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Comment by kieckerjan | Hacker News Reader

Articles like this are like catnip to me. If they are part of a cluster, I will easily click away a whole morning.

However, they usually leave me feeling a bit bloated and unsatisfied. The PKM gurus I come across seem to use their system mainly for recording thoughts about their system. Now, I can appreciate going meta as much as every nerd, but somewhere the wheels have to touch the ground.

Edit: I realize there is an availability bias at play here. There are probably tons of people with effective PKM who do not use their PKM to produce blogs about their PKM.

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I understand your feeling, but it doesn't match the reality at all. As an enthusiast (not an expert), I love going meta and nerd about systems and productivity. But I don't live in theory-land at all. I use my system to capture and organize pretty much everything I learn, whether it is about software development, music, product development, sales, marketing, finance, etc.

The articles I write however are geared towards people who I think would benefit from using the same kind (not necessarily the same!) techniques. So I try to document what it's all about, what benefits I notice based on my own personal experience, and approaches that I found actually useful.

I often think about my son when I write my articles. I hope that someday these articles or what I tell him will drive him to experiment and find techniques that help him achieve his goals in life. Those may or may not be relevant for him, but might be, I don't know ;-)

I think the problem is that a lot of PKM articles are about _the PKM_, rather than the knowledge captured. Endless articles about 'hammers and chisels' in abstract, and not about 'woodworking', or how to use a chisel to accomplish a certain task during woodworking.

However, it's rare that I actually see articles talking about WHAT they capture. They never put the PKM into context. So again a lot of these articles feel like 'just take notes, DUH!'...and yes that's mainly what it comes down to. But with blog post after blog post, there seems to be so much added 'ceremony' to note taking. If there wasn't so much ceremony, one blog post would likely do. Adding all this ceremony just feels like you (the amorphous 'you') are trying to complicate the process so that you can monetise the solution.

If some of these articles explained their thought process about capture and organisation in a real world context, rather than just the abstract notion of 'tags are good', 'organisation is good', 'notes let you follow up on stuff later!', they wouldn't seem so vacuous.

I generally am also quite interested in PKM, and have maintained a git repo of markdown for the best part of a decade, augmented with pinboard and goodnotes for bookmarks and handwriting respectively. I've tried various tools such as evernote, obsidian, physical notebooks, zettelkasten, personally hosted wikis, tiddlywiki, trello, onenote, zenodo, mendeley etc over the years, and even wrote my own bookmarking solutions and CLI tools.

> are about _the PKM_, rather than the knowledge captured

This is because engaging with information ("to note"...) is such a basic human activity. So, you have to abstract to a higher level if you wish to attract the "average" internet audience.

This is one of the reasons I suggested (bellow) it would be better to anchor note-taking discourses within established communities (students, business, academia...)

> much added 'ceremony' to note taking

Like every Human sub-culture/scene/community, note-taking/PKM/tft automatically creates its own customs and ceremonies. There is no escaping it. The fun thing is : because it is a basic activity (as I said earlier), those outside these circles will find it bizarre (the ceremony part) and banal (the basic part), both at the same time.

Bizarre + banal = WTF!

Thanks for clarifying that. I just read your blog about your 25+ years of PKM (go c64!) and noticed your older blogs that are mainly about software engineering, so I seem to have jumped to conclusions. Apologies.

My misgivings about grand PKM systems have been formed, at least partly, by my own starts and stops, which mostly amounted to little more than fruitless tinkering with the system. It seems to me that I am not the only one.

It's often because those gurus and their articles are swallow and empty. They show the surface, but don't understand the topic, and are thus unable to tour around it's deeper parts and point on specific parts hidden from plain sight, which we are all searching for. And even worse, mostly all of them are writing literally the same, copying from each other, recapturing the always same swallow parts in their own words and images and always moving the same gear.

This is ok if you are new to a topic yourself. But after you've learned the first layers, it's become harder to find something new with substantial value. And thus, you are unsatisfied.

I agree. I'm also not satisfied with the quality in this domain.

Here is why I think it is the way it is:

- The contours of this domain are very fuzzy: What are we talking about here? the fact that words like (P)KM and productivity were hijacked by corporate motives for most of their history does not help.

- The "emptiness" comes from "influencers" trying the cater to our incessant pursuit, as a society, of the new and shiny. Social media FOMO makes this worse. But The shallowness you are talking about have absolutely nothing to do with this domain in particular. It is endemic to our current world.

And fuzziness does not help. I appreciate the effort and enthusiasm, but we need to anchor/connect it to more established communities.

Is it about Business management / The future of work? Personal Thinking and Problem Solving? Personal Development? Personal Journaling? The future of journalism? Text Editors UX? Information & Learning Design? L&D (Learning and Development) ? Higher Education Note-taking? Digital research? Software studies? Digital Humanities?

These are all related real domains (google them)

Your comment really resonates with me (as a general point, not specifically about OP article which is about note-taking as a whole.)

For example, when a Youtube creator makes videos about new PKM apps/systems, they are getting secondary benefits that ordinary users are not. Tinkering with new apps can be fun, but often not worth the actual trouble of learning and converting over to a new app/system. Worse, it can be a source of procrastination in itself.

But the Youtuber pushing out monthly videos about the hot new thing is accomplishing their main purpose of making new Youtube content (which is of course fine.)

I personally started using Obsidian late last year, and have no real desire to look at anything new. It works great for me, and the active plugin development community provides enough new shiny stuff to try out at every now and then. ;-)

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