You’ve captured 3,000 notes.
You can find maybe 12 of them when you actually need them.
Congratulations, you’ve built a very organized graveyard.
Every week, I watch busy professionals make the same discovery. They’ve invested hours into building what they thought was a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system. They’ve read the books, watched the tutorials, tested the tools, created the folders, perfected the capture workflows.
And yet, when they need that client conversation from three months ago, they’re scrolling through hundreds of notes hoping something looks familiar.
Most people blame the tool. They switch from Notion to Obsidian, from Evernote to Roam, convinced the next app will finally solve the problem. Others blame themselves. “I need better discipline,” they tell themselves, scheduling yet another weekend reorganization session that will last approximately until Thursday.
Both diagnoses are wrong.
Your PKM system isn’t broken because of the tool. It isn’t broken because of your discipline. It’s broken because it’s blind.
Think about it. Your productivity system knows nothing about you. It doesn’t know what you’re working on this quarter. It doesn’t know which clients matter most to your business. It doesn’t understand how one project connects to another. It has no idea what you were thinking when you captured that note six months ago.
You’ve essentially hired a stranger to hold your most valuable information, then you’re surprised when they can’t find anything.
“Connection, not collection: That’s the essence of knowledge management.” — Tom Stewart
The missing ingredient is context.
Context means your PKM system knows everything about you and what’s going on in your professional life. It understands not just what you captured, but why it matters, when it happened, what it relates to, and how you’ll search for it later.
Without context, you’re just hoarding digital artifacts. With context, you’re building a productivity system that thinks alongside you.
In this article, I’ll share four tactics that inject context into every piece of information you capture. These aren’t complicated frameworks requiring weekends of setup. They’re practical approaches you can implement today, starting with the note you capture this afternoon.
The compound effect will surprise you. Each tactic works alone. Together, they multiply.
Context: The Oxygen Your Productivity System Can’t Live Without
Let’s get clear on what context actually means in practical terms.
Context is the information surrounding your information. It’s the metadata that transforms isolated notes into connected knowledge. It’s what allows your brain (or your search function) to instantly locate what you need.
When a colleague says “that client meeting,” your brain doesn’t search through every meeting you’ve ever had. It instantly narrows to recent meetings, relevant clients, active projects. Your brain has context. It knows what you’re working on, who matters, what’s current.
Your PKM system needs the same capability.
Here’s a search query that fails: “meeting notes.”
Here’s a search query that succeeds: “meeting notes Q3 budget Sarah Project Apollo.”
The difference isn’t search skill. The difference is that the second query has context baked into the note itself. The information was captured with enough surrounding detail that retrieval becomes instant.
“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” — Samuel Johnson
The power of context is exponential, not linear. Every piece of context you add multiplies the value of every other piece. A note connected to a project becomes more valuable. That same note connected to a project, a client, and a date becomes dramatically more valuable. Add a link to related notes, and you’ve created something that practically retrieves itself.
This isn’t new wisdom. The Library of Alexandria didn’t fail because it lacked scrolls. It housed an estimated 400,000 of them. It failed because the cataloging system couldn’t scale. Scholars could deposit knowledge but struggled to retrieve it when needed. The same problem, different era.
Modern PKM tools give you infinite storage capacity. That’s never been the problem. The problem is always retrieval. And retrieval depends entirely on context.
Let me break down the four dimensions of context we’ll cover:
- Structure context tells your productivity system where information belongs.
- Time context tells it when information was created and what was happening then.
- Relationship context tells it how information connects to the important entities in your life.
- Identity context tells it how you’ll search for information in the future.
Each dimension adds a layer of retrieval intelligence. Stack all four, and you’ve transformed your PKM from blind storage into a thinking partner.
Let’s build each layer.
Build a Structure Your Brain Already Understands
Structure is the first layer of context.
Before you decide what to capture, before you write a single note, you need a structure that answers one critical question instantly: where does this belong?
I call this the millisecond test. When a piece of information crosses your desk, can you determine where it goes in milliseconds, without hesitation, without second-guessing? If you can’t, your structure is fighting your brain instead of working with it.
Most productivity systems fail this test because they impose arbitrary structures that don’t match how you actually think about your world.
