[HN Gopher] Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit
___________________________________________________________________
Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit
Author : leephillips
Score : 83 points
Date : 2022-04-30 17:31 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.otherlife.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.otherlife.co)
| syndacks wrote:
| By "bull in a china shop" does he really mean "the elephant in
| the corner"?
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| This rant ignores the fact that our technology has failed to
| provide the average user with a common, ubiquitous, low-effort
| way to recall all the useful information that we can now dig up.
|
| These billion dollar tech cos either think that I'll just be able
| to search google again when I really need it (what a joke!) or
| that I'll spend more time using tags to be able to find it again,
| but that requires a list of tags way to long to be easily fluent
| with and way too much librarian work on my part.
|
| I have endless lists of bookmarks organized into ~50 categories
| that are still too broad to be useful (mostly because folder in
| folder bookmarks are a bad UX in Firefox).
|
| I started using Notion because I like to see URL previews, but
| that list gets unwieldy fast and it is more of a pain to populate
| than saving a bookmark.
|
| And now, I am down to a system where I keep 10 browser windows
| open with up to 40 tabs in each and if a tab gets too stale, I
| dump it in a bookmark folder and hope I'll find it when I need
| it. Each window is given a name based on its topic with the
| Window Titler add-on and uses non-treed ('cause trees are a
| stupid waste of space) side tabs ('cause top tabs are unreadable
| and STUPID) with the Sidebery Add-On. Each window with up to 16
| pinned tabs that are major sources for that window's topical
| links. This system actually works for me and requires a low-
| effort flow to manage information for someone with a huge variety
| of work, interests and pursuits.
|
| What I really want is a browser that has all that out of the box
| so that it works seamlessly (e.g. Sidebery doesn't recognize
| Window Titler titles so moving tabs between windows is a huge
| pain), isn't a pain to setup on a new machine (I hate Mozilla for
| making it so hard to get rid of the top tabs!!!) and doesn't
| require me to trust several nearly anonymous Add-On makers.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| I hope this isn't true, hah. I don't really invest in any
| existing PKMs but i nevertheless spend a fair bit of time writing
| the foundation of my own.
|
| Regardless of the implementation, i want something to archive
| and/or retain (in the working memory sense) my conclusions. As
| without repetition i feel like a majority of what i read, and any
| conclusions therein, evaporate. Maybe the author would argue that
| if i want to retain it i should study it! .. but i don't, it's
| just some article i read.
|
| Are my only choices to invest heavily or become increasing narrow
| minded? The things i actually invest in i know quite well.. but
| what does that matter? I'd like to be generally, reasonably
| informed. I'd like some minor effort spent reading broad topics
| to not be in vain. Besides, even if i invested heavily - there's
| only so many hours in the day; only so many things i can invest
| in to properly retain.
|
| It seems reasonable to me to seek software to aid in this. But it
| feels like the author is attacking the idea of PKM just as much
| as the implementations. I can imagine many implementations are
| akin to snake oil.. but the goal seems reasonable. No?
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| > and any conclusions therein, evaporate.
|
| I'm in a similar but different boat: my brain remembers the
| conclusion but discards all of the "useless" details used to
| arrive there. This works fine on a personal level, but when
| someone challenges your position, you find yourself unable to
| defend it because all of the supporting details have long since
| evaporated.
|
| So PKM might be useful to archive away the details after you
| reach a conclusion.
|
| I highly, highly recommend having your own private wiki. It is
| the 80/20 sweet spot of PKM.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I've been playing with an app idea that helps people
| communicate these sorts of conclusions to each other to
| whatever level of detail they require. You can drill all the
| way down to the premise/axiom level if you want but you don't
| have to. The graphical animation is nice, but like you say, a
| private wiki can get you most of the way there.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| > I'm in a similar but different boat: my brain remembers the
| conclusion but discards all of the "useless" details used to
| arrive there. This works fine on a personal level, but when
| someone challenges your position, you find yourself unable to
| defend it because all of the supporting details have long
| since evaporated.
|
| > So PKM might be useful to archive away the details after
| you reach a conclusion.
|
| 100%. I hold the same mindset!
| tunesmith wrote:
| I see knowledge as being a dag where the edges are directional
| and where the edges actually mean something, meaning multiple
| types of edges. Generic backlinks are nowhere near sufficient
| and lead to the sort of combinatorial explosion the author
| talks about. But when you have "statement" and "statement"
| necessitates "conclusion", (the edge means "necessitates") then
| reviewing the graph over time can actually lead toward you
| paring down the graph and distilling it to the knowledge that
| is most useful to you.
