He Built His Own Encyclopedia. He Says Learning Everything Isn’t Everything.

I'm fascinated with how the smartest people in the world get their work done. That's what Superorganizers is about: seeing all of the little habits that make up a great work day and a great life. Artificial intelligence has changed what it means to be productive and efficient at work, so we decided to revisit some of our favorite interview subjects to understand how their routines have changed in the era of AI models. Most recently, we spoke to startup adviser Gaurav Vohra. Today, we’re back with software engineer Ceasar Bautista for an update on our very first edition of this column.—Dan Shipper

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Ceasar Bautista has been writing his own personal encyclopedia since 2013. It's like Wikipedia for his life. When we last spoke to him in 2019, Bautista—then a software engineer at the venture capital firm Signal Fire—was documenting everything he knew so he never forgot what he learned. He has entries as varied as modern art, linear growth, travel insurance, and enamel.

Years later, his encyclopedia continues—it now comprises 3,061 articles with 3,835 images. But his philosophy around note-taking has changed considerably. We caught up with Bautista about his evolving approach to acquiring knowledge, why he's become skeptical of productivity apps, and his newfound obsession with stoking his memory using Anki flashcards.

What was the original concept behind the personal encyclopedia?

In college, I was forgetting the contents of some books I had read and loved, and was stumbling trying to explain them. I’d read these books only a few years earlier, which meant the half-life of my memory was extremely short.

I wanted to try different hierarchical ways to organize notes, but was failing. There probably is no great way to divide up the branches of knowledge in a clean tree structure because there’s a ton of overlap. But that’s what I was trying to do—my original goal was to create beautiful notes, rather than actually have them serve my goals. 

More than a decade later, the reality of the situation was that I had serious undiagnosed problems with generalized anxiety disorder. One of the symptoms of anxiety is to obsessively research things. I do think some amount of note-taking makes sense and is reasonable, but if the goal is real productivity, we have to keep our priorities straight, and make sure notes are pretty far down on the list.

Are you still keeping up the encyclopedia? What's stayed the same and what's changed?

Yes, daily. The software remains virtually untouched from 2019. There haven't been especially compelling reasons to improve it. I am generally bearish on note-taking apps. Neither notes nor learning have inherent value. The value comes from their ability to help you achieve whatever goals you may have. Reading about arcane topics and meticulously taking notes is not a good strategy for getting things you want out of life. There just isn’t enough time to follow every curiosity. And to make a more subversive claim, the publishing industry is very clever about getting the attention of intelligent people, so we have to be especially vigilant of where we’re spending our intellect. Don’t be a collector of information.

This same pragmatic ideology also informs what makes a genuinely good note. We generally consult our notes when we’re making decisions and know there is relevant information that we can’t quite recall. Notes should be written like a dossier that one might deliver to a billionaire or a president: The most important information should go up front, with clear frameworks about how to make good decisions in that area, and then all the details after. Contrast this with Wikipedia, which is structured to present information about a topic if one wants to understand the topic in its entirety. I used to write in a similar style, with my theory being that if I went and systematically deeply understood, say, the core 10,000 ideas that underpin everything, I’d basically understand the world. I think that might work, but it would take too long.