Propagation - The art of growing ideas

Propagation - The art of growing ideas

With your purpose as your North Star, your system prepared with thoughtful structure, and information effectively planted, we arrive at perhaps the most transformative aspect of personal knowledge management: propagation.

To propagate means "to grow plants from a cutting" or "to spread ideas widely." In the context of personal knowledge management, it means taking what you've planted and transforming it into something valuable.

It's not enough to capture insights; you need to work with them, connect them, and transform them into something greater than the sum of their parts. Propagation is fundamentally about moving beyond the collector's fallacy.

This is where captured information becomes actionable knowledge, where scattered thoughts become coherent insights, and where your digital garden truly begins to bear fruit. It's the time consuming work of actually thinking, where the real value emerges. Instead of managing a library, you're building a laboratory for your mind.

This pillar transforms your knowledge management from a passive repository into an active thinking environment.

The art of growing ideas

But how exactly does this transformation happen? It begins with understanding the messy, non-linear nature of creative work itself.

New ideas are haphazard and unstructured. True knowledge work isn't linear—it requires space for ideas to simmer and develop organically. This is the latent space, where half formed musings and fragments of observations come together to yield value. This is where the flexible lightweight structures introduced in the preparation phase really come into their own. It's a dynamic unveiling, rather than a perfect formula.

Effective propagation requires intentional movement of information through your system. The key is creating systems that make it easy to move valuable content from temporary capture to permanent development.

Your evolution strategy should recognize that:

  • Fleeting thoughts and basic observations can be processed and either developed or discarded
  • Reflections and insights deserve more permanent homes where they can be built upon
  • Questions and ideas need spaces where they can be explored and connected to related concepts

A quick tangent: I often look at the advertising promises of project management software like ClickUp and Motion which will use AI to transform your workflows. Perhaps in an agency environment where things need to get done on strict timelines that is a necessity. But in the personal domain, it feels like the process of knowledge management and creation doesn't work like that—it's a continual non-linear approach that resists rigid systematization.

Linking as the catalyst

Understanding this non-linear nature leads us to one of the most powerful aspects of modern knowledge management: the ability to create meaningful connections. This is all achieved through linking or tagging your information.

With recent developments across different note-taking platforms, linking and tagging have started to take on different meanings, so I'm attempting to reduce it to one word, linking, and leave the interpretation up to you depending on your context.

Imagine your notes as objects in a digital universe that are all connected to one another. At the most basic level, it's important to differentiate the different objects in your database. The first type of link effectively groups objects in your workspace by what type of information they are.

"This is a meeting note. This is a person. This is a task."

The next level of linking is beginning to define the relationships between different pieces of information: adding context, and enriching the connection. The simplest version of this is concept based linking, which adds a high-level association to a piece of information or paragraph in your workspace, a keyword which allows you to resurface it in a future context when you're looking for related information.

You can also add further context when adding these concepts, building out some of the reason why you're perhaps adding that word. You can also add more words to create multiple different hooks of association, facilitating improved retrieval and helping you abandon the location-dependent desktop/folder paradigm in your organizational practices.

You can also bring in a time dimension, using links to dates to highlight the evolution of your thoughts, connecting current observations to past experiences or learnings.

It's important to not get caught up in finding the perfect structure. That can be a tempting trap because it feels productive, but in reality it's not. Trust that when you need something you'll find it, and make peace with the fact that things are going to fall through the cracks. Information needs to be filtered—otherwise everything you read on the internet would require cataloging every related quote and concept. We need to chew, digest, and filter out the relevant information.

MOCs as propagation tools

While linking creates the pathways for connection, you need larger structures to hold and develop these connections over time. This is where Maps of Content or MOCs become essential. An MOC is far more than a simple index—it's a cluster of information that maps "things" in context with other "things."

What might these things be? MOCs might correspond to your major areas of interest, ongoing projects, or persistent questions you're exploring. They could be all your notes for a subject you're studying, broken down in outlines, or branching off in linked notes. It could be the outline for a book you're writing with different chapters as links, and notes on each chapter included below the header.