| kopkako wrote:
| Wow, does this ring true for me. I had been using Evernote for at
| least 7 years, then switched to Notion a few years ago,
| completely "reinventing my digital life" and creating my "Second
| Brain" with the P.A.R.A method by Tiago Forte.
|
| I loved that for the first few months, then slowly but surely the
| sheer amount of interconnected nodes became... oberwhelming, to
| the point of me almost completely stopping to enter in new data.
|
| I recently realized that I kind of hated my Second Brain, and did
| a painful migration away from it, to the stupidly simple
| Notes.app (the built-in Apple one).
|
| Feels much better now: Less worrying about bloat, I deleted a
| bunch of stuff and do less procrastinating and fiddling about
| with the structure of it all.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Some stuff must be digital of course but I always find paper
| notebooks superior in the end. Something about physically
| writing it down makes me remember it better. And even though
| they can become disorganized I like occasionally flipping
| through an old one - it often triggers memories associated with
| the time I wrote the note or people I worked with that I would
| not get with digital files.
|
| I think the other thing is it forces you to be more space
| conscious - you do not have unlimited real estate. Large
| notebook for some things, smaller handbook for portable, and
| notes that are compressed or adjusted for each.
| civilized wrote:
| A lot of technical people think to themselves "if I master this
| tool, something wonderful will happen," when in reality you
| usually have to figure out the wonderful thing you want to
| happen, not just trust a tool to manifest it for you.
| nojito wrote:
| >Sure, you could say that I just didn't learn to use it correctly
| (and link me to a paid course, no doubt).
|
| Nailed it on the head. Productivity is ripe full of gurus and
| experts looking to make a buck.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I feel productivity is one of those areas that people get into
| and spend a lot of time thinking and writing about, to the
| detriment of their productivity.
| hkon wrote:
| Procrastinating so much that their relief became their
| passion.
| tronicdude wrote:
| PKM is not bullshit; it is extremely helpful to a lot of people.
| This article seems a bit pointless. Yes, the graph is used to
| advertise a lot of these systems, but the point of the graph
| isn't the graph itself; it's just showing the power of backlinks.
| I use Obsidian and haven't looked at my graph since I started.
| But I use backlinks regularly. The graph is merely advertising
| the power of backlinks.
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| And it is extremely unhelpful to a lot of people aswell. It
| doesn't work for everyone.
| moltar wrote:
| I've tried a bunch of these sorts of tools. And nothing stuck
| over the years.
|
| But two things did after all, recently:
|
| 1. Using Bear.app. I realized that I just hated slow, sloggy note
| apps. Bear is native and very fast! Faster than Apple's own
| Notes.app!
|
| 2. Not worrying about organizing too much. Especially upfront. I
| just start dumping everything. Then _maybe_ organize later. But
| more often not. Just leave it as is. I can usually find it fast
| with a simple keyword search anyways.
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| > I've tried a bunch of these sorts of tools. And nothing stuck
| over the years.
|
| Yeah same with me, I've tried many tools like Org-Roam inside
| Emacs which is yet another Zettelkasten type of system, doesn't
| really make sense for me.
|
| So I just stuck to using plain text notes with whatever
| structure I want them to have, no standard structure, just
| whatever structure I want on a given day, and that is how I can
| actually get myself to write shit down, rather than wondering
| about structure and how this note links to that etc.
| rvzx wrote:
| This is mostly a set of surface-level arguments about superficial
| aspects of personal knowledge management.
|
| Yes, influencers pitching specific methodologies are often full
| of shit. Yes, network graphs are often boring and gratuitous.
| Yes, being overly focused on the tools used to complete tasks
| often gets in the way of completing tasks.
|
| None of that is super interesting.
|
| Particularly disappointing are the references to obesity and
| hoarding. Taking notes isn't hoarding. Storing notes isn't
| obesity. Physical and mental health issues should not be fodder
| for bad analogies. The act of writing notes and being able to
| search and read notes is useful for anyone, and is essential for
| those with memory issues.
|
| The idea that ought to be central to this post, cutting a line
| through the knowledge graph, could have been really useful and
| compelling if not surrounded by trivial complaints. It would be
| fascinating to explore how knowledge management tools can help
| people do the job of cutting a line through a graph, though
| that's not really explored in this post.
|
| Maybe with this post the author got a little lost in the
| knowledge graph in his head rather than cutting a line.
|
| His business Indie Thinkers seems to share a market with many
| personal knowledge management tools. Of course it does.