Alphabetical folders? Date-based systems? Abstract category taxonomies? They all share the same flaw. They’re logical to a computer but foreign to your brain.
When you’re capturing notes during a client call, you don’t think in abstract categories. You think about the client, the project, the context of why this conversation matters.
Your brain doesn’t think in abstract categories. It thinks about what you’re working on, what matters in your life, and what you’re learning.
That’s exactly what the My Life structure captures.
“The best productivity systems don’t add friction. They remove it.” — Cal Newport
My Life organizes your entire productivity system into three pillars:
- Current Projects. Your active initiatives that drive business value right now. Not someday projects. Not ideas you might pursue. The work you’re actually doing.
- Key Elements. The core aspects of your professional life that need consistent attention. Your business. Your team. Key clients. Primary responsibilities. These aren’t projects with end dates. They’re ongoing areas that impact everything else.
- Topics. Subjects relevant to your business or personal development that you want to explore. Communication strategies. Leadership techniques. Industry trends. Whatever you’re actively learning.
The magic happens when you limit Topics to three at a time.
Yes, just three. You might have dozens of potential Topics worth exploring. But trying to learn about everything means learning about nothing deeply. By concentrating on three carefully chosen Topics, you create space for meaningful progress instead of superficial browsing.
This structure works because it mirrors your natural thought patterns. You don’t think in “Resources” or “Archives.” You think about the projects you’re working on, the clients you’re serving, the skills you’re developing.
When I encounter new information, the filtering becomes automatic:
- Does it relate to my Current Projects?
- Does it impact my Key Elements?
- Does it align with my focus Topics?
If yes to any, capture it. If no to all, let it pass. No guilt, no FOMO, just clarity.
The Capturing Beast workflow we teach at Paperless Movement® transforms this structure into an active filter for engaging with the world. Information either passes through one of these three gates or it doesn’t deserve your attention right now.
This isn’t about limitation. It’s about transformation.
Your implementation step: Before you capture another note, map your professional life to these three pillars. Write down your Current Projects (keep it tight). Identify your Key Elements (the ongoing responsibilities that matter). Choose three Topics you’re actively exploring. That’s your structure. Common sense as the guiding principle. If you have to think about where something goes, the structure is wrong.
Journal Your Days (Not Your Feelings)
Let me be clear about something: this section isn’t about gratitude journaling, morning pages, win/loss analysis, or any other personal development practice you’ve heard about.
I’m talking about creating time-based context for your information.
The tactic is simple: interact with a tool where your days are clearly represented and navigable. Daily notes. Dated entries. A timeline of your professional activity that you can move through like a calendar.
Roam Research popularized this approach. I don’t know if they pioneered it, but they were the first tool I used that made daily notes a first-class citizen. Since then, nearly every serious PKM tool has adopted the pattern: Obsidian, Logseq, Heptabase, Tana. They all understand that time is context.
“Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” — Peter Drucker
Why does time matter so much for retrieval?
Because human memory is time-anchored.
When you’re trying to remember that conversation about pricing changes, you don’t search your memory alphabetically. You think: “That was around the time we launched the new product. Maybe late March? We were still dealing with the integration issues…”
Your brain uses time as a primary retrieval mechanism. Your PKM should do the same.
Writing notes in daily entries creates this temporal context automatically. Every note gets a birthday. Every idea has a timestamp. Every capture sits within the larger narrative of what was happening in your professional life at that moment.
The retrieval power is immediate. “What was I working on in March?” becomes a viable query. You can navigate to that period and see exactly what occupied your attention, what decisions you made, what you were thinking.
But the deeper power is in cause-effect visibility.
Six months from now, you won’t just remember what you decided. You’ll remember the circumstances that drove that decision. You’ll see the context: the competing priorities, the information you had available, the constraints you were operating under. This isn’t historical curiosity. It’s intelligence for making better decisions next time.
The practical approach is straightforward: write as much as possible. Every meeting note, every idea, every decision, every observation. Link it to the day. Don’t worry about perfection. The investment is minimal; the retrieval power is massive.
A colleague I worked with resisted this approach for years. “I don’t have time to journal,” he said. Then he spent four hours trying to reconstruct a conversation from two months earlier for a legal matter. The notes existed somewhere. He just couldn’t find them because they had no temporal context. After that experience, he became a convert.
