Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
unattributed.cc
unattributed.cc
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.
That being said, I have never seen such procrastination as with people on the lookout for their ideal productivity systems. People writing lengthy blogposts about the last 0.1% of optimization on their note taking systems as if note-taking was their main job. The thing is: a note taking system doesn't need to be ideal, because as with most tools it matters much more who is using it, how they are using it and for what purpose. A note taking system is like a musical instrument: if you constantly find yourself swapping them because "they don't work" chances are this is a skill-issue, not a problem inherent with the system.
There is immense value in just picking a simple system, sticking to it and only revisiting it if there are real tangible problems. I for example just put a piece of paper on my desk every week and write down the things I need to do that aren't appointments. For more complex things, sketches, etc. that I may need in the next two or three months I use a notebook. For long lived stuff I use whatever. A markdown file in the project folder, a text file on the server, Obsidian. This has served me very well for the past decade.
But my job isn't taking notes, my job is doing the things I need to do, taking notes is just something that helps me doing that.
Yes, but, the _shape_ of something does offer affordances of what it makes easier or harder to do. So "obsidian" vs "saving files on my computer" does seem to be a legitimate question.
Except a nice interface. Except syncing between devices. Except cloud backups. Except third party data breaches. Except paid support contracts.
> Has there been a meaningful increase of understanding and creation thanks to personal knowledge management systems?
My question is: in a world where photography didn't exist, how would your life have been different? How would everyone's lives be different? It's a counterfactual that's impossible to answer meaningfully. Similarly, we can't measure how the world is different as a result of the popularization of [[links]].
Let's be fair, this article is about this exactly.
> That is a question that, the more that I look at it, seems completely wrong. (...) How does anyone measure what the contribution of a piece of software is to the world? (...) The tool doesn't make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world.
and then tries to challenge quoted articles again to prove/disprove those words.
So, I disagree with this line of criticism - I think you very well can do those things.
I think you have to be somewhat careful with this line of reasoning - the camera put the portrait artist out of business pretty much permanently, and the spreadsheet had similarly cataclysmic effects on the accounting and engineering professions.
Just because these things are tools, doesn't mean they can't distort the world by their very presence. I'd be hard pressed to put my finger on the distortion caused by obsidian et al
In someways the problem here is the inverse one might expect. Without photography, the entire modern world does not exist - it's the base technology required to develop optical lithography, without which we never achieve silicon chips. Without the spreadsheet (VisiCalc), the IBM PC likely fails to find product-market fit, and the entire tech and financial worlds are a decade or more behind where they are today. These are technologies with downstream tech trees so deep we can't reasonably put an upper bound on their value.
I don't personally believe that note-taking represents a paradigm change in the same sense - obsidian and friends are really just reifying existing text-based (and even paper-based) note taking workflows, with some hypertext niceties layered in...
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!
That needs to start all conversations in this area. Not everyone had the same goals.
Second, what is your specific problems?
Again not everyone had the same problems. There are common problems with common solutions (often multiple conflicting solutions that work in isolation but perhaps not for your life), learning what works for others can thus be helpful. Beware, not all problems are big enough to be worth addressing for you.
The important part is find what works for you. Sometimes you don't need to measure what you learned - which seems to be your concern- if it is important and you learned it you will remember when needed. Of not you need to look it up again. It can be liberating to realize that you don't need to measure everything. Sometimes that isn't good enough though, so back to the first two questions.
That's a very good question. In my case, when learning in the mode I described above, my brain is often more worried about the amount of unknown stuff versus focusing on what I am working on at the moment. With that, learning starts to feel like a burden and leads to burnout (even though I enjoy solving problems). I can become closed off to new information, and disheartened at everything I don't know.
The problem I'd like to solve is being able to retain excitement about learning while working on projects without it feeling like an obligation. There are probably more base issues to address for this (eg. being less controlling of outcomes). And there's particularly a lot of doubt now that AI coding is the norm, and I feel uncomfortable with moving faster because I feel attached to all the details. That has turned the debate much larger about what anyone really needs to know if they can blitz through stuff at the speed of prompting.
