Capture everything. The real problem isn’t how much — it’s what you can find.

There’s a worry in PKM circles that capturing too much is dangerous. The argument: if you clip everything you find online, you’re not really learning it. You’re hoarding.

That’s half-true. If you’re taking a course and you clip instead of doing the exercises, you’ll miss the learning. That’s a learning strategy problem — not a PKM problem. The vault itself has no ceiling. You can’t overflow it. Whether you clip selectively or broadly, you end up with hundreds of thousands of entries eventually — it’s just a matter of how fast you get there.

What “out of control” actually means at scale:

• At 500 notes, the problem is organization: do I have a folder or tag for this?
• At 5,000 notes, the problem shifts: can I find the thing I know I captured?
• At 50,000+ notes, the problem is retrieval design — does my system surface the right note when I’m actively working on something that needs it?

Capturing aggressively is fine. What fails isn’t the vault — it’s the retrieval mechanism that never got built. The notes that never get retrieved aren’t a problem. The ones you needed but couldn’t find are.

The question worth asking isn’t “am I capturing too much?” It’s: when I’m writing or researching something specific, how does the right note find its way back to me? And more importantly — how do I build that retrieval layer into my actual project workflow rather than treating it as an afterthought?

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Zhenia