Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

otherlife.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–99 of 99 posts

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#91

Post by lolcat_cowsay »

civilized wrote: post #61
kopkako wrote: post #46

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 n…

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.

Exactly, you have to know what you wanted to do before mastering the tool in the first place, this is true for a lot of things not just note-taking systems.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#92

Post by rchaud »

the_af wrote: post #7
QuikAccount wrote: post #5

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 l…

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.

Naturally organized people built VisiCalc, and yet us mere mortals were still able to make use of electronic spreadsheets. The blog author is needlessly pigeonholing people because he thinks the knowledge graph is silly.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#93

Post by dSebastien »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #84
kosherhurricane wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the Johnny Decimal system (with Zim Wiki). In 30 years of trying, it's the best personal knowledge management I've ever used. All these note taking tools missed out on the straightforward categorization that the Johnny Decimal provides. And it's a big one.

Never heard of the Johnny Decimal system. Are there good any writeups or videos on it you recommend?

I wrote an article about it a few days ago: https://dsebastien.net/blog/2022-04-29-johnny-decimal

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#94

Post by dSebastien »

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

Shameless plug: Check out tht Obsidian starter kit: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#95

Post by the_af »

rchaud wrote: post #92
the_af wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Naturally organized people built VisiCalc, and yet us mere mortals were still able to make use of electronic spreadsheets. The blog author is needlessly pigeonholing people because he thinks the knowledge graph is silly.

There are exceptions, and it doesn't invalidate the article's premise. Spreadsheets are a huge deal, agreed. At this point they are like a general purpose visual programming language, rather than an "organize my thoughts" tool.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#96

Post by Veen »

ravenstine wrote: post #29
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…

Apple Notes got tags with iOS 15 / macOS Monterey. You can combine them with Smart Folders for organization.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#97

Post by xmprt »

divan wrote: post #52
xmprt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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.

For me, the value is somewhere in between. Priority number one is getting the data into the second brain. Afterwards try to do a little organizing but don't fuss around too much with it because I can always make improvements later (especially if/when I access it for a second time). That's kind of how the real brain works.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#98

Post by hjkl0 »

PKM is not bullshit, but many of the people creating content about PKM do seem to be professional bullshit artists, for e.g Tiago Forte and his “build a second brain” method, a $700 workshop that can be summarized as a distinction between “projects” and “areas”.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#99

Post by cyberprunes »

I would revise that to say "The Knowledge Graph View is mostly bullshit". That seems to be the core of the argument anyway.

It's not about "node flexing" and neither is it about letting the system do the work for you. You still have to do the work of turning information into understanding.

Post reply on HN