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| I agree, this blog post is too long for what he was actually
| trying to say, he could of gotten his point through in a few
| paragraphs rather than an entire page, I'm surprised that I had
| the patience to read all of it today.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I liked the first part of the article, up to the knowledge graph
| discussion.
|
| The author is lumping all KGs together. The term also applies to
| KGs that help run Google, Meta, etc. Good tech for using
| disparate data sources.
|
| Personal KGs? Then I agree more with the author. Perhaps the
| problem is companies like Roam reusing existing terms?
| creakingstairs wrote:
| > The sex appeal of the Knowledge Graph derives from the fantasy
| of not having to decide what's most important
|
| I write way more notes because that decision is taken away from
| me.
|
| > Not only will the graph tell you what's most important
|
| While I'm sure some people do, I never thought to use the graph
| for finding what's important. It's always been about the
| connection between topics rather than the number of connections.
| The act of consciously connecting the topic to another topic is a
| great way to internalise it.
|
| The notes also do help me write blog posts when I want to. But
| their structures do not get determined by the graph.
|
| The thing I like the most about having a graph is just doing a
| "wiki surfing" in your own wiki. It's quite fun and sometimes I
| make new connections with the topic.
|
| I do agree that showing off how many nodes/connection your graph
| has is bullshit and I still quite liked the post :)
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Google knows that search solves pretty much all of these
| knowledge management issues. But there are deep conflicts of
| interest, and curious corporate blind spots to solving this
| individually.
|
| So why don't all my web browser keep a complete copy of
| everything I have viewed (ok maybe not _those_ sites) - so I an
| do a text search for "that thing about female doctor who was
| first ever".
|
| Partly because if I had that on my local disk I would not need to
| go to the google home page. More fairly that particular search
| has been followed by X thousand previous people and Voogle knows
| how many ended up finding something useful.
|
| But this does not solve for Outlook. The second biggest search
| opportunity surely is corporate emails. Gmail must have shown the
| outlook product managers how to do search ... 15 years ago. Yet
| it is still clunky unintuitive slow and frequently wrong.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| > So why don't all my web browser keep a complete copy of
| everything I have viewed (ok maybe not those sites) - so I an
| do a text search for "that thing about female doctor who was
| first ever".
|
| This existed for a bit, it was a Chrome extension called Memex.
| They pivoted to social bookmarks and it absolutely crushed me
| losing it. I had become very used to only needing to remember a
| few keywords from something I'd read in the past and then being
| able to rapidly finhd it.
| luckydata wrote:
| Google has one of the most severe knowledge management issues
| I've experienced in my career and search is not very helpful in
| taming it. I'm not convinced that's a good example.
| sfink wrote:
| I want this article to be correct because it would validate my
| failed attempts at knowledge management. But I can't say that it
| isn't just some random person stridently arguing against the
| positions of a bunch of other random people. (And the author has
| the disadvantage that they totally misused the "bull in a china
| shop" metaphor...)
|
| I certainly find it believable that people will fetishize
| knowledge graphing, because it's something I would do: spend lots
| of time to produce something sophisticated and fancy and utterly
| useless for real-world impact. But the abuses of people like me
| don't disprove the value. And the argument that it won't
| magically do some things, like derive the importance of specific
| bits of data, doesn't prove that it won't do other things.
|
| Anything we produce or decide is based on a substrate of
| information, sort of a soil in which ideas and conclusions can
| grow. It doesn't seem ridiculous that it could be beneficial to
| take some intentional action to enrich that soil. Just don't
| expect that it's going to produce amazing results all by itself;
| I agree with the author that willful linearization and filtering
| is critical when you're trying to make something out of it.
| QuikAccount wrote:
| I agree with the general idea here but there are some opinions
| here I can't get behind.
|
| > Individuals blessed with high degrees of industriousness and
| orderliness will build sophisticated media diets, note-taking
| systems, and automated archiving pipelines much more effectively
| than those less blessed with these traits.
|
| I can tell you by nature I am not a smart organized person but
| implementing certain systems in my life has made this easier. I
| don't think what I'm saying necessarily contradicts this quote
| but this quote seems like it is reducing the argument to "the
| haves and have nots."
| the_af wrote:
| I think what the quote is saying is that naturally organized
| people are the ones who build all these management systems. For
| them, they work because they are naturally organized; pretty
| much any system will work. Because they lack this insight, they
| think they found the One True Way, but for people less
| naturally organized, every system will be a burden, including
| this One True Way.
| rhizome wrote:
| I think everybody has a different sense of organization, and
| the prevalence of organization schemes and apps is in hopes
| that enough people can relate to a particular app-developer's
| preferences and patterns. At the end of the day though, I
| think productivity is such a chaotic and fragmented genre of
| tools because everybody is different and there are as many
| productivity methods as there are people. I've certainly
| never found one that I've been comfortable depending on, and
| it just so happens that I've had the idea (and the skills) to
| create The Best Todo for years, details of which are lurking
| on some note pages in this pile over here (and a few over
| there).