Say what you will about Tim Ferris, but maybe he was onto something when he said only learn the bare minimum to get something done and more than that is a waste (4 hour workweek).
1. I excelled at my exams without any strange note taking systems;
2. I remember many details down the road, even things I thought I had forgotten. For example, I needed some Linear Algebra, and I was surprised by how much I recalled after 10 years, so much in fact that in 3 days I was on par with when I passed my exam. It would have been worth it to make an Anki flashcard for every theorem?
3. In the exam I used such method I just needed much more time that when I used my minimalist note taking. So much in fact that I question the efficiency of such methods.
The issue I'm still working on is how do I find such notes when I don't exactly remeber what they were about.
I can't claim to have solved that; but I do have a personal rule about notes. I don't create a note unless (1) I'm willing to endow it with at least some metadata, and (2) I'm willing to manually link it to another note so that I've at least dropped one breadcrumb.
I found reading a textbook, and typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough. Typically: definitions, quotes, and personal thoughts while reading. Did this for stats/comp sci/etc. Obsidian + markdown worked for that, even without plugins. Being able to text search is useful, which is why I don't hand write.
Anything beyond that you have to be cautious about paralyzing yourself from trying XYZ PKM.
Theres a quote from stephen king that goes somewhere along the lines of "during first draft don't try referencing or fixing grammar because it breaks your train of thought". I think similarly, when learning something, choose the thing thats most out of the way (usually the simplest) that is least likely to break your train of thought.
In terms of tracking how much you're learning, I'd be very very slow and incremental in what tooling/methods you pick. For me, I just trust myself after reading/notetaking a textbook. Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign. Being able to explain what I learned to someone else is a good sign.
> Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign
I agree, but having homeworks in itself is a big advantage! It means you're in a structured learning environment where someone has taken the care to create a learning path and added checkpoints with carefully designed problems designed to refresh + assess what you've absorbed until that point.
When you're learning outside the classroom (for yourself or on the job), there's this sudden loss of all bounds where you now also have to draw a line of what knowledge is reasonable to acquire and what is out of scope. For example, when working independently on personal projects, I sometimes get sucked into reading about the details of protocols, standards, RFCs etc. and have a difficult time deciding when to stop.
One answer is learn just enough to solve the problem at hand at move on, but if you're in a field like eg. security you feel an obligation to do your due diligence when designing something. And of course, with LLMs now it's possible to move past any problem without learning anything at all, so you have to be even more intentional in which things you do decide to learn.
Not only does it help you learn in a structured way with predetermined goals etc, but you end up with fairly solid evidence of what you've learned.
I think the self learning path is much more difficult, both figuring out what to learn and then proving what you know to a potential employer. I tried that first and did learn some things, then I tried calling a potential employer who asked me a few questions, quickly assessed that I wasn't up to their standard and recommended a formal education. I took his advice and my career was pretty much on rails from then on.
A common argument is that they teach a lot of "useless" stuff and you can tailor your learning better on your own. I think it's really hard to figure out what to learn when you have no idea what the options are, and I think you won't know what's useful until you end up using it. Many people go through their whole careers doing things the wrong way because they don't know they need to learn something that would help them do better. There's also nothing stopping you from learning extra things beyond the curriculum, in fact I would recommend that.
Another common one is "I didn't learn anything in university" and all I can say about that is if you spent 3 years where your job was learning, and you didn't learn anything, then that's on you.
I don't think that's what people mean when they say that. They followed the curriculum and then when they started working they found they needed little of what they had studied and had a lot of gaps in their knowledge that needed to be filled.
I also think this view severely underestimates how much you actually end up using. For example you (are supposed to) learn at least one and more likely 2-3+ programming languages. We learned DSA which I very frequently see mentioned as "useless" which just tells me they never understood the topic to begin with. We learned about databases which I'd say most developers end up using. We learned about web development which sure if you go on to work on embedded systems or something you might not use it but it's a stretch to say it's useless.
