflow orchestration, but understanding your natural information processing patterns helps you design supportive structures.

Preparation requires extra work

If you're a gardener, it's very easy to throw seeds on the ground. But we all know that nothing will grow if the soil isn't prepared. Similarly, preparing your database requires additional work to grow your knowledge sustainably.

You don't need to do everything upfront, however. In fact, doing too much structuring upfront may slow your progress. Instead, think of preparation as continuously curating your database, adding meta-data and organizing your information.

This ongoing work pays dividends over time. Adding consistent meta-data, creating logical connections, and maintaining clear navigation reduces the mental overhead of working in your system. You'll spend less time searching and more time thinking.

As your knowledge grows, you can add or refine structure as it becomes necessary to manage the growth. The small investments in structure compound: a well-organized project page saves time in every subsequent work session; consistent tagging makes theme-based retrieval effortless; clear question frameworks guide your research focus.

Balancing structure with flexibility

The biggest trap in preparation is the pursuit of perfect structure. It's tempting to believe that if you just design the ideal system, everything else will flow smoothly. But perfect structure is a journey, not a destination.

Over-engineering creates busy work that feels productive but rarely moves the needle. Complex structures increase friction, making it harder to capture information naturally. They also require ongoing maintenance that can become overwhelming.

Instead, embrace preparation as an iterative process. Start simple and add complexity only when it serves a clear purpose. Use placeholder systems (like "revisit" or “to organize” tags ) to capture information that doesn't yet have a clear home.

Remember: the goal is to support your thinking, not to showcase your organizational skills.

Moving forward with clarity

Preparation transforms your knowledge management from a collection of scattered notes into a coherent system that supports your goals. It creates the conditions where insights can emerge and compound over time. With thoughtful preparation—balanced between structure and flexibility—you create the conditions where information can be easily captured, connected, and retrieved.

Remember: the infrastructure here is going to look different for everyone. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather a way of thinking about how you can structure your work so that you are easily able to find and build upon it.

Next in this series, we'll explore the third pillar: Planting—how to capture information effectively within the prepared foundation you've created.

Thanks for reading 🙏

Questions to consider: What are the standard types of information in your current system? How might better preparation reduce friction in your daily knowledge work?