| FourthProtocol wrote:
| I use Windows Explorer. Simple folder names like work, with
| subfolders for employers. Another folder for car, identity, one
| for medical, another for my son with subfolders for reports,
| pictures he drew, etc.
|
| I can find anything very quickly. When search fails me because I
| forgot a vendor name or something, I just navigate the folders.
|
| No software required other than what comes with Windows.
| emteycz wrote:
| Exactly!
|
| My GF's grandmother was very confused when we didn't know what
| database (sic!) she has on her computer, she said every
| computer has it... and then she has shown us her perfect
| categorization of documents into folders... We (both
| programmers) felt very dumb that day :-)
| moosey wrote:
| It's great to have a note system where you can get general
| information about a subject. However, such a system will not
| encourage you to read and recollect the information on a regular
| basis.
|
| It seems to me that the only good personal knowledge management
| system is a self-testing tool, like Anki. When going through your
| daily tests, completed questions can have links to the source of
| the information. If you find yourself interested in studying the
| material again, you can follow the link, or retest using decks
| that you can build on the fly based on the tags of the question
| that caught your interest.
|
| Personally, I just link to the original material that I found,
| instead of a personal note system. When I write notes, I write
| them by hand and regularly throw away binders of material. The
| handwriting was the important part, fully reinforced by constant
| self-testing.
|
| The reason that this is so difficult, though, for technology, is
| the rate of change and how much technological bifurcation exists.
| Each company that I might go to will have their own stack of
| similar technologies with the same goals. How many languages do I
| actually want to know all the details of? Probably one. The
| ability to think as a programmer (or server administrator,
| network administrator, container system engineer, etc.) is the
| important part. Otherwise, I can learn the details of any utility
| on the fly as needed. It will stick with practice, and doesn't
| require the same level of personal knowledge management.
|
| Learning a language, or things that don't change much (STEM
| subjects, for example), can benefit from the use of such a
| system.
| themadturk wrote:
| I'm possibly one of those people who aren't genetically inclined
| to these kinds of applications...all I know is, if an app doesn't
| work seamlessly across MacOS, iOS/iPadOS and Windows, it's no
| good for me. Obsidian is great, but totally failed for me on the
| iPhone. I couldn't navigate at all. I don't know if that's my
| fault or Obsidian's, but that meant it was broken, and I moved
| on. (OneNote is great these days.)
| ethanbond wrote:
| Anyone sharing a picture of their graph, or who even pretends to
| navigate/look at the graph _as a graph_ in any useful way, is
| definitely a bullshitter. In my experience, the graph is just a
| consequence that is sometimes pretty to look at, and that 's it.
| But what is it a consequence _of_? I think there is a ton of
| value in _taking_ notes (probably more value than in _having_
| notes), so what I get out of Obsidian, my PKM tool of choice, is
| probably no more than vim keybindings on a text editor, but that
| text editor can autocomplete references to other files without
| getting in the way of bulleted lists or prose.
|
| Pretty much agreed for the most part, but if these chic new PKM
| tools get people who need to take notes but kind of suck at it
| (like myself) to take notes, then that's a good thing. Definitely
| not as miraculous as some claim. The cult around Roam in
| particular is well beyond laughable at this point.
|
| Edit: The other thing I find very pragmatically useful, and is
| also a relatively simple thing (but _a thing_ nonetheless!) is
| querying your notes. So I can take meeting notes, add some
| followup items as checkboxes, and then have a note that
| aggregates all of those to one place while linking back to their
| original context.
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| > Anyone sharing a picture of their graph, or who even pretends
| to navigate/look at the graph as a graph in any useful way, is
| definitely a bullshitter.
|
| Yep. Graphs are not "scalable" unless the visual elements are
| meaningful in themselves; they are mostly for "feeling-good-
| about-oneself" --- "look at all the notes I took and linked!".
| drcode wrote:
| When I created my own Roam clone from scratch, I completely
| left out the "knowledge graph". I agree it's a failed idea.
|
| My clone is optimized for terminal usage, since the clunky
| javascript UI is the other flaw of Roam.
| Macha wrote:
| Yeah, the three things I get out of Obsidian compared to my
| previous approach of a generic text editor + folder of markdown
| are:
|
| 1. As you mention, I can just shove a todo in a note and then I
| have a note to query all of these so I can make sure I'm
| following up on things I should be. For me todo systems came
| and went but it took integrating at the point I'm keeping
| records when most "todo" items come in for one to stick.