I think the DSA example encapsulates a lot of this. Most people aren't top students who actually understand the topics, most people are mediocre and lazy. They learn barely enough to pass then they forget 90% of it and then they complain that it was a waste of time. Well duh. Of course it's a waste of time when you didn't actually learn it.
They go to uni just for the piece of paper and then complain that all they got was the piece of paper.
What sorts of things are you writing into your markdown file? After 3.5 years of uni I still don't know how or why to take proper notes to enhance my learning.
For students, that is. If you're writing papers or a book you should probably structure and manage your notes somehow. But for uni classes, well, it isn't even recommended that you read your notes. Or teachers' slide decks.
Lectures, slides and notes are merely a hike through the territory. You're supposed to range it by yourself later, seek out papers and books. Digest as much material as you can as early in the course as you can. Taper it off towards exams and do not study for a few days beforehand.
Basically the opposite of every student's instincts. It works though. Learning takes inquiry, breadth and depth and lots of sleep to sink in. Cramming for exams is self defeating.
I find that there is some element of ritual to "proper" notes. Its personal, and everyone differs. Any given system may sound logcal and sensible, but its most important that you write something, anything. Everything else doesnt really matter. I like to use real paper and pen, and start with a wide ruler drawn margin on the left (of course, you can buy paper with this. I prefer to do it by hand. It feels right.) and the date and subject at the top. Then I put keys on the left (page numbers, question numbers, subtopics, speakers in a meeting) and values on the right (insights, things that seemed cool, the steps of a particularly tricky bit, definitions of words)
I put a dash before tasks I have to do, and a question mark on words or concepts I heard but didn't understand and I need to go look up later.
Literally none of this is necessary. It supports my learning only in the sense that it makes me feel like im doing things right. I rarely ever come back and read them (usually only ad-hoc looking for something I knew I wrote but cant remember, not a structured review of them). Your system is for you to figure out yourself. A lot of it came from imitating my math teachers. But maybe the description helped?
Some days I write the date and a margin, and nothing else. No pressure, not every day is a notes day. Some days you learn a ton, and others don't challenge you at all. Thats normal too.
I think my downfall might have been questioning the efficacy of my method beyond it just "feeling right" and trying to find ways to show myself that I am learning.. maybe the correct approach is to just do whatever and hope for the best
It's kinda the purpose of note-taking imo. At its core, it's a mechanical way to enforce "think more about it". Simply putting words down in some form is at least partly achieving that, though if it's mindless it doesn't tend to provide very much benefit beyond that point.
(this is also why I despise mandatory note-taking in classes. they have universally expected something like a dictation, and that isn't how I take notes. (I'm fully aware these are just awful teachers and it isn't how all others operate, and there were many other signs they were awful))
I keep "proofs" of past performance. Like a drawing or a name of netflix series I barely understood or a text I wrote.
Once in months, I check that stuff and see myself understand the series better, see that I do better pictures etc etc.
When I feel anxiety, I check old stuff and compare it to the new stuff. It brings pleasure.
For this reason I deeply hate formal certifications especially in IT. It's too much jumping through stupid hoops as well as the world according to <vendor>. But I'm still known as one of the most knowledgeable people in the company because I'm always building stuff and jumping on new things.
But lately I find IT to be becoming really rigid. We have all this governance and iso bullshit in work now where they want us to be certified before we can even start on something. I've been able to duck out of it most of the time by jumping on side projects but in the end I probably need to move to a smaller company that isn't so much into all the overhead.
Ps I do admire people who can be so structured. I just can't be like that. I have heavy ADHD which is probably the main cause :) But it's interesting to hear.
However it also seems to tie me to projects that nobody else wants because the path forward is not clear or they are deemed unsafe bets, which means I have a lot more agency as most of the management and oversight also doesn't want to link their names to it too closely :) Which is exactly what I want. I noticed a lot of people get more conservative in their approach as they move up in their career. Probably because they have more to lose. For me having challenging and interesting work is more important than my career path.
