I’m beginning to see something: people have lots of different ways of processing information, but there’s no single best way. It all depends on who you are and what works for you.

Let’s take reading books for example. There are paid apps like Readwise that pull together all your ebooks and audiobooks into one place, make them searchable, easily shareable, and even sync them to your “personal knowledge management” system. I’ve tried that for a couple of years (both Readwise and the PKM) and it didn’t work for me. I just kept wasting time organising and tagging instead of thinking.

So now my belief is that I should find my personalised way of processing and internalising information, with the goal of turning them into intuition and knowledge.

So what’s this way?

Writing daily reflections

For now, I’m tempted to say that what works for me is writing a daily reflection of what I’ve learned or thought about on any given day.

This is especially helpful when my mind is not focused on a particular project but rather in a state of casual exploration.

For instance, perhaps I’m not actively trying to change anything in my life right now (or maybe I’m not attuned to that desire yet), so I’m casually reading 48 Laws of Power in the morning and browsing some ByteByteGo technical newsletters in the evening. Maybe I watched Simon Sinek interviewing Trevor Noah during my lunch break.

By the end of such a day, there’s a great chance that I’d have made mental notes of a bunch of things that I think are interesting. In my experience, these thoughts don’t stick around for long. They soon, within a day or two, disappear into the dark recesses of the brain that I’m almost certain I’ll never be able to dig up again.

This is where sitting down to write a daily reflection comes in. It becomes a ritual. Every evening, spend a couple of minutes to think about the ideas you’ve contended with, list them down, double-click on them and explain what you thought about it in your own words. The very act of writing this reflection is very likely to be powerful enough to make more ideas stick.

I would then publish them online (this blog) so that I can refer to them anytime I want. Knowing myself, I’ll come back to re-read some of these, and it’s a kind of unstructured spaced repetition. The beauty is that I’d have already gotten them down into words once - without this initial step, it’s dark recesses territory.

Writing notes like a university student

But what about when I’m in the mode of a project?

For example, I’m currently considering a change in careers from software engineering the adjacent field of product management. To help in that, I’ve started to look for resources to learn the trade of PM-ing and began consuming curated content on platforms like Exponent.

As I went through the content, I found myself nodding a lot. I scribbled on a post-it and I also sent myself a message on WhatsApp. On the post-it I scribbled an idea to bring to to work tomorrow, and on WhatsApp I noted to myself “the wheelhouse is lingo for PMs to describe a company’s core expertise.”

Now, what’s the best way (for me) to maximise retention of these valuable ideas?

In this case, it’s likely to be A4 sized papers, stapled together, with scribbles and sections and arrows everywhere. I can boldly title the top of the first page with the project: Transitioning to Product Management.

I would only opt to work this way, which I haven’t in almost 10 years since I graduated university, if I knew that I was doing an intensive study of a subject. Let’s face it - for most adults, the interval between these occurrences are few and far between, so it’s more of a specialised approach to a specific problem.

The general way forward

Writing a daily reflection blog post is perhaps my current go-to way of retaining information that entered my brain that day. Conscious and subconscious thoughts are welcome to play on the page.

For me, there’s no problem if these are read just by me, but because these are published on my blog, I expect a handful of readers to peruse them. Privacy isn’t a concern (I’ll leave out sentitive topics), but readability is. How can I package the disparate thoughts of a day into a single, coherent reflection post?

No idea, but I do know practice may illuminate the way.