|
| 2. Embedding can be kind of handy. I think there's more places
| I can use it, but I do it so I can e.g. embed my discussion of
| a ticket in both my 1:1 notes when reporting to more senior
| leaders, and also my personal log of what I did that day. It's
| not like a lifechanging moment but it makes me appear more
| professional and prepared when I'm not going "Hold on a moment,
| let me pull that up _waits for JIRA to load_ ", or having to
| search for files to open them up as I'd closed them down to
| avoid tab overload.
|
| 3. Templates. I have some e.g. for standup, for 1:1s with
| specific people, for a daily/weekly note (which includes some
| recurring todos in the template, to link back to point 1)
|
| ---
|
| For the graphing features, yeah, I take a lot of notes, and a
| lot of them are leaf nodes apart from a few highly connected
| ones, and those tend to be stuff like "Weekly XYZ meeting
| agenda", rather than anything enlightening. Having a leaf node
| each for each ticket I'm tracking in my system or each day's
| standup is going to make any diagram an absolute mess.
|
| However, the other thing I do use Obisidian for is my tabletop
| game sessions. These tend to have much more "stable" entities
| (Player character X, location Y, Maguffin Z). While I don't
| personally use the graph there, it at least looks much more
| sensible there to the extent that I could maybe imagine it
| makes sense for people using the tool in a creative
| writing/research context. People find mind maps valuable too,
| even if that never did it for me, so I can imagine people
| inclined in that way would appreciate basically hyperlinked
| mind maps.
|
| ---
|
| For the point on whether such a structured note taking system
| is useful at all, I think it really depends on "Does the number
| of distinct items you need to keep track of exceed your mental
| organisational capacity to keep track of them?". When I was
| just a mid level developer, I never took personal notes. For
| the "now" period, if I had 4 topics on my mind it was a lot,
| and that was well within my capacity to keep track of. For
| longer term keeping, either it was useful technical information
| for _other_ developers as well and I shoved it in a shared
| wiki, or it was information about how the feature we're working
| on is evolving as we work on it, in which case it made sense to
| keep it recorded in a ticket or document. At that point, there
| was very little left that was valuable to write down but didn't
| go into some other shared document bucket.
|
| But once my role changed to one where I am now also responsible
| for the work of other people, that's when things changed and
| where I needed a note taking system. It might be a very simple
| topic and we might have talked about it yesterday, but I have n
| things I'm working on, plus x team member's and their
| individual n things, plus things that are upcoming that need to
| be ready for the team to work on.
| historia_novae wrote:
| This reminds me story: during my first (failed) PhD attempt, I
| had a supervisor working on a knowledge graph system for
| education. Great! I was doing something very similar, except I
| had an algorithm for presenting it in a linear way. So I shared
| my concern that students will not be able to understand and
| make use of a graph representation. Like almost everything I
| said in the following years, it was immediately dismissed and I
| quickly stopped trying to work on this with that guy.
|
| Fast forward 2-3 years later, I ask about a student that was
| somewhat working on that project with this supervisor, he
| replied "oh, I stopped working on that, it doesn't work,
| student are confused by the graph!" In the meantime, I've also
| read a paper in another field that said users don't understand
| graph representation.
|
| I still think that graphs can be useful for knowledge
| management, but it has to stay an implementation details not
| shown to the user.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| This was a weird article for me - I agree with much of what he
| says but I also use Roam (and have tried many of the others) and
| it is very useful for me. I've also tried it with my business
| partner and it was a complete failure for a couple of reasons:
|
| * We have different knowledge consumption habits. I consume a lot
| of snippets on the internet during the day and then consume books
| via an eReader, which allows me to dump the highlights straight
| to Roam. He prefers purely physical books and takes his own notes
| instead of capturing direct quotes.
|
| * He is visio-spatial and I am verbal. He needs to draw, move,
| and position things (whiteboards everywhere!). Roam is useless
| for this.
|
| * I tend to do more convergent thinking - I take in a lot of info
| from a lot of sources which, when thinking about the problem,
| tends to snap into view for me as something new. This works well
| in Roam because I can reference/quote things from across many
| areas rapidly.
|
| > The concept of the Knowledge Graph deserves the classification
| of bullshit because its allure derives primarily from the false
| impression that it can mechanistically deliver--or substitute for
| --the brute, linear willfulness that defines all non-trivial
| writing.
|
| This particular critique stood out as a bit strange to me, and
| maybe it is simply a difference and how my brain and the author's
| brain works, but writing is linear (on a page) but the content
| gathering and referencing is not, which is where I find it most
| helpful. I brute force the narrative/story, but fill in with the
| details more slowly and with more references.
