A teacher told me something at the beginning of medical school that I’ve never forgotten: “You will learn—and forget—90% more than most people will learn in their lifetimes.”
I remember thinking that wouldn’t apply to me. Of course I’d remember more than that.
Here we are, nearly 15 years later. It’s so, so true.
There is just so much to know. We learned some wonderful, amazing things in school, and I know I’ve developed an intuition for patient care with experience—learned things through repetition and looking them up over and over. But my secret desire has always been to have all that knowledge encapsulated somewhere my brain can access at a moment’s notice. To suddenly be one of those people who knows exactly where to find the answer at all times.
Is this healthy? Maybe not. But it’s part of what drives me forward in this quest for the perfect personal encyclopedia.
Plus—we paid SO MUCH MONEY for everything we learned. I want to squeeze every last drop out of it if I can.
The problem is that so many notes were stuck in PowerPoint presentations. Fine for learning (mostly, I guess), but useless for looking things up later. In my more motivated semesters I turned these into Word docs, which helped. Some teachers gave us both the outline and the presentation, which was amazing. But I did not do this reliably for four years of school.
So I was stuck with all these unusable notes. But I kept them. And I embarked on a hunt for the perfect place to store them as notes apps flourished. I’m a chronic app-switcher—always have been. I have this desire for things to just feel like they work, and because our brains all work differently and apps are made for many different brains, this is rarely the case. I searched for the right tool and probably wasted a lot of time, but it was also an interesting way to interact with the material over time.
What I eventually realized is that the problem wasn’t finding the right container for my notes. It was making them actually usable.
Storing information is easy. Retrieving it when you need it—in the right context, synthesized with other things you know—that’s the hard part.
A few months ago I started experimenting with something that changed this for me: using Claude (an AI assistant) to actually work with my notes. Not just search them, but interact with them—reorganize, connect ideas, fill gaps, create new reference materials from old ones.
When I first started doing this, it required using a terminal interface (Claude Code), which felt a little like learning a new language. I tried to explain it to some colleagues and they said, “I love you, but I have no idea what you just did.” I realized I was sitting on something valuable but couldn’t share it because the barrier to entry was too high.
That’s why I got excited when Anthropic recently released a desktop version that doesn’t require a terminal. You can point Claude at a folder on your computer and it can actually work with what’s there. Your knowledge base becomes something you can have a conversation with.
The state of my notes is still evolving—still messy, honestly—but it feels closer to my ideal of a personal encyclopedia than ever before. And I can actually use them to make things.
Last week I created a custom plan for a patient dealing with post-chemo neuropathy. All I did was describe what she was dealing with—the symptoms, the context. Claude identified which notes to pull from across my vault: Chinese dietetics, peripheral neuropathy, cancer support. I didn’t have to remember where I’d stored that information or which semester I’d learned it. The connections were made for me. I just had to review and refine.
That synthesis would have taken me hours on my own. I know a lot of that information, but I don’t always have the time to pull it together that way in the middle of a clinical day.
It’s leveling up what I’m able to offer my patients. It’s increasing my own learning and connection to the material. And it’s giving me validation for hanging onto all those old notes for fifteen years.
I’m still early in this experiment. But for the first time, it feels like all that learning might actually become accessible again—not because I found the perfect app to store it in, but because I found a way to work with it instead of just around it.