Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

A few days ago, someone jokingly asked if Henry Ford had a personal knowledge base in Obsidian... Well, sort of! He had something he called "jot books", where he journaled, kept notes, grocery lists, etc. Not dissimilar to how people use Obsidian. The Henry Ford Museum has fifty of these notebooks: https://www.thehenryford.org/search?Query=%22jot+book%22

How should we quantify the impact of Henry Ford's notebooks? How should we quantify the impact of spreadsheets?

Most people who accomplish anything take notes in some form, because writing is a way of thinking. We love to mythologize the tools and methods of accomplished people because we hope it will let us absorb a bit of their genius. But a good camera doesn't make a good photographer. Taking lots of photos helps.

Should you take notes? Probably. Does it matter what your method is? Probably not. Whatever works for you. Obsidian (or any other form of notetaking) is successful if it disappears and lets you accomplish your work.

But when I relate these activities to learning itself, it becomes difficult to gauge how much of it is necessary. If I don't constantly serialize or test what I'm learning, how do I know I'm learning anything at all? And externalizing so much starts to feel like a burden and gives me less confidence in my own intrinsic ability to just go and do things.

I was going to post an "Ask HN" on this topic to see if other people related to this. If anyone has been in this mindset before and managed to break out of it, I'd be curious to know what helped!

Broadly, there are two very different kind of notes. First, there are notes whose purpose is to be easy to find when you need to recall some bit of information. Then, there is note taking in service of learning.

These two are very different in goals and thus very different in terms of optimal strategy.

Also, there is note taking in service of creation, where the end goal is neither recall nor learning, but to create notes to share to other people, often for artistic purposes but potentially also for reference or learning. These are also different from note taking for personal reference or learning.

I found they are too complicated, bloated, not easy to organize notes, not easy to access across devices, not flexible, no manual sorting, etc.

I like simple, concise, flexible and practical note-taking or bookmark management app. So I have created my own note-taking app Metaessen [1] for 2+ years.

Now I am just using my own app and pure text for bookmarks and notes.

Life is short, no necessary to use too complicated softwares.

[1] https://metaessen.com/

Brennan could have gone about a better more interesting route that I would have agreed with more, instead of incorrectly blaming Obsidian and conflating it with a specific PKM framework.

I am an avid obsidian user and have avoided most PKM stuff, and instead just developed a PKM that works for me through slow incremental improvements and changes. The beauty of Obsidian is the plugin eco system, and I even was able to develop my own plugin for what I specifically wanted. I think that's what Brennan basically talks about in his "Question 3" section where he favors just making your own.

I do think that there is "choice paralysis" that people may have when jumping into Obsidian and trying to add plugins too early instead of discovering what works (and what doesn't) for them first.

His final point:

> After researching... well, research, a part of me feels a sense of relief. The fact is that I've been using ad-hoc, improvisational methods for research and knowledge management for my entire life. It's clear I haven't been missing out on deeper, richer understandings by way of more complex knowledge management systems.

I completely agree with this, and Obsidian is one of the best tools to do this! And Brennan corrects this in his update at the end of his article.

Would love something better than markup but not as CPU intensive as Evernote.

Not read it, not highlight it, not copy it out: apply it.

The only way to build personal knowledge, in my experience, is to do things.

And I only want to learn things in the context of doing something.

I read and favourite and bookmark stuff all the time to dig into for inspiration.

But then I choose to build something, and I assemble knowledge on a JIT basis and apply it. LLMs make this easier than ever before.

Everything else is theatre at best, procrastination at worst.

"German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, as he was famous for his use of the "slip box" or Zettelkasten note-taking method and the achieved output of more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles. This is the kind of remarkable output that many in the PKM community aspire towards."

I think that is somehwhat misguided. The goal shouldn't be great quantity of output, but great quality.

I think AI has revealed that to us in reccent years. AI can produce endless output. But who needs it, what is it good for? Unless we have a GOOD QUESTION to AI, it's output is not very valuable.

These note-taking apps, you write a lot of notes, but is there an overarching question the notes are meant to answer? Depends on how you use them of course. But I would guess that most of the notes are more "Good to Haves" than "Step towards a definite goal".

Most notes don't probabaly take you closer to the end-goal of your project. You just think they might become useful in the future, so you write them down. Just in case. To feel you are taking good care of your precious ideas. But how much time are you eilling to spend to read them in the future?

The whole discourse around PKM is a problem of the pluralistic framing in modern society that we hide behind individuality while missing the basic points. "Use whatever works for you" is intellectually lazy, and the opposite isn't an authoritarian ontology that people think they are protecting against.

