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Comment by aristofun | Hacker News Reader

This general “knowledge management” question is like a “time management” one — usually meaningless and sometimes a form of escapism.

When you don’t have any particular emotionally charged goal(s) in mind — no time/knowledge management technique would really make a difference.

But some of them might give you a good illusion of something important going on.

And as soon as you have specific important goal in mind (like preparing to specific exam, getting lawyer license etc.) — almost any approach you feel comfortable with will do the job.

You usually dont need to review possible options in advance, the goal itself gives you hints and guides (if preparing for exam means remembering a lot of scattered facts - you’d probably end up with some anki cards on your own etc).

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I've had a different experience.

In the times where an emotionally charged goal isn't driving me forward, adhering to disciplined regimes for time and knowledge management has helped me to prepare and therefore perform better in times there IS a highly motivating goal.

There don't have to be two extremes of X-management (one fuelled by emotion and one dragged down by apathy). Like anything, building a discipline in the slow times will set you up really well for when you need to run hard in the fast times.

All that said, I use Roam Research[0] for my knowledge management now. I consolidate my thoughts and ideas weekly, and aim for evergeen knowledge[1].

[0]: https://roamresearch.com/

[1]: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z4SDCZQeRo4xFEQ8H4qrSqd68ucp...

Edit: formatting

You’re right. Discipline and habit is the king.

But i see that its near impossible to build a discipline without particular goal in mind.

By “emotionally charged” i meant “really important for you”, important enough so you even force yourself when you don’t feel excited about the goal.

I've found similarly that there's a lot of value in cultivating your knowledge base in between emotionally charged goals or spurts of inspiration, but highly disciplined / regimented approaches never worked for me at all for some reason.

For me, the key was switching to a totally non-linear but robustly inter-connectable note system, which turned out to be tiddlywiki in my case. Regimented approaches I found created friction for creating a new submission, and switching to just creating a 'tiddler' when something was on my mind (and then being able to choose to reference that content within larger ones later or not) has been one of the most liberating changes I've made in years.

Roam appears to have a similar graph structure to https://www.thebrain.com/ for nodes.

Agree. All these management tools for knowledge and time feel like bikeshedding to me.

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