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| I completely agree with your points and they also relate with
| me a bit, Zettelkasten systems don't work for me at all, nor do
| TODO lists, it depends on the type of person, it doesn't work
| for everyone; I think what the author is trying to say is that
| Zettelkasten or other knowledge-based linking systems shouldn't
| be advertised to everyone as a "way to organise your thoughts",
| mainly because of the fact that it depends on the type of
| person, like an example is that as you mentioned, it works
| amazingly for you, but for me it doesn't really make sense with
| how I do things, I think that is what the author is trying to
| say.
| ffhhj wrote:
| >> After only two weeks, my knowledge graph was utterly
| unintelligible and distressing. It's called combinatorial
| explosion.
|
| I've built a few node design tools and this is one of the main
| problems I've had to deal with, how to keep users from building
| this forest of wires that won't let them see the trees, I mean,
| nodes. The only way around is limiting the "depth" of nodes the
| user can work on, requiring them to organize those in "scenes"
| and hide everything else that is distracting. Then we get from
| "graphs are beautiful, behold their complexity" to "graphs are
| useful".
|
| I'm currently building a concept web for a new search engine, and
| I want users to explore it without getting lost in the forest.
| The problem is there once again.
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| > The problem with the Knowledge Graph ideology is that
| everything in your mind is already situated in a graph structure.
| That is precisely the problem. It's big and complicated, with way
| too many connections everywhere. There's no good in replicating
| that web in digital form.
|
| I completely agree with this, I'm not an organised person, I
| rarely write TODO lists, yet in Emacs with Org-Roam I thought I
| would be highly productive because I would start writing notes
| and linking them together or whatever magic Org-Mode has inside
| Emacs (if I can even be bothered to write a TODO list in the
| first place);
|
| But I don't think Org-Roam is for me, I rarely wrote TODO lists
| even before using Org-Roam, and I'd have never heard of
| Zettelkasten or whatever until trying out Org-Roam, you could say
| that I'm not an organised person, and that is true, but I don't
| care.
|
| Using a Zettelkasten system for people like me isn't going to
| work, it will never feel right to be honest, in the first place
| before trying it out I didn't want any of this stuff anyway, I
| don't need a graph linking notes together, I'm a simple man, just
| write a few notes sometimes.
| ravenstine wrote:
| The problem I see is, as you say, not the structure of personal
| knowledge, but _recall_.
|
| Once I can recall something, that usually leads me to where I
| need to go. It's sometimes that initial failure to recall what
| I wanted to remember that can prevent me from acting until much
| later.
|
| This is why I don't like any structure to my personal data. I
| throw every single thing I jot down into Apple Notes and either
| I'll come back to it when I see it above the fold or if I do a
| search query.
|
| I like Apple Notes, but it really sucks in a lot of ways. The
| search function is _crappy_ as crap gets. I don 't know how
| indexing could be so poor. There's no way to tag or label notes
| other than by placing notes in folders. Notes does nothing to
| try and help you extract meaning from your unstructured text.
|
| What I want more than anything that tries to impose the job of
| organization on to the user is something that lets me treat it
| like a dumping ground, does its best to extract any implicit
| structure or meaning and keywords from my notes, lets me add
| relationships optionally, and then gets out of my way. I don't
| need silos or folders or schemas or graphs or any such
| nonsense.
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| > Once I can recall something, that usually leads me to where
| I need to go. It's sometimes that initial failure to recall
| what I wanted to remember that can prevent me from acting
| until much later.
|
| Exactly my frame of thinking, if I start worrying about
| structure, I forget the thing I wanted to write about in the
| first place.
|
| > I like Apple Notes, but it really sucks in a lot of ways.
| The search function is crappy as crap gets. I don't know how
| indexing could be so poor. There's no way to tag or label
| notes other than by placing notes in folders. Notes does
| nothing to try and help you extract meaning from your
| unstructured text.
|
| It lets you get the job done quickly, you just remembered you
| had to write something down, you can just write it down as
| quick as possible without worrying about other nonsense.
|
| > What I want more than anything that tries to impose the job
| of organization on to the user is something that lets me
| treat it like a dumping ground, does its best to extract any
| implicit structure or meaning and keywords from my notes,
| lets me add relationships optionally, and then gets out of my
| way. I don't need silos or folders or schemas or graphs or
| any such nonsense.
|
| Exactly, this is what I am thinking too, organization
| shouldn't be worried about when you just want to write
| something down NOW, as apposed to later after you've worried
| about organization and you've forgotten the thing you wanted
| to write about in the first place.
|
| The actual thing that you are using the write notes on should
| do the organization itself, make tags automatically and link
| notes automatically, without you having to worry about
| anything, that for me, is the best way.
|
| And you should be able to search through notes quickly and
| find keywords etc.. all just by looking at what is inside the
| notes that have any sort of structure.
|
| > lets me add relationships optionally
|
| Totally agree, relationships should be worried about after
| the note has been written down, not before.
