Build a Personal Wiki You'll Actually Use

You start the wiki on a good day. A clean note-taking app, a tidy outline, a folder for every topic you care about. For two weeks you feed it diligently. Then a busy Tuesday hits, you learn something worth keeping, and saving it means opening the app, finding the right page, formatting the entry, tagging it. You don't. You learn three more things that week and save none of them.

A month later the wiki is a graveyard of stale pages you're slightly embarrassed by. You conclude you're "not a wiki person" and go back to losing things.

You're a wiki person. The wiki was the problem. Every personal knowledge system dies at the same point: when capturing a thing costs more than the thing is worth in the moment.

The fix is to make capture cost one sentence, and let Cowork do the filing.

#Why your last wiki died

A wiki has two jobs: holding knowledge and absorbing new knowledge. Most tools are good at the first and terrible at the second. They make a beautiful home for information you've already organized, and they make adding a small chore: open, navigate, format, tag, save.