Here’s a question most productivity people won’t ask you:
What if your system is doing more harm than good?
As in burning you out, stealing your life, and turning you into a person who checks their calendar before going to the hospital.
That last one actually happened to author and neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff.
She was working her way up the success ladder as an executive on Google’s digital health team when she was told she had a life-threatening blood clot and needed to go to the hospital immediately.
But her first instinct wasn’t panic. It wasn’t calling a loved one to let them know.
It was checking her calendar to see if she had the time. She describes that moment in detail on her website, and that moment was a tipping point for her. She quit Google, moved to London, and enrolled in a neuroscience master’s program at King’s College because she wanted to understand how her own mind actually worked.
What happened next is the kind of thing that sounds too good to be true, but it is: she accidentally built one of the most thoughtful PKM systems in the world while trying to study for her degree.
The Accidental Newsletter
When Anne-Laure started her academic journey, she was drowning in research papers. So she did what any good neuroscientist would do:
She looked for the evidence on how to actually retain what she was reading.
In doing so, she stumbled upon a concept called the generation effect, which is where the brain encodes information more deeply when you produce it in your own words.
The trick is to avoid passive consumption. If you write what you learned in your own words instead of just making highlights, it leads to dramatically stronger retention.
So she made a deal with herself. She would write about what she was studying every week, in plain language, in her own words, and publish it publicly to stay accountable.
That newsletter became Ness Labs, and it now has over 100,000 subscribers.
She didn’t set out to build an audience. She set out to learn better. The audience she built was a byproduct of a PKM system that actually worked. And in this newsletter, I want to break it down and examine it piece by piece.
So here's a full teardown of Anne-Laure's Creativity Flywheel.
Capture: Follow What Stops You
Anne-Laure keeps what she calls a "writing inbox," which is a running list of ideas she can draw from whenever she sits down to write.
The trigger is simple: anything she finds interesting gets captured to this writing inbox. A book, a podcast, a conversation with someone. If it catches her attention, it goes on the list. She describes her writing inbox as "long enough to last a few months at least," and she's constantly adding to it.
The tools she uses to capture inspiration to this writing inbox are determined by the context. On the go, she uses Google Keep with separate lists for article ideas, product ideas, random thoughts, and book recommendations. She uses this because it's low-friction and always available. Anything that needs more room to breathe moves into Roam Research, where she does her actual thinking and starts to write things out in her own words.
That last part matters. Getting ideas into her own language isn't just a note-taking habit; it's where the generation effect kicks in. The act of rewriting what she's encountered is what turns a fleeting reaction into something she can actually use later.
Curate: Tending What’s Worth Keeping
Not every captured idea makes it further in Anne-Laure’s Creativity Flywheel. Her curation happens through her public digital garden, Mental Nodes, a linked notebook she describes as “a space to connect early-stage ideas, collect evergreen notes, and plant the seeds for more ambitious work.”
The notes there are explicitly unfinished. She’s clear about them being personal thoughts and even says on the about page, "You’d probably be right to disagree with many of them.”
By publishing ideas before they’re ready, she’s using public accountability as a curation filter. If a thought isn’t interesting enough to share in rough form, it probably isn’t interesting enough to develop.
The parallel pipeline is telling too. Raw thoughts go into her private note-taking app. Longer essays go on the blog. Mental Nodes sits between the two. This in-between space is where ideas graduate from capture to something worth returning to.
Connect: The Unexpected Thread
Anne-Laure's system is built on a belief most productivity tools don't account for: the best connections aren't the ones you plan.
The mechanism that makes this possible is bi-directional linking, the feature at the heart of tools like Roam Research and Obsidian that lets every note show what other notes link to it, not just what it links to. It's a small technical detail with a big practical consequence: instead of filing a note into a folder and forgetting it, every note stays visible to the rest of your system. This allows old ideas to surface when new ones reference them, and threads you didn't know you were pulling start to appear.
Over time, something magical starts to happen. An idea you captured while reading a neuroscience paper turns out to have something to say about a note you wrote after a difficult personal conversation. A half-formed thought from six months ago suddenly becomes the missing piece of something you're working on today. You didn't file those notes next to each other. The garden grew that way on its own.
