Longtime listener and first time asking the question here. I'm quite fascinated by reading your articles, neither the New York Times or your books. You have so much references. So the question is, how do you keep track of all the references? Do you have a method? Let's say if you were to read a book or article and then you find a quote, how do you store them or how do you keep them so that you can refer back when you are doing an article?

Anyways, I'd like to know your method and look forward to hearing. Thank you for all the good work you do. Cheers. Well, when it comes to information management of this type, there's two big schools of thought-- proactive or reactive. So the proactive information managers want to take the information they encounter when they first encounter it and put it into some sort of system, even before they necessarily have a specific use for that information.

They want to get it into a system where it can later be retrieved if needed. And in the more advanced version of those proactive systems where new novel connections can form that themselves might even help give you ideas about what you should be writing about. So this is a really big idea right now.

A lot of the proactive systems you might hear about are inspired, generally speaking, by the Zettelkasten system, where you have contextual links between different pieces of information. Information are like nodes in a graph and you have edges that connect them. Through these connections, you can find information serendipitously. Second brain is a concept like this.

You might have seen-- I think this is Diego Forte's second brain is one example of this. When I had Srini Rao on the show, I interviewed Srini Rao, he talked about his use of a particular Zettelkasten-style note-taking system that he actually had generate for him, basically, article ideas. He finds interesting connections, then all the information he needs is there.

I largely do not use proactive systems. There's an overhead to them that I haven't yet gotten over. There's a lot of overhead to getting that information in there. My time is quite limited. So I often don't have or feel like I have that time to sit back and extract things from the books I'm reading or articles that I'm reading.

I'm not saying it wouldn't work for me, it's just I haven't done it. I am more of the reactive camp, which is a much more minimalist approach. And the reactive camp is, I'm working on this. I got to get a lot of information to help support this thing that I'm working on.

And you go out there and you find some information for that thing, and then you work on it, and you have all that information right there to cite. Almost always, that's how my writing comes together. If I'm working on an article, then I will go out there and find sources I need for that article, and I will keep track of them right there in Scrivener, in my research folder, link, link, link, link, link, link, link, and they're all right there.

That goes to the fact checker. That's where all the citations come from. If I'm working on a book chapter, similar, I have a rough outline of what I want there. That outline might have some sources in mind. But then I go out when I'm working on that book chapter and find those books and find the articles and talk to the people.

And I keep track of right there for this chapter. Here's all the different sources I used. Often, I'll just footnote as I write. OK, here's the source. Here's that source. Here's this source. And I do it on demand. Now, there's little hacks in here. So when I'm book writing, for example, I will use shorthand for my references.

Maybe I'll just mention the PDF name of the article I cited or a brief description of the book title. I tend to then hire an editor to come in later and actually clean up all of those references to be in the proper style citation so that-- there's some hacks.

There's some technical hacks there. But I'm not drawing from some very large second brain Zetalcast and inspired system to get those references. I find them as I need them. Now, what happens here is that over time, if you write enough things and you have put together enough creative ideas, you have been bathed in a lot of interesting notions.

You've been bathed in a lot of interesting citations. You've been bathed in a lot of interesting case studies. And your brain itself implicitly implements some sort of Zetalcast and type system. So then when it comes time, if you've been a writer for 10 years, to do a chapter for a book on a certain topic, already off the top of your head, you get five or six good starting points.

Oh, I should use an example from Lincoln. And I remember listening to a thing about Thoreau. And oh, and I wrote about this guy before. And there's some stuff I learned about him that I never really got around to using. I tend to find that stuff is relatively accessible and it pops up.

And it's a good starting point. And you start with those sources, and those lead you to new sources. So your brain itself actually can do a good job of implementing what a lot of these systems are trying to replace. And so that's how I do it. It's incredibly low overhead.

I'm exposed to a lot of information. I remember a lot of stuff. That's my starting point. But when it comes time to write something, that is when, in the moment, I begin to more systematically try to find sources. Storm right there where I'm working. It all happens more or less on demand.

It may not be the most elegant system. It may not be the most serendipity, promoting, supporting type system. But it's very low overhead. And so far, it seems to work. (upbeat music)