MOCs go beyond indexes, as they're working documents that allow you to update your thinking. As you create and customize these maps, you're not only organizing information—you're actively developing your understanding, building out your notes and interleaving observations with other notes.

MOCs as scratchpads

Another useful metaphor is thinking of MOCs as "scratchpads"—working spaces where ideas can grow organically without the pressure of immediate completion. It might take the pressure off to work with a looser, unstructured approach.

Rather than creating separate pages for every potential essay or project that might never materialize, you can drag ideas into these digital holding spaces or workbenches where you aggregate related thoughts across different domains of your life.

The beauty of this approach is that it allows ideas to cross-pollinate naturally while providing focused spaces for development. In practice, this means creating landing pages for your key themes where you can:

  • Bring together related observations from different sources and contexts
  • Work with ideas in bite-sized chunks rather than feeling pressured to produce complete pieces
  • Let patterns emerge organically as you accumulate thoughts over time
  • Create jumping-off points for future work when inspiration strikes

How do you decide when to create a new MOC? MOCs provide cognitive support by reliably holding any ideas you put in them, while giving you the ability to rapidly shuffle and edit each interrelated idea. When your thinking becomes constrained, or there's suddenly friction in your work, you've probably reached a squeeze point where you're no longer able to manage all the information you need within a single place. That's when you might create another branch or MOC. 

This allows you to aggregate notes and information at different levels of abstraction that are meaningful to you. This creates an environment where you're thinking at a higher level, learning more deeply.

Going beyond organization

Beyond their organizational function, MOCs serve a deeper purpose in knowledge development. Many great thinkers have emphasized the importance of writing out your beliefs to articulate what you believe to be true about the world. This is challenging work—hopefully the work of a lifetime as you continue to evolve and mature. The process of externalizing your thoughts makes abstract concepts tangible, allowing you to examine them from different perspectives and identify logical gaps or inconsistencies in your reasoning.

Your knowledge system therefore becomes a place where you can test and refine your thinking by articulating ideas clearly, identify gaps or contradictions in your understanding, track how your beliefs evolve over time, and build coherent frameworks from disparate insights. This isn't about creating rigid doctrine, but about developing a living document of your understanding that can grow and change as you do.

    Creating creative continuity

    While MOCs provide the structure for developing ideas, maintaining momentum in creative work requires one more element: continuity.

    Another practice worth developing is maintaining a record of what you were working on each day, especially in a creative context. In my own practice, I have a Creative log file, which I'm admittedly not very disciplined about maintaining. Still, it's nice to log the different pieces you may have been working on, if anything to provide a jolt to the brain, allowing you to quickly reconnect with your previous thinking and momentum.

    It need not be super strict, but it's helpful to have these "Hemingway bridges"—reference points that help you resurface what you were exploring and pick up where you left off. This creative continuity prevents the frustration of staring at yesterday's work wondering what you were thinking.

    The compound effect of working with ideas


    When these practices—linking, MOCs, and creative continuity—work together consistently, something remarkable happens. Good propagation habits compound over time. Each insight you develop thoughtfully becomes part of a growing web of understanding. Random observations from months ago suddenly connect to current projects. Meeting notes become the foundation for strategic thinking. Personal reflections reveal patterns in your growth and decision-making.

    This compound effect ultimately transforms not just how you organize information, but how you think and create. Propagation bridges the gap between consuming information and creating knowledge, transforming your system from empty structure into a living repository of your thinking and learning. Your knowledge system becomes not just a record of what you've learned, but an active partner in your thinking process—delivering clearer thinking, deeper understanding, and the ability to connect ideas across domains in ways that create genuine insight and innovation.

    The journey through the 5Ps framework is almost complete, but the system requires one final element to ensure it continues serving your evolving needs. Next in this series, we'll explore the final pillar: Probing, where we'll examine how reflection and course-correction ensure your knowledge system continues to serve your evolving needs and goals.

    Thanks for reading 🙏

    Questions to consider: What percentage of the information you capture do you actually develop into insights? How might creating dedicated spaces for idea development change your relationship with your knowledge system?