> "I know I wrote this down somewhere — I just cannot find it now." ^pain A personal retrieval pain. The knowledge worker has captured something but cannot locate it later when a need arises. The cost is repeated searches and a slide back to asking a colleague or redoing the work — and over time, declining trust that their own past notes are worth searching. ## Discovery questions - "When you need to remember something you wrote down last year, what's your first move?" - "How often do you start a task only to realise you already worked on it but can't find what you did?" - "Walk me through the last time you gave up looking for one of your own notes and re-derived the answer instead." ^discovery-questions ## Examples - Academic work on personal information management shows individuals repeatedly failing to re-find documents they stored because later search terms no longer match earlier folder/label choices.[^1] - An Obsidian user write-up describes notes that exist but are effectively lost due to freeform structure and inadequate metadata, requiring manual re-indexing.[^2] [^1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1242572.1242753 [^2]: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/notes-become-unfindable/37534