| ineedasername wrote:
| > _...is genetic. Individuals blessed with high degrees of
| industriousness and orderliness...namely that most of the
| variance between individuals is genetic and relatively
| invulnerable to intervention._
|
| This is a very strange thing to attribute to genetics, certainly
| not without some reference that supports it-- I could not find
| any. It seems much more likely to be a product of what you
| observed in your parents growing up, and perhaps more importantly
| how you were trained early on in your career.
|
| That statement immediately put me on the defensive to be
| skeptical of the rest of what the author wrote, which was perhaps
| justified: the rest of the article was basically the author
| complaining about organization methods they didn't like and
| didn't think we're effective even though other people seem to get
| some value from them. And also that some people seem to brag
| about their system, which is entirely irrelevant to assessing
| actual utility. All of this while also coining their own buzz
| phrases, e.g., _" brute linear willfulness"_.
|
| TLDR: just another person claiming a tool is useless because it's
| not a tool they like.
| brightball wrote:
| I take notes relentlessly with Obsidian and I'll honestly never
| go back. I would have been more stubborn about this earlier on in
| my career. Now I realize that I've probably forgotten more over
| time than I ever would have imagined so I realized having good
| notes is critical for me. I end up looking up answers on stack
| overlflow and then realize I wrote them.
|
| To each their own.
| testingwaters4 wrote:
| Can you recommend a workflow for obsidian? Or some pointers for
| resources. I am struggling to "get" how to take notes with it
| and I am feeling a lot of friction
| iraphael wrote:
| i would focus on just taking notes on related topics, without
| much structure for a bit. try to link them together if they
| are on related ideas a bit. once you have a network of notes
| that feels a little less manageable (~100), i create a "map
| of content" where i link to all notes related to that
| concept, and in it i essentially tell a higher level story
| about how those notes relate to each other.
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| This is if he wants to take notes in the first place.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I started up a job a few months ago and threw myself into
| Obsidian, and it has definitely been paying off. Here's how I
| work, ymmv of course:
|
| - I create a "Work" folder. Inside it are folders for Weekly
| Notes, Tasks and Information.
|
| - At the beginning of each week I make a new Weekly Notes
| page. I have a subheading for each day, and a subheading in
| each day for a todo list. After the todo list, I put down a
| heading for each of my meetings/activities that I want to
| take notes for and fill them in accordingly.
|
| - When I begin work on a non-trivial ticket or project, I
| make it a note in my Tasks folder named with it's Jira tag.
| That makes it easy to link to from my weekly notes, and gives
| me a loose idea of when I was working on which tickets
| through backlinking. I then use these notes to plan out the
| problems, store personal research and organize code snippets.
|
| - The Information folder serves as a kind of "Misc." folder.
| I have sections for travel, guidelines, best practices, and I
| even store some PDFs relating to my job in there.
|
| A few other general tips for Obsidian:
|
| - Create a group in your graph view for "Work" and it will
| highlight all of the notes in your work folder with a
| specified color. Pretty handy.
|
| - Make heavy use of linking, both internal and external. Tags
| are also nice, but don't be afraid to break out your notes
| when things get too heavy; that's what it's made for.
|
| - Liberal use of the keyboard shortcuts is a gamechanger.
| Ctrl+O to open notes, Ctrl+P to open the command palette
| (which I mostly use to split panes), and hold Alt+Arrows to
| quick-switch to adjacent panes.
|
| - Plugins are nice, but it's easy to get carried away. Mind
| Map, Tasks, and Admonition are the only ones I keep enabled.
|
| Hope you get as much out of it as I do. It sounds like a lot,
| but it feels like second-nature to me now. Feel free to adapt
| this to your own needs or skip it all together, this is just
| my personal workflow and what made me fall in love with
| Obsidian.
| greenice wrote:
| When sharing/saving links to Obsidian, can it automatically
| add the title of the linked page (and date)?
|
| It just saves the URL for me.
| divan wrote:
| Second this. I even have a bookmarklet in the browser that
| adds text selection or a page automatically to Obsidian. And
| yet, when it comes to saving something I feel is important,
| the maximum I can do is just create another note and put the
| text/link and forget. I feel like I need to find proper place
| for this note in the folder hierarchy or think how to
| categorize it ("should it go to the Economics->Behavioral or
| Sociology?"), and quickly becomes a burden. In the end I feel
| like heavily underusing it, but perhaps I just don't get the
| right workflow..
| xmprt wrote:
| The best workflow is to consciously underthink it. If you
| find yourself spending more than 10 seconds thinking of
| where to put something then you're doing it wrong. Force
| yourself to go with the first place you were thinking.
| You'll most likely find it later using search tools.
