Probing - Building feedback loops for your knowledge
Do you ever feel like your notes disappear into a digital black hole?
You capture interesting ideas, save important documents, and meticulously organize information—but when you need it most, you can't find it. Or worse, you forget you even captured it in the first place.
The fifth and final pillar—Probing—is about creating simple feedback loops that help you actually use what you've captured. But most people overcomplicate this step and lose steam trying to maintain elaborate systems that don't yield fruit.
What probing actually is (and isn't)
Probing is creating simple systems that help you regularly reconnect with information you've captured. It's not about building perfect dashboards or comprehensive tracking systems—it's about sustainable habits that surface useful information when you need it.
Think of it like tending a garden. You don't need to check every plant every day, but you do need regular rhythms for watering, weeding, and harvesting. The goal isn't a spotless, pristine garden—it's a garden that actually produces something useful.
Most people fail at probing because they design systems for an idealized version of themselves that they see presenting digital panaceas on YouTube (guilty!) rather than their actual workflow patterns. They create elaborate review schedules they never follow, or dashboards so comprehensive they become overwhelming. Effective probing doesn't shout "Look at me"—it starts small and grows organically.
The three types of probing
It's helpful to think about three different types of probing that serve different purposes:
1. Tracking: coordinating mechanisms that move things through funnels of status
This is about managing commitments and open loops—the stuff that keeps you awake at night if it's not handled. It's the coordination mechanisms that help you track interactions and manage state changes over time.
A task moves from "next action" to "waiting for feedback" to "completed." A customer interaction moves from "initial contact" to "proposal sent" to "closed deal." This active movement helps you know what needs attention and when.
Examples include: customer relationship management systems, project scope and task management, ticketing systems and issue tracking, decision logs and meeting follow-ups, and daily habit-tracking. All of these share the common pattern of moving items through predictable status changes.
These tracking mechanisms are built on the structural "furrows" you created in your Preparation phase—simple workflow triggers that move work across your plate. Basic status changes such as todo, doing and done, or project states like paused and active. These can be set up using templates and tags in the tool of your choice.
2. Discovery: rediscovering your garden
Without regular review, your digital garden becomes like a notebook you never reopen—full of valuable information that might as well not exist. This type of probing is about periodically surfacing information, including that which you may have forgotten you have, making connections between ideas captured at different times, and ensuring that your past thinking can inform your current work.
Discovery works through two complementary approaches: directed review and non-directed review.
Directed review follows a structured approach to revisit your notes. Some tools have spaced repetition mechanisms that allow you to structure your own revision. You can also use your MOCs and various collection buckets of information to systematically review specific topics or themes.
Non-directed review has proven equally valuable, if not more generative for me. If you only review the notes you're looking for, you'll keep finding the same connections. A little randomness helps you stumble upon unexpected insights—the article you read six months ago that's suddenly relevant to today's project, or the connection between two seemingly unrelated ideas that sparks a new direction. Features that support this include plugins to retrieve random notes, following link trails, or exploring a visualized graph of nodes in your workspace.
3. Reflection: learning from patterns
Reflection is about occasionally stepping back to see larger patterns in your work and thinking. While tracking and discovery are about managing commitments and growing your knowledge, reflection is about recognizing meta-patterns that become visible over time.
Through reflection, you might discover that you're consistently capturing information about a topic you didn't realize was important to you, or that certain types of notes never get revisited and might not be worth capturing. In a self-development context, it's also about finding what gives and drains energy.
You can decide on your own rhythms for different types of review, but a weekly review is often a good place to start. Set aside some time at the end of your week to think about what worked and what didn't work. This doesn't have to be about the information itself, but rather about yourself as the person processing all this information. Ask questions like: What themes keep appearing in my notes? What questions am I repeatedly trying to answer?
On a practical level, reflection is about adjusting your other systems based on what you learn about your actual patterns, not your intended patterns. What information am I capturing but never using? Where are my biggest pain points? This meta-awareness helps you evolve your knowledge management practice to better match how you actually work and think.
Starting simple: your first probing system
Start where there is the most perceived mental friction. What's causing you the most pain right now? If you're constantly losing track of commitments, focus on better tracking. If you keep re-researching things you've already explored, focus on your MOCs and entry points. If you feel scattered, spend time on reflection.
Set up the time. There's no perfect system, but there is necessary investment. Block time in your calendar for probing—even just 15 minutes weekly. And as tempting as to think AI will solve this, I believe AI can't do this work for you. The value comes from your mind making connections, recognizing patterns, and deciding what deserves attention.
Use what you've already built. Don't create new systems—leverage the structure from your Preparation phase, and focus on iterating as you go along.
Pay attention to what you actually use. Notice which information you find valuable and which you ignore. This tells you what's worth capturing and what adjustments your system needs.
Avoiding common traps
The biggest trap in probing is pursuing comprehensive tracking of everything. Perfect organization is a journey, not a destination—and often not even a worthwhile destination.
The complexity trap: Your probing system should feel easier than not having one. If it feels like work, it's too complicated. Start with basic search and simple lists before building complex dashboards. Avoid creating beautiful, comprehensive dashboards that become overwhelming. I often default to searching rather than returning to custom-built dashboards.
The perfect tracking fallacy: Stop trying to track everything perfectly. You don't need to record every single thing you did on a day so that you can look back years later. Focus on tracking what you actually need to act on, not what might theoretically be useful someday.
Inconsistent rhythms: This is what I'm most guilty of—not sticking to what I set out to do. Creating habits around probing is important because this is slow and patient work. Build probing into existing habits rather than creating entirely new routines.
Focus on functional feedback loops rather than complete coverage. It's better to have reliable systems for your most important information than fragile systems that theoretically handle everything. For example, I keep my next steps tasks in an outline underneath a project node or page. This simple structure makes it easy to see what needs attention without complex tracking systems.
For my writing projects, I have a "Creative log" note where I track all my writing work. It's just a running list with different dates in an outline and the pieces I started working on or progressed during that time. But I know exactly where to go when I want to pick up my writing, and I can see progress over time, which is helpful for the striving mind.
Conclusion: sustainable systems over perfect ones
Probing is the difference between having an impressive information collection and having a system that actually improves your thinking and productivity.
Sustainable beats comprehensive every time. A simple weekly review you actually do is infinitely more valuable than an elaborate dashboard you abandon after a month.
Start with the absolute minimum viable probing system—maybe just 15 minutes of weekly browsing. Pay attention to what you find useful and what you ignore. Build on what works; abandon what doesn't.
This week: Try one 15-minute session of browsing notes from last month. Notice what you find interesting, useful, or surprising. That's your starting point.
Thanks for reading 🙏