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Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

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Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#21

Post by eightysixfour »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #14

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 l…

> 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.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#22

Post by runjake »

testingwaters4 wrote: post #10
brightball wrote: post #8

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.

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

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/vid...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbLb6QCK88

3. https://johnnydecimal.com/

4. https://jamierubin.net/blog-series/practically-paperless-wit...

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#23

Post by luckydata »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #14

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 l…

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.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#24

Post by lolcat_cowsay »

testingwaters4 wrote: post #10
brightball wrote: post #8

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.

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

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.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#25

Post by lolcat_cowsay »

runjake wrote: post #22
testingwaters4 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 th…

> 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.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#26

Post by lolcat_cowsay »

eightysixfour wrote: post #18

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…

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.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#27

Post by iraphael »

testingwaters4 wrote: post #10
brightball wrote: post #8

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.

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

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.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#28

Post by smoldesu »

testingwaters4 wrote: post #10
brightball wrote: post #8

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.

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

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.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#29

Post by ravenstine »

lolcat_cowsay wrote: post #20

> 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 p…

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.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#30

Post by moltar »

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.

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