Instead the basics are this: Whatever system you currently have to store/search/synthesize/and share information CAN and SHOULD be introspected to improve itself. Some functions are matters of time and space cost/benefits, other metric functions are qualitative, but can be experimented against and improved greatly with creativity and testing.

[1] https://logseq.com/

[2] https://github.com/logseq/logseq

Notes can be organized in folders just like in obsidian and Reminders are clean and simple to use. No infinite options to customize, no moving blocks and no infinite properties. Simplicity feels good —- for me —- when it comes to these kind of tools.

These also work great with Codex and Claude Code, and with the hopes of Apple getting their act together with an AI integration, I think it might be the better option to manage one’s writing and tasks.

—-

I see some Apple haters’ cortisol levels rising on this comment. Please, this is not me saying that Apple is better. I’m just saying that it’s a solution I’ve found to work for me, and it may work for others too. Just like your super customized Obsidian vault in your cute Linux machine works for you and others.

I think people get tied to particular tools and methods and optimizing them just right, rather than adapting things piecemeal in a way that works for them.

I've been experimenting with this for well before Obsidian existed by using what is probably the best proto-Obsidian -- https://zim-wiki.org

And my gut is, while they can be very useful and it can be rewarding to get a good workflow for yourself, we will not see some sort of revolutionary improvement across humanity strongly attributable to these things, and I think I have a solid why we won't even if it seems like we should.

Roughly, they're attractive looking to our brains because they work just like them, nets and nodes and connections and such -- but ultimately, our brains are actually much better at that exact type of work. These tools can help, but they pale in comparison to human brains.

- Engage with what you're reading. Ask yourself what the key ideas are, which ideas are new to you, how you would define them, and how they relate to other ideas you already understand.

- Test yourself. Do the excercises at the end of a textbook chapter. Create your own questions and answer them. Quiz yourself at least once a week (on both new and old material). Check your answers and correct yourself (if you were wrong, how, and why?). Use flashcards with a spaced repetition regime (like Anki)

- Focus on your retrieval. Avoid looking things up unless you really have to. Each time you recall something you've learned, you reinforce it.

- Your first encounter with new information may need a small interval of just a few minutes or hours, but you should gradually increase the interval periods between quizzes/flashcards on something. The longer you go between recalling something the more it gets reinforced because you have to work harder for it. Build up gradually.

- Use what you got wrong in quizzes or flashcards to identify what needs work.

- Focus on the material you get wrong, but don't totally neglect things you feel comfortable with.

- Basically, use Anki/spaced repetition.

- Take some time between study sessions and quizzing. (I think of studying like kneading dough, you need to let your brain relax some before you work it some more).

- When studying a subject, interleave different but related topics.

- Topics should be complementary and reinforce one another so that insights from one lead to insights in the other. Examples: calculus and rocketry. Spherical trig and astronomy or celestial navigation. German idealism and eastern philosophy. Etc.

- Once you have a rudimentary grasp of a new type of problem, move onto something new, but make sure to return to this type of problem periodically. (Basically, add this type of problem to your flashcard deck). Don't worry about mastering one type of problem so you can do it your sleep before moving to the next thing.

Some other key things:

- Elaboration: Relate material to what you already know. Explain it in your own words. Visualize it. Imagine it in different contexts (if you're learning calculus, imagine your speed and acceleration while biking in hilly terrain in terms of derivatives, etc).

- Generation: Attempt to answer a problem before you know the solution. This excercises your creativity and gets you looking for similarities to other types of problems you already understand. Before reading new material, make a quick summary of what you expect to learn and how it will relate to your prior knowledge.

- Reflection: take a few minutes to reflect on what you've learned that day. What went well? What could have gone better? What other knowledge or experience does this remind you of? What do you need to work on? Etc.

- Calibration: you need an objective measure of what you do and do not understand. Humans are pretty bad at gauging this for themselves without some sort of external measure. This gets back to flashcards.

- Consider using some mnemonic devices. They can be very effective.

- When reading a textbook, don't bother with crazy highlighter schemes. Research shows it doesn't really help. Neither does reading textbook material more than maybe twice unless you have a particular point you're confused about. What does help is spaced repetition and summarizing the material in your own words.

This all sounds like a lot of effort, but one of the key things to remember is that learning is effort. Struggle is basically necessary for your brain to optimize and form new connections, or even to reinforce old ones, and if you aren't struggling you're probably just doing what your brain is already optimized for, which means you probably aren't learning much.