Sorting what goes into your knowledge base isn’t the same as sorting what it actually is. This post walks through the structured-note skill I use to turn a bullet journal line, a voice memo, or a half-read article into one note typed by information type (concept, reference, principle, process, task) with a real worked example and the skill itself to try.
Throw a handful of mixed seeds onto bare dirt and something will definitely come up. You just won’t know what, where, or whether it’s anything you actually wanted.
My markdown knowledge base isn’t run that way. I don’t dump everything from the notebook into it and trust AI to sort out what grows.
It’s closer to a garden. Every note gets sorted before it goes in the ground, placed where it actually belongs, and given the conditions that kind of knowledge needs to take root.
Last week I wrote about why a $12 notebook beats every AI note app I’ve tried at separating storage, structure, and access. I promised I’d come back with how I’m building the digital half of that system.
“Digital gardening” is a common term for this kind of bottom-up approach, and like any kind of gardening, requires the skill of identifying and sorting what goes where.
Not everything from the notebook goes into the markdown knowledge base. Every knowledge base needs a filter. But that’s only the first step.
Before a note goes in the ground, it has to be sorted by what it actually is, not just what it’s about. That’s the job of what I’ve been calling the structured-note agentic skill that takes something I’ve written, said out loud, or read, and turns it into a note organized by the work each piece of it is doing.
In case you’re a newbie, here are the five core information types:
A concept explains what something is or why it matters.
A reference is a fact you look up and move past.
A principle is a rule you can follow or break.
A process describes something unfolding that you watch rather than perform.
A task is steps you actually carry out.
I’ve written about this framework before, so we’ll keep the brief so we can get on with the structured skill.
But those are certainly not the only information types, especially if you gather knowledge about more than just documentation. For example, many things I research make arguments built on specific warrants. You can get even more granular with claim, grounds, warrant, backing, qualifier, rebuttal, counterclaim. The basic rhetorical building blocks of most arguments.
The other addition is metadata like purpose, audience, tags related to my work, etc. It’s not required to get the benefit of typing your notes, but it’s what lets an AI — or future me — find the right note without rereading everything first.
To help make this process more efficient ... because, yeah, it can be a lot of work ... I created a structured-note skill.
This is the skill that shapes a note before I plant it. Sometimes it’s a line in the bullet journal. Sometimes it’s something I talked through out loud into Pocket (referal), my voice-note app, on a walk. Sometimes it’s an article sitting in Readwise Reader, highlighted and half-forgotten.
A few months back, all three fed the same note. I’d jotted a line in the notebook about breaking big goals into short “Sprints,” talked through the idea into Pocket, then finally sat down with Ryder Carroll’s piece on the same idea and ran the whole thing through the skill. Here’s a condensed version of what came out:
## Reference: what a Sprint is and the three requirements
A Sprint is a short, self-contained project covering a subset of a
larger goal. Unlike a phase, a Sprint is an end in itself — it
produces its own satisfaction, information, or motivation, rather
than existing only to lead to the next step. A Sprint has to have
no major barrier to entry, break down into clearly actionable
tasks, and stay under a month, ideally one to two weeks.
## Process: how Sprints sustain motivation
A long-term goal pursued all at once behaves like a marathon — the
longer it takes, the more it drains patience, and drained patience
is what causes projects to get abandoned. A Sprint interrupts that
drain with frequent, visible checkpoints of progress.
Claim: Sprints protect motivation better than open-ended goals.
Grounds: one writer lost motivation when his task app erased each
item on completion, leaving nothing to show for finished work;
switching to a typewriter, where pages physically piled up, made
progress tangible again. Warrant: visible, accumulating progress
is what sustains motivation on projects with no external
accountability.
## Principle: rules for keeping a Sprint workable
Keep every Sprint under a month. Estimate how long it'll take,
then triple that number and plan against the tripled one. If you
don't have enough time to meet even the tripled estimate, shrink
the Sprint's scope — don't let the timeline slip.
This pattern carries throughout the note, recording how the Sprint cycle actually unfolds, the steps for setting one up.
That middle section used to be typed as Concept, not Process, until I ran it back through my decision guide. These distinctions are harder than they look, and AI gets them wrong too, which is the whole reason I built the guide in the first place. It’s in the public skills library if you want to try catching your own mistypes or use it for a reference for AI.
Now I can more clearly find the specific kind of information I need ... but so can AI.
If you’re interested in trying the skill yourself, all my skills are available in my public skills library for paid subscribers. Fully adaptable, and I’d love to hear what changes you’d make. I’m also sharing an installable bundle in that library, so you can plug and play if you just want to take it for a test spin.
That’s the planting done. What’s still ahead is the garden itself, for example how the notes actually sit together once they’re in the ground, what an entity is versus what an information type is, and what I’ve started noticing growing in there that I didn’t plant on purpose.
I’ll get into that next.
Curious what the sorting actually looks like under the hood? Below is the skill itself for paid subscribers, copy-paste ready.