|
| Sometimes you don't even need to take notes. Just the act
| of pasting in a link or a snippet from an article you read
| is enough to reference it in the future.
|
| If you insist on making things clean, then you can use some
| sort of version control and review all the notes that
| you've taken once a week and organize them better. The most
| important thing is to take the note.
| divan wrote:
| Right, agree with <10 sec rule. But, again, the main
| promise of second brain tools is to keep your "second
| memory" layer organized. Apple Notes are good enough for
| copypasting links and excerpts you want to make
| searchable later, right? So I assumed that Obsidian's
| markdown/hyperlink system should bring some benefits into
| organization.
| runjake wrote:
| Browsing through Linking Your Thinking's YouTube channel[1]
| might be a good first-start. Despite appearances here, I am
| not a notes fetishist, so I find his videos rather
| approachable especially his "Start Here" video[2].
|
| Jamie Rubin's blog series[4] is pretty good, too.
|
| I personally just create atomic (single-topic) notes, with
| tags in the YAML front-matter, and store them in a folder
| structure along the lines of the Johnny Decimal System[3]. I
| store checklists, procedures, howtos, concept summaries,
| cheatsheets, and a daily log stored in a YYYY-MM.markdown
| file.
|
| I don't have any comment on the blog post in the article,
| because this system works _really well_ for _me_. Obsidian is
| extensible at hell, but I 'm not spending all day looking for
| new tweaks, I'm just writing notes. Also, since notes are
| just files stored in directories, I have all sorts of
| shell/Python-scripted automations and shell aliases to
| quickly do stuff.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC85D7ERwhke7wVqskV_DZUA/v
| id...
|
| 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbLb6QCK88
|
| 3. https://johnnydecimal.com/
|
| 4. https://jamierubin.net/blog-series/practically-paperless-
| wit...
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| > I personally just create atomic (single-topic) notes,
| with tags in the YAML front-matter, and store them in a
| folder structure along the lines of the Johnny Decimal
| System[3]. I store checklists, procedures, howtos, concept
| summaries, cheatsheets, and a daily log stored in a YYYY-
| MM.markdown file.
|
| You must be a very organised person, any sort of
| Zettelkasten or knowledge-based linking system for me is
| too complex, I'd rather just take a simple note, maybe with
| the date in the filename, to each their own I guess.
|
| I rarely write TODO lists.
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| Its probably not for you then, people makes Zettelkasten look
| like a magical thing that will help you get more organised in
| life.
|
| You would've "gotten" how to create a workflow that fits you
| by now if this is what you really wanted.
| dkislyuk wrote:
| Obsidian is an amazing piece of software.
|
| Perhaps PKM as a cottage industry is overdone, and the author's
| point that everybody's system is highly personal and should not
| be replicated is valid. That said, Obsidian has allowed me to
| organize all of my reading, learning, writing, and thinking
| into a format that allows me to recall knowledge and make
| connections that I wouldn't have otherwise found. Seeing in
| what other contexts you have read about a concept or a
| historical figure or an essay, etc. is so valuable for life-
| long learning that I can't imagine going back to disconnected
| or separated note-taking.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Obsidian is new to me, thanks for the recommendation. I see the
| files are local, does the app need to phone home for anything?
| I'd like something that will still work even if the company
| goes away at some point.
| luis8 wrote:
| have you heard about logseq? It seems to me that it is what
| you are looking for
| larodi wrote:
| The best system for PKM is called sub-consciousness. When one
| learns to facilitate it right and all there is is at a thoughts
| distance. Writing stuff down is a way to reinforce the
| subconscious stress of memory, also sleeping well, walking and
| taking time to be with oneself.
| gradys wrote:
| Roam user here. My experience is that it's not about the graph as
| a whole, it's about the neighborhoods. I never look at the graph
| view and I don't meaningfully use the global structure of the
| graph for anything, but I find that projects develop local
| neighborhood graphs that are definitely useful.
|
| The thing Roam-style note taking software accomplish is letting
| you be productive by organizing bottom-up rather than being
| forced to decide what notebook/tab/folder any given new thing
| needs to go in. It's very pragmatic and low-bullshit in that
| sense. Being able to make references to other nodes (rather than
| only to other pages) is also very pragmatically useful in my
| experience (e.g. refer to a TODO I wrote in my weekly TODO list
| when writing my daily TODO list, so when I check off a daily TODO
| it's also checked off in the weekly list), and I never saw
| anything like this in pre-Roam tools like OneNote.
|
| I get that other people operate differently and are obsessively
| "gardening" their graphs and searching around for connections to
| make. I don't do any of that. Doesn't seem valuable for me in
| particular, though maybe if I were a professional writer, I could
| imagine it being useful.
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