Stop me if you've heard this before: we're overloaded and overwhelmed by information. There's more content than you could ever hope to consume. More scientific theories, philosophical concepts, and art forms than you could ever hope to engage with.
Enter personal knowledge management (PKM). It's a modern term for an ancient practice—how one collects, preserves, and utilizes knowledge worth remembering. In this episode, I speak with Sari Azout, the founder of Sublime, an app for personal knowledge management (but that description truly doesn't do it justice). We talk about the philosophy behind the product and how that plays out in the product's design.
Plus, I dive into how Sari's PKM philosophy is part of a long lineage of practices people have used to remember what's worth preserving.
Footnotes:
Every new episode is published in essay form at WhatWorks.FYI!
★ Support this podcast ★00:00 - How I keep track of ideas and information
02:56 - Meet Sari Azout, founder of Sublime
04:30 - Information age versus post-information age
06:55 - Information overload is an ancient problem
08:05 - Commonplace books
11:20 - Commonplace books contain a central tension
12:12 - We shape our tools and then they shape us
16:24 - Where the cool stuff is really happening
17:40 - John Locke's commonplace system
19:52 - A tool for creativity rather than productivity
23:33 - Single-player mode versus multiplayer mode
27:05 - The promise of preservation