> "I had a thought that mattered and then it was gone — I never wrote it down." ^pain The earliest personal knowledge-management failure: the artefact never exists at all. Fleeting ideas, useful articles, insights from conversations evaporate before they reach ink. The cost is invisible by construction: missing things are never listed as missing. Upstream of every other knowledge pain — there is nothing to discover, maintain, or share if it was never recorded. ## Discovery questions - "When you have an insight in the shower or on a walk, how often does it survive until you're back at your desk?" - "Think back to the last article you said you'd come back to — what fraction of those do you actually return to?" - "How much of what you read in a week leaves a trace anywhere outside your head?" ^discovery-questions ## Examples - Neuroscience overviews of working-memory limits (Cowan's "magical number 4") explain why we hold only a few items at once before new input overwrites them.[^1] [^1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2864034/