After six months of daily entries, you have a searchable timeline of your professional life.
That’s not a journal. That’s a competitive advantage.
Your implementation step: Starting today, capture your notes within a daily note framework. Most PKM tools support this natively. If yours doesn’t, create a daily note manually with today’s date as the title. Every piece of information you capture today goes there first, then gets organized to its permanent home. The temporal breadcrumb stays forever.
Link Everything to Your Main Entities
Here’s a note without context: “Discussed pricing strategy. Consider 15% increase. Check competitor rates.”
Here’s the same note with relationship context: “[[Sarah Meeting]] [[Project Apollo]] [[Q3 Pricing Review]] Discussed pricing strategy. Consider 15% increase for enterprise tier. Check competitor rates before Tuesday sync with [[Marketing Team]].”
The second note has links. And links are retrieval insurance.
Every link is a connection. Every connection creates another door through which you can find this information later. You might not remember you discussed pricing strategy. But you’ll remember you met with Sarah, or you’ll search for Project Apollo, or you’ll look at everything tagged for Q3 review. Multiple entry points mean certain retrieval.
“Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action.” — Peter Senge
Your main entities are the crucial elements of your professional life:
- Projects you’re working on.
- Goals you’re pursuing.
- Clients you’re serving.
- Suppliers you’re managing.
- Team members you’re leading.
- Products you’re developing.
- Initiatives you’re driving.
Every note you capture should connect to at least one of these entities. Ask yourself: What project does this relate to? Which client does this serve? What goal does this advance?
If a note doesn’t connect to any main entity, question whether it deserves to be captured at all.
The brain parallel is instructive here. Your brain doesn’t store isolated facts. It stores relationships. The word “coffee” doesn’t exist alone in your memory. It connects to “morning,” to “energy,” to “that café in Rome,” to “the conversation with your business partner that changed everything.” Information in your brain lives within a web of associations.
Your productivity system should mirror this architecture.
The combination of connections produces something greater than individual notes. This is where PKM transforms from storage to knowledge. Individual notes are data. Connected notes are information. Networks of connected notes become knowledge. That’s the transformation you’re building toward.
There’s another phenomenon that emerges from consistent linking: unexpected pattern recognition.
When you link a meeting note to a client and a project and a strategic goal, you’re not just creating retrieval paths. You’re building a knowledge graph. Over time, that graph reveals patterns you didn’t plan for.
One entrepreneur we’ve coached discovered through her PKM system that three different client conversations, captured weeks apart, all pointed to the same emerging market shift. She didn’t set out to identify that trend. Her linked notes surfaced it automatically. That insight informed a strategic pivot that significantly impacted her business.
Modern PKM tools make linking effortless. Bi-directional linking means when you link Note A to Note B, Note B automatically shows a backlink to Note A. The connection works both directions. You don’t have to maintain these relationships manually. The tool maintains them for you.
A note without links is a message in a bottle. You’re hoping it washes up on the right shore someday.
Hope isn’t a retrieval strategy.
Your implementation step: For every note you capture today, add at least one link to a main entity. Create dedicated pages for your most important entities if they don’t exist. Projects, key clients, major initiatives. These become hubs that gather related information automatically through backlinks. Start with just one link per note. The habit will compound.
Name Files Like You’ll Search For Them
This final tactic might seem trivial. It isn’t.
File naming is the last layer of context, the final filter that determines whether you find what you need or keep scrolling through search results hoping something looks familiar.
Here’s the reality: when you search your productivity system, you often see only file names in the results. Especially when searching across folders, across tools, across years of accumulated notes. The file name is your only clue. Make it count.
My standard: YYMMDD prefix at the beginning of every file name.
250115 tells me instantly when something was created or stored. I don’t need to open the file, check the metadata, or hover for properties. The date is right there in the name.
This seems small. The compound effect is significant.
“Put knowledge where people trip over it.” — Carla O’Dell
When you’re scanning a folder with 200 files, date prefixes let you navigate by time visually. You’re looking for something from early January? Your eyes jump to files starting with 2501. No scrolling through metadata columns. No sorting and resorting. Visual chronology at a glance.
