Capture Process Use (CPU)

Canonical version: Capture Process Use (CPU).

A PKM idea shared by Theo Stowell: strip away the apps, the methods, and the acronyms, and every note-taking system reduces to three stages. CAPTURE information, PROCESS it into knowledge, USE it to produce something (i.e., turn knowledge into wisdom). This loop is the processor of your second brain, and like a computer's Central Processing Unit (CPU), everything else in the system exists to feed it.

Most broken PKM systems fail at a specific stage: capture-only systems pile up highlights nobody revisits (the Collector's fallacy), process-heavy systems polish notes that never get used, and use-without-process means constantly recreating thinking from scratch.

It maps cleanly onto my own, more granular process, which I covered in depth in my Knowledge Management for Beginners course. My explore → curate → consume → capture stages are CPU's "Capture" expanded: being intentional about sources BEFORE anything enters the system. My distill → organize → connect stages are "Process": raw captures become atomic Permanent notes (via Fleeting notes and Literature notes, Progressive summarization, and a structure like the PARA method, optionally combined with the Johnny Decimal system). And "Use" is where my whole content pipeline lives: notes become articles, newsletters, courses; Writing is thinking applies at both ends. CPU is a compressed mental model. My process is the same loop with the gears exposed. Even the AI-era tools converge on it: Gray Box's capture-organize-ask is CPU with an LLM in the Process seat.

References

• Theo Stowell's Fundamentalised: https://www.fundamentalised.com/

Related

• Theo Stowell
• Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)
• Collector's fallacy
• Permanent notes
• Fleeting notes
• Literature notes
• Progressive summarization
• PARA method
• Writing is thinking
• Gray Box

About Sébastien

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