Why it is built the way it is, and why it is not a filing system.
A head that is busy holding on to things is not free to do anything with them. That is the whole starting point. Put everything down here, and what is left over is attention: for the decision, the idea, the thing you actually wanted to do.
That is where the name comes from. Zanmai (三昧) is the Japanese word for being completely taken up by one thing, samadhi in Buddhism, and in ordinary speech an ending you hang on a word to say nothing but that. It only happens when the other twenty things are not pulling at you.
This is the part almost every system gets wrong, and most assistants along with them. A brain is not a warehouse. It connects things, notices patterns, and makes something that was not there before.
So Zanmai helps on both sides. It takes the weight of remembering, and it works with what it holds: a decision you can now actually make, a piece of research, a document, an image. The pile is not the product. What you do with it is.
Most systems for personal knowledge come from project management. Everything becomes a project, an area, a resource, an archive. That works for work packages and it fights you everywhere else, because most of what matters in a life is not a project and never becomes one.
Worse, the categories are unstable. A trip is a project, then it recurs and becomes an area, then it is over and turns into a resource. Every item asks you a question, and the answer changes over time. That is not thinking, that is administration.
Zanmai is built the way people actually think, and asks for as little from you as possible.
Knowledge is everything you want to keep. Collect it, dump it, no ceremony. Inside it, related things gather into themes, which exist for you rather than for the system, so you can see a structure when you look. The assistant does not need those folders; it follows the links. You do.
Habits are the things that come back. Sport, once it is actually running. The weekly review. Whatever repeats.
Focus is what occupies you right now. That can be a real project, but it can just as easily be a thing on your mind this month. No definition to satisfy.
That is the whole taxonomy. Nothing you keep needs to be classified beyond those three, and anything unclear goes to knowledge.
Everything is linked. A theme, a person, a company, an invoice, a policy. So an invoice is not a lonely PDF in a folder, it is attached to the insurance it belongs to, which is attached to the company, which is attached to the person you talked to.
That is what lets you ask a question in your own words and get an answer, instead of trying to remember which folder you chose two years ago. It is also why a growing vault gets more useful rather than heavier. Hundreds of documents work. So do thousands.
Your folders hold what matters to you, and they are named after states of a head rather than stages of a filing system. What is on its way in has one folder of its own, and it empties itself.
Nothing you write is rewritten. Structure happens around your words, never inside them.
You collect things as they come up. You write a journal. You have things researched. Over months that turns into a body of knowledge that is yours, connected and current.
Then it pays off twice. You make decisions on top of it, and Zanmai helps you think them through. And when something has to come out of it, a document, a piece of research, an image, it gets built from the material you already gathered instead of from nothing.
- How the vault is organised, the same idea as concrete folders
- Finding things again, how the connections are kept
- What Zanmai remembers, what it keeps about the way you work