When search results show 15 possible matches, date prefixes help you quickly identify which notes are from the relevant time period. That Q2 planning conversation? It’s probably in files starting with 2404, 2405, or 2406.
But the more important naming principle is this: name the file based on how you’ll search for it in the future, not how it feels right now.
Right now, you know exactly what “Client Feedback.md” refers to. Six months from now, you’ll have no idea which client, which project, which feedback session. “Future you” is the audience for your file names, not “present you.”
Think retrieval-first. What words will you type into a search box when you need this information again?
If you’ll search for “quarterly budget review,” then name the file something like “250115_Q1_Budget_Review_ProjectApollo.md”.
If you’ll search for “Sarah meeting marketing,” then name it “250112_Sarah_Marketing_Strategy_Session.md”.
Consistency compounds. Random naming creates chaos at scale. You can handle inconsistent naming when you have 50 notes. When you have 5,000, the chaos becomes debilitating. Every file named with the same protocol becomes easier to find. The pattern recognition kicks in. Your brain learns to parse file names instantly.
I know what you’re thinking: “This tactic won’t change my life.”
You’re right. Alone, it won’t.
But combined with structure, time context, and linking, naming conventions compound. This is one of the most important principles in systems theory: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Each tactic adds value independently. Together, they create something far more powerful than any single approach.
The engineer in me loves this truth. Individual optimizations matter less than system-level integration. Your productivity system isn’t built from one brilliant feature. It’s built from the compound effect of many small practices working together.
Your implementation step: Pick a naming protocol today and commit to it. I recommend: Date prefix (YYMMDD) + descriptive keywords + main entity reference. Example: “250115_Pricing_Strategy_Meeting_ProjectApollo”. Start using it for every file you create from this moment forward. Don’t go back and rename everything. Just start fresh. The new files will eventually dominate your system.
From Blind Storage to Intelligent Partner
Let’s trace what we’ve built.
Your PKM system was blind. It held your information without understanding anything about it. Notes existed in isolation, findable only by luck or exhaustive searching.
Now it sees.
Structure tells it where information belongs. The My Life framework gives every note a home that matches how you naturally think about your work. No more hesitation about where things go.
Time tells it when information was created. Daily notes anchor every capture to the larger narrative of your professional life. You can navigate through your history like a timeline.
Links tell it how information connects. Every note tied to your main entities becomes findable through multiple doors. Patterns emerge that you didn’t plan for.
Names tell it how you’ll search. Every file becomes its own retrieval instruction, optimized for future discovery rather than present convenience.
Each tactic works alone. Together, they multiply.
“The only thing that gives an organization a competitive edge is what it knows, how it uses what it knows, and how fast it can know something new.” — Laurence Prusak
This is systems thinking in action. The productivity system you’ve built isn’t just the sum of four practices. It’s the compound effect of four practices working together, each amplifying the others.
When you need that client conversation from three months ago, you’ll find it in seconds.
You might search by time (“around late October”).
You might search by relationship (“meetings with Sarah”).
You might search by project (“Project Apollo notes”).
You might search by file name keywords.
Any door gets you there. Context made the difference.
And something else will happen that’s harder to predict. You’ll start seeing patterns you didn’t plan. Connections your conscious mind missed. Insights that emerge from the network of information you’ve been building.
That’s not magic. That’s context doing its job. Your PKM system knows enough about your world that it can surface relationships you hadn’t explicitly created. This is when knowledge management transforms from storage to intelligence.
The four tactics I’ve shared align with how we approach information management in the ICOR® methodology: systematic, context-rich, retrieval-focused. They’re not complicated. They don’t require special tools or weekend-long setup sessions. They’re practical approaches you can implement today.
Here’s your quick win: Pick the tactic that resonates most. Implement it today. Feel the difference this week.
If structure is your gap, map your My Life pillars before you capture another note.
If time context is missing, start using daily notes as your capture foundation.
If your notes lack connections, begin adding one link per note to a main entity.
If your file names are chaos, adopt a naming protocol for everything you create from now on.
One tactic. Today. The compound effect starts immediately.
Your information deserves better than digital burial.
Give it context, and watch it come alive.