And I am pretty successful with my approach meaning results. I always feel like if there is a way to do something I will find it and that generally does end up being the case. At work it's becoming a harder and harder fit though as governance processes ramp up.
In personal projects I'm even more like this and I do end up not finishing many of them. It is what it is. I do find that brainstorming with a good AI model can help the momentum going though. I know several projects I have hardly progressed with until I started doing that.
It becomes a problem of organising my thoughts so that I can find them and reconnect them and bundle them together into ideas. Which later might become understanding and wisdom.
Obviously this is not nothing new, Zettelkasten is solving the exact the same problem. And through out history many collections of notes have been found and archived. These systems will benefit much from LLMs, purely for the organizational advantageous.
I have taken another approach inspired by mind maps to create my own visual PKM[1]. It has become a giant scrapbook with notes, videos and imaginary, ideas and half-finished projects, and everything in-between. The advantage is that it's a giant visual program, it's a mind map created using a visual programming environment. I'm constantly extending it with new tooling to help me keep my thoughts in order.
In the end, it's the tweeking at my scrapbook while adding to the scrapbook that then causes more tweeking until something arises that was expected but which is very much welcome.
[1]: https://blog.openmindmap.org/blog/mind-maps-for-busy-minds
Otherwise you're just gonna be doing busy work to feel like you're doing what you're supposed to.
Do not suppose. Decide what you want to achieve and slice that into things you can do inside of a day.
On the other hand, if you have nothing to achieve, anything goes. Just read, think about it, go for walks.
Just don't get caught in between, busy and going nowhere.
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.
Which is fundamentally a reference sheet, it's not for learning.
That might be why interacting with dedicated PKM-centric communities and content is personally so exhausting.
I would think the latter is the former. Do you mean the idea that hand movements of writing help retention?
> Do you mean the idea that hand movements of writing help retention?
It's not just that, but also mentally engaging with the material.
The former is, e.g., writing down how you got some software working on your machine so you can reference it in a few years.
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.
I have to admit I'm one of those people that just doesn't "get" Obsidian. Every now and then when I have a specific thing I'm working on, I create a new vault, write one or two notes, and then inevitably never look at it again.
I read a post recently about using a local LLM to OCR handwritten notes that I intend to trial soon:
https://andrewdoering.org/blog/2026/remarkable-local-handwri...
Having experienced all of these methods. I've found myself regularly searching through my vault and referencing older material. While the notes hand-written on a tablet, made it much easier to sift through vast amounts of material I was ingesting at the time. I find myself unable to re-use these notes in any meaningful way. They still exist, I can access them, but I don't find myself going back to them. Old paper notebooks? Most of them are destroyed, lost, forgotten to time.
The knowledge management, with easily indexable and searchable contents, has this invaluable perk of being accessible at a moments notice. Keeping potential of being relevant.
Some people then add layers of fetishizing to that, because humans gonna human, but the actual idea itself doesn’t deserve to be tarred with the same brush.
Any thing else goes to the PKM in a structured and often actionable way. It is my notebook, my business development system, my todo list, my brain dump, my list of contacts, etc. What I particularly value is the easy ability to enrich a document with cross-links. This is for me the strongest point of PKM as the one I have in Obsidian.
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.
it isn't in a space that's full of snake oil salesmen trying to peddle you solutions you don't need. The problem with the whole knowledge management thing is that it's full of people obsessed with appearing intellectual and productive while never actually producing anything worth mentioning despite their gazillion knowledge hacks, which was the point of the original article.
Just like any other 'life optimization' cottage industry, stop over intellectualizing, stop inventing problems that don't exist and do something useful instead is perfectly valid, much needed advice
As such, people who are interested in learning more about how to have an intentional relationship with their library are left with a freshman level understanding of the topic.
The goal is to provide a comprehensive overview of the problems and solutions tried in the past, and give people access to creative ways to build (and share findings from) their libraries.