This is the stage most PKM systems are theoretically built for, but most people never get this PKM payoff. They capture and maybe curate, but the vault never gets rich enough (they don't visit it often enough) for the unexpected connections to show up. Anne-Laure's approach fixes this by making the garden the primary interface. Not a search box, not a tag cloud, but a linked network you actually wander through. The connections find you as much as you find them.
Cultivate: The Mind Garden
This is where Anne-Laure’s framework gets most interesting, and most distinct from the top-down filing cabinet approach most PKM systems default to.
She calls it the Mind Garden, rooted in the French phrase cultiver son jardin intérieur, which means “to tend to your internal garden.” The metaphor is structural, not decorative. In her words:
“Taking care of your mind involves cultivating your curiosity (the seeds), growing your knowledge (the trees), and producing new thoughts (the fruits).” (Source: Mind Garden post)
In her system, cultivating means returning to notes over time, adding to them, and giving them time to grow and mature. Not because she planned to, but because new reading or thinking makes an old note suddenly relevant again.
The key insight: you don’t know what an idea really is until it’s been in the ground for a while. Premature organization is the enemy of unexpected insight. The gardener doesn’t decide which seeds become the tallest trees. She just keeps showing up and giving those seeds the right conditions to grow.
Her ongoing PhD research at King’s College (now UKRI-funded, focused on the neuroscience of curiosity, ADHD, and lifelong learning) feeds directly back into this stage. The science she’s generating in the lab becomes the fertilizer for the inner garden.
Create: From Garden to Published Essay
The finished essays on Ness Labs aren’t written from scratch. They’re harvested.
Anne-Laure’s process is explicit about this:
“I seed my mind garden with lots of raw notes. I then connect the dots between notes to see if anything interesting emerges. I then take the most interesting ones and turn them into actual essays to publish on my blog.” (Source: Embarque interview)
The path from note to published piece runs through a deliberately simple stack:
- Bookmarking, brainstorming, and outlining all happen in Roam Research
- From there, drafts move into Google Drive for the actual writing (where she does almost all of her work, solo or with collaborators)
- The finished piece goes live on the Ness Labs blog (built on WordPress) and lands in readers’ inboxes via Kit.
She also maintains a strict daily writing practice: one hour blocked every morning, first thing when she opens her laptop. Not waiting for inspiration. Not trying to polish something for two weeks before publishing.
In her words:
“Instead of waiting for my elusive muse, I use time blocking.” (Source: Embarque interview)
She publishes, incorporates feedback, and learns from it for the next piece (that's the Creativity Flywheel in motion).
In my opinion, this is why her work reads differently than most productivity content. She’s not summarizing research she found last week. She’s synthesizing ideas that have been growing alongside each other in her system, making connections that only become visible with time.
Her book Tiny Experiments is the longest version of this: a full argument, built from years of cultivated notes, that rigid goal-setting creates anxiety and narrows exploration — and that curiosity-driven small experiments produce more growth and insight than any optimization system.
It’s not just a book about setting better goals. It’s also a book about what happens when you let knowledge accumulate long enough to surprise you.
PKM Takeaways From Anne-Laure's System
Anne-Laure’s contribution to PKM isn’t a tool or a framework. It’s a reframe — and it’s one the Creativity Flywheel framework is built around too.
The goal isn’t to organize your notes. The goal is to think better, and eventually, to create something worth sharing.
The generation effect alone is worth crafting a system around. Every time you take a highlight and turn it into a note written in your own words, you’re not just filing information. You’re encoding it. Most people skip this step entirely and wonder why their vault never produces anything useful.
The mind garden metaphor is also worth stealing — or more accurately, worth recognizing in your own system. It's also a principle that LifeHQ (my epic done-for-you Obsidian vault) is built on. If LifeHQ is doing its job, it’s not just a filing cabinet. It’s a living system that grows alongside you. It's a place where the connections you didn’t plan for turn out to be the ones that matter most.
It doesn't happen automatically. You still have to put in the work. But a well-designed Creativity Flywheel makes it a lot easier.
