Knowledge-based Systems

August Bradley's Pillars, Pipelines, and Vaults OS

This is part of year zero life design which is a Notion-based system for "people who feel they're not progressing in life achieve what matters most to them" via "Pillars, Pipelines & Vaults (PPV). The website is a pure appeal to people who what to be more successful in life with the Notion tool, and uses a lot of credibility-building superlative-laden language that does not say what the system actually does. He apparently started as a YouTuber and his August Bradley Llife Design channel is more informative.

I'm reviewing the 2020 video of his Notion System Overview at 2X speed.

• dashboard, pillars, pipelines, vaults as top level folders
• all needed information available
• mobile and desktop portable

Now reviewing the 2020 Pillars Pipelines and Vaults take on applying systems thinking to knowledge management.

His system principles:

• should help you focus
• should align your work to your vault and track them
• should capture, synthesize, and vault information

The essence of the system appears to be (I've changed the order here):

• Pipelines that are the progress-producing actions, results-producing processes. There are four databases for "values", "goal outcomes", "projects", and "action items". He compares this to GTD.
• Vaults are the knowledgement management system, organized in a way that helps with recall in an efficient way, also in databases: media, education, notes, tools, etc. He compares this to PARA.
• Pillars are the life segments categories, which can have their own subcategories: growth, home/life, business. Focus and Align is a master pillar for "action" and "aliognment"

To keep the balance, time-based checks are performed by Cycles at intervals year, quarter, monthly, weekly reviews. Daily tracking is what keeps it honest.

He packs a lot of different processes and methodologies into his dashboard and PPV elements, with detailed models for tasks, projects, dependencies, and so on that he has internalized. He's used Notion as a "code-free" software developer to model his conception of the day in the way most optimal for himself because he knows what is optimal as an experienced self-managing knowledge worker.

He's not kidding when he describes it as a Notion-based operating system. It is pretty sophisticated and uses Notion's database and various display options to create a dashboard that helps him see everything he needs to decide what to do. The relevant information and data is also available in Notion so you know where to find it and can grab it directly.

His Dashboards are pretty great, using Notion's document nesting and instancing to make a flexible way to show different system elements in different contexts. Notion has a lot of very rich knowledge management and scheduling element types, and he's made excellent use of them. Again, though, he also has a very rich model for everything he does. This is a perfect system for him because it models his existing complicated workflow. For other people, it would require a lot of hands on training as well as a lot of introspection about what they are really trying to do.

Thoughts on the nature of PKMS

from PKMS thread in DSCAFE October 17 2023

prompt from foureyedsoul:

It's definitely unfortunate how the "citizen science" of knowledge management has been distributed across a bunch of places that are hard to search. I've thankfully also seen people who focus more on practices over tools, but they're in the minority… and usually spread through YouTube comments, Discourse-based forums, Discord communities, Mastodon spaces like https://pkm.social/, GitHub discussions, etc.

Sri's thoughts:

That makes me think that one o_f the fundamentals of knowledge management is intentional connection in such a way that they are both points of access and wayfinders that can be grouped and aggregated into mixed collections on-the-fly.

But intentional connection is enormous. Most tools I've seen talk more about the storage and linking capabilities but don't really seem to support intentional connection etc as first class ideas in their system.

My gut reaction is that Johnny Decimal is a filing system that is needed to have content that is addressable, but not the intentional linking itself. Maybe it's "intentional filing". Let me try making a sacrificial first draft of defining "intentional connection" so we can all slaughter it into new ideas

• intentional connection" is a form of knowledge synthesis, specifically taking pre-existing chunks of knowledge in an addressable system and making connections between them.
• connections describe the relationship between knowledge chunks
• there are many kinds of relationships that can exist, and they exist in a metacognitive space that isn't usually supported by the filing system (tags are sort of a half-measure)

[search-based filing systems] makes total sense to me. I think for a lot of things a really great query-based approach to knowledge management works great; the desire to build the organized database is maybe more of a reflection of the dream of having GOOD KNOWLEDGE, so the PMKS is more of a currated collection. Maybe in this case, the PKMS is more of a collection of collections of specialized preexisting knowledge.