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.
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.
I also completely understand "bloat"/simplicity - my project may seem dead on Github, but for me it is "perfect software" - no more features needed, no bugs in what I use daily.
Some of my favorite projects got so complicated over the years that I stopped to use them. This is why Don and his TeX is the legend ;)
Just plain text or markdown format, name, description and keywords (tags, unique features: keywords have orders and bound time) for resources, structures like real objects, search and filter by text or keywords,
No inline images or videos (add images in the future), math, diagrams, AI / LLM, or other unnecessary things (my own values for unnecessary things).
So it struck me as strange that people devised these extravagant note taking systems because I could easily sense the procrastination rearing its ugly head. The actual work behind the notes is always the difficult part. Not the notes themselves. But it’s good people realize this eventually even if it takes them years to come to their senses.
As for the Moleskine, decades later it sits unused. I went back to cheap spiral bound paper and pens, because my mind does not register any of it as some shrine to my thinking, I’m free to actually focus on what I should be writing about. A few color coded pens just for my own sake is all that’s needed.
The financial investment of that one stupidly overpriced and overrated notebook was enough to paralyze me to the point where I never want to use it.
"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?
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.
Would love something better than markup but not as CPU intensive as Evernote.
I am less concerned about open source than open standard. I have had my notes in text, jpg for more than a decade. Have used plain text editors (textmate?), nvALT etc and now use obsidian. I am sure these text files can stay for another 10 years even if obsidian itself goes out of business.
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.
Yeah, that's a good method. Never forgetting stuff is such an amazing side effect of putting them down in writing. Instead of throwaway notes, I write articles for my website now. I actually have fun re-reading those.
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 would love an open, cross-platform Apple Notes.
You're right on there not being an API, but...
Both Notes and Reminders have a full AppleScript / JXA interface that Apple has maintained for years. Any LLM with shell access can read notes, create folders, add reminders, mark them complete, etc... + iCloud syncs everything out to iPhone/iPad/Watch/Vison/whatever-comes-next automatically.
- 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.
For text files, I always have one generic TODO.md file that uses the `[ ]` todo and `[X]` done notation, and a couple of more generic text files like "work.md" or "solace.md" for more free form writing. There are also folders and text files for specific topics, like quotes, poems, etc. It's very important to have a scratchpad that you can just open up and start typing without thinking about how to categorize it, because you might lose the precious thread of the thought while debating which category to use, and you can always shelve it later if it's worth keeping. Zero friction to start typing is crucial.
On paper, I use a simple loose leaf and folder system. I used to use bound journals, but since 80% of what I write down is thrown away, loose leaf works better. Have a pile of about 10-20 pages. You fill up a page, and if it's destined for the circular file, dog-ear it; otherwise give it a title and date and move it to the bottom of the pile. When you run out of blank pages, go through and either discard or file each page in an appropriate manila folder. This works better than index cards (which are too small to contain a complete thought) or journals (where it's too hard to discard pages.) Lots of people use ring or disc bound journals for that, but I find that fiddly and not any easier to work with than loose-leaf, probably because I just keep everything at my desk and don't have to carry it around anywhere.
Paper has a massive advantage when it comes to diagrams, design thinking, and mathematical equations. I love LaTeX, and use MathJax on my personal site quite heavily, but its so much slower and less fluent than just writing equations on paper. I've tried tablets, and am really good at using draw.io (now app.diagrams.net) but when you're thinking freeform you want flexibility and fluency above all else and never want to be fighting a UI, which takes you out of the flow state. Ideas are fragile things, especially when newborn; any distraction is an unacceptable risk.
I used to use a custom Tesseract pipeline to OCR the pages I wanted to be searchable, but lately I've just been using ChatGPT, which seems to do just fine with my handwriting. As OCR got better over the years, I actually moved more towards paper, because what's the downside?
So, getting back to the point of the article: PKM tools are stuck in the unenviable position of competing with both paper and ordinary text files, and for me they just don't offer enough advantages.