Knowledge Work Should Be Accretive

Most knowledge work is ephemeral–we write documents, emails, code and then it’s done. The ways in which we work don’t tend to compound or accumulate over time. This makes knowledge work lossy. A good example of this is note taking–we tend to never look at notes once they are written.

Ideally, all work we do builds on and increases our capacity for new ideas. Systems we put in place should allow us to add to and extrapolate from our knowledge.

See also:

  • Andy Matuschak’s note where this idea came from (actually I heard it at talk he gave)
  • Zettelkasten is a note taking system which attempts to build up a ‘conversation partner’ by accumulating notes with a dense set of connections thus accreting knowledge systematically.