Since Family Knowledge is a major effort this year, let's understand what we're talking about. Curiosity about a topic we want to explore usually begins with questions like these that I will explain further in this article.
- What is family knowledge?
- How is that different from personal knowledge?
- Why am I spending my time doing this?
- Why is it important to me and my family?
Personal knowledge
Personal knowledge focuses primarily on thinking, linking, and sharing for yourself.
- Learning, understand, reflection, growth
- Thoughts, experiences, memories, knowledge, and skills
- An Obsidian vault is a "second brain" that supports our "first brain"
Family knowledge
Family knowledge is created and shared for the benefit of your family circle of loved ones.
- What personal knowledge is needed by your family later?
- Sharing linked Family Notes in a Family vault (and binder)
- Everything your family needs to know and do when you're not available, whether illness, injury, dementia, stroke, or death
Do it now
It takes some effort to get this done, but now is the time to get started. Hopefully, my experience will make the process easier for you as we focus on these elements.
- Notes: I have an Obsidian vault with linked notes (and binder)
- Reviews: weekly meeting (30–60 min) to review & discuss focus items
- Accounts: logins, websites, workflows, and automation
- Documents: paperless digital files, assets, and legacy
- Estate plan: wills, trusts, advance directives, etc.
Accounts
It helps to establish a map with an initial outline with themes for each quarter and month, as well as have a focus topic for each weekly review. This will evolve as you go, and it can be adjusted based on your experience. We both look forward to our Family review each week, which have really worked out well.
For example, we started out with passwords, accounts, and budget; we wanted to address the area of finances because we already addressed our basic estate planning earlier. However, we discovered that it would take much more time to review all our accounts with their websites, documents, and workflows so we include several each week and spread it out.
Also, we found it extremely helpful to consolidate everything in each account note rather than having account information scattered across multiple notes on logins, budget, etc. This allowed us to develop a consistent structure for each account in spite of all the unique differences in each account website. I will provide more details about the templates that we use for our accounts and reviews.
Technology
Be gentle and patient with your family and respect that this might be a lot to learn for them since you may have doing all this yourself until now. There probably is quite a bit to learn about technology and apps, so it helps to break these topics into bite-size chunks (and repetition helps).
For example, my wife is not familiar with macOS at all, although she does have an iPad and iPhone, and she has never heard of Obsidian or Markdown, so there's some orientation that will be needed (which really helped a lot). There is a lot that you do all the time without even thinking about it because it's familiar, but you must look at everything from their perspective if they have to do what you do now.
Status
We have made significant progress since we kicked this effort off in January. I have created many posts in the Linking Your Thinking (LYT) community on Circle during LYT Workshop 15, Notemaking Mastery, and several LYT Gongs. I did a 10-min LYT 15 Showcase presentation, and recently a 60-min LYT Community Event on Family Knowledge. Now I'm publishing that content in my blog, website, and newsletter to help more people.
Summary
This topic has resonated with many, and I hope it's useful and practical for you too. I will share what I have done and learned so far, and continue to post my progress with updates along the way. Please follow me on this journey to help our families.
