How to Create Knowledge Clusters (that actually work)
My trusted highlighting system (Readwise), which has greatly helped me over the last year is becoming a hindrance. Or rather, it needs saving!
I’m drowning in highlights, scattered insights, and endless notes, and I’m beginning to feel overwhelmed and disconnected from them. Despite thinking I’m collecting valuable information, it’s frustrating when those ideas slip through the cracks, especially, when I need them the most.
But the problem I now think, isn’t that my highlights are poor; the problem is I haven’t been connecting them sufficiently to extract their true value.
I can now see a path to turn that overwhelming flood of information into a vault of organised, interconnected insights.
The solution lies in knowledge clusters, a simple yet powerful way to organise, connect, and expand one's learning.
By creating an interconnected system, I will begin to see hidden connections between dormant insights, leading to a richer, more creative output. I’m not entirely sure I know what I’m doing yet, but for those of you who are struggling with this too, I can hopefully shed some light on how we can get out of this together.
This will be part one of The School of Knowledge’s first-ever series.
Let’s discuss my 5-step-process to create knowledge clusters:
Read time: 3 minutes
1. Forming Knowledge Clusters
Think of your highlights as thematic clusters rather than the isolated passages they currently are. These clusters can be built around any ideas, insights, problems or questions you have. For example, if you’re interested in decision-making you could cluster ideas and passages from behavioural science, philosophy and economics.
Action: Identify the major areas you frequently highlight and create clusters of these themes you can build your knowledge system around.
2. Tagging Your Clusters
It’s important to have a multi-layer tagging system that indicates major areas of interest and subtopics attached to them. For example:
Primary tag (major areas): Decision-making
Secondary tags (subtopics): Cognitive biases / Ethics / Game theory
A subtopic can belong to more than one major area. For example, game theory could belong to the major areas of “decision-making” and “economics.”
3. Cross-Pollination Between Clusters
Since multidisciplinary learning thrives on combining insights from different fields, look for opportunities to cross-pollinate between clusters. For example, a highlight tagged under “Innovation” could be cross-linked to another under “Systems Thinking” to explore how innovation happens in complex systems.
Action: Periodically search across clusters using a combination of different tags (e.g. “Innovation + Systems Thinking”) to discover unexpected and new connections. This can work for both major areas and subtopics.
4. Concept Mapping for Clusters
Export your tagged highlights into a concept mapping tool to visualise how different ideas and insights relate to one another. Visualising your tagged highlights this way can help you spot connections that you otherwise may have missed by using text-based analysis alone.
Action: Use mind-mapping tools or apps to create knowledge maps where clusters of highlights from various fields visually intersect, aiding in idea synthesis. Obsidian is a popular choice.
5. Reviewing and Strengthening Clusters
Regularly review, refine and reinforce your knowledge clusters. Over time, as you add more highlights, review your clusters to see how ideas have evolved. This helps to ensure that older highlights stay relevant and continue to shape new insights. When you add personal summaries or anecdotes to the notes, it helps entrench them even further into your memory.
By organizing your highlights into knowledge clusters and encouraging cross-disciplinary connections, you can better manage your growing database and ensure that the ideas you capture remain accessible, interconnected, and useful in your writing.
Until next time, Karl (The School of Knowledge).
P.S
If you haven’t already check out my Personal Board Meeting Template I use for keeping myself accountable. It’s free.
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I’m struggling in this area as well. As you highlighted, I find it most valuable when you are able to find the synergies, between unrelated topics sometimes, and gain deep insights. Knowledge clusters is a an interesting way to look at it, I’ll give it another look.