Personal Knowledge System: digital notes

01

Design the system before you pick the app

In simple words

Before you build a toy box, you decide what goes inside and how you will find things. The app is only the box. If you pick a box first, you may find later that your toys do not fit.

Before this course: Study Notes: systems and review (course 13.12.2). You already know the capture, process, test, space and mix loop, effect sizes, and how to run a two-week study experiment. This course moves that loop into a digital system you can keep for years.

Key facts

A personal knowledge system has three jobs: keep what you learn, find it again fast, and use it (to study, write and decide).
Write your needs down before you compare apps. Useful questions:

Question	Why it matters
Where are my notes stored? (files on my device, or only in a company's cloud)	Decides who controls them and whether they work offline
Can I export everything in an open format (plain text, Markdown, HTML)?	Decides if you can move apps later
Does it work on all my devices?	Capture happens on a phone, processing often on a computer
Does it let me link notes to each other?	Links are the heart of Lessons 3 and 6
What does it cost now, and what if the price changes?	Check the app's own price page on the day you decide
What do my school's rules say about apps and AI features?	Some classes limit devices or tools

Two real examples of different designs:
Obsidian stores notes as Markdown plain text files in a vault, which is a folder on your own computer (subfolders included). Because they are plain files, other editors can open them too.
Notion keeps pages in its own workspace. Its help centre says pages and databases can be exported as PDF, HTML or Markdown & CSV, and a whole workspace as HTML, Markdown or CSV (for databases), plus uploaded files.
Neither design is "right". The test is: if this app disappeared tomorrow, could you take every note with you in a format another app can read?
This course uses Obsidian-style examples because the files are plain text and easy to show. Every idea works in other apps too (names of menus can differ by app and version).

Step by step

On paper, write the three jobs (keep, find, use) and one real task for each, for example "find my notes on photosynthesis in 30 seconds".
Answer the six questions in the table for yourself.
Pick two apps you might use. Open each app's help pages and find its export page.
Write down, for each app, where notes are stored and which export formats it offers.
Make one test note in each app, with a heading, a list and a link. Export it.
Open the exported file in a plain text editor (such as Notepad or TextEdit).
Check: you can read your test note without the original app, and you wrote down why you chose one app.

LESSON 01Design the system before you pick the app

LESSON 01 / ANIMATED LESSON / AI VOICE00:00 / 01:00

Voice

Read the video script

[Host] "Most people pick a notes app first and a system never. Let's do it the other way round."
[Text on screen: keep, find, use] "Your system has three jobs: keep what you learn, find it fast, and use it."
[Screen: export menu of a notes app] "Before you commit, export one note. Can you open it without the app?"
[Host] "If yes, your notes belong to you. If not, think twice."

Try it now

Write a half-page "system brief": your three jobs, your answers to the six questions, the app you chose and the reason. Keep it. You will update it in the final project.

ClaudeStuck? Copy a ready-made prompt for Claude

Copy this, open Claude, paste it, and Claude will walk you through the lesson step by step.

For a grown-up: Claude is for adults (18+). Copy this, paste it into Claude, and use the answer to explain the lesson to your child.

I'm learning "Personal Knowledge System: digital notes" on The Future Market. Lesson 1: "Design the system before you pick the app".

What the lesson teaches:
- A personal knowledge system has three jobs: keep what you learn, find it again fast, and use it (to study, write and decide).
- Write your needs down before you compare apps. Useful questions:
- Question - Why it matters
- Where are my notes stored? (files on my device, or only in a company's cloud) - Decides who controls them and whether they work offline
- Can I export everything in an open format (plain text, Markdown, HTML)? - Decides if you can move apps later
- Does it work on all my devices? - Capture happens on a phone, processing often on a computer
- Does it let me link notes to each other? - Links are the heart of Lessons 3 and 6

The exercise I'm working on:
Write a half-page "system brief": your three jobs, your answers to the six questions, the app you chose and the reason. Keep it. You will update it in the final project.

I'm stuck. Please:
1. Explain the main idea in plain, simple words with one everyday example.
2. Walk me through the exercise one small step at a time. Ask me what I've done so far before giving the next step.
3. Don't just give me the final answer. Help me do it myself, and check my work when I share it.

I'm a parent helping my child (about 8 years old) with a lesson called "Design the system before you pick the app" from the course "Personal Knowledge System: digital notes".

Here's what the lesson says:
Before you build a toy box, you decide what goes inside and how you will find things. The app is only the box. If you pick a box first, you may find later that your toys do not fit.

The activity:
Write a half-page "system brief": your three jobs, your answers to the six questions, the app you chose and the reason. Keep it. You will update it in the final project.

Please explain this so an 8-year-old understands: short sentences, a fun everyday example, and no hard words.
Then give me 3 simple questions I can ask my child to check they understood, and a way to do the activity together, one tiny step at a time.

Open Claude

Sources

Obsidian Help, How Obsidian stores data: obsidian.md/help/data-storage
Notion Help Center, Export your content: www.notion.com/help/export-your-content

My notes

I learned this

02