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Comment by bauerd | Hacker News Reader

I returned to hand-written notebooks. None of these knowledge management frameworks ever worked for me. Sure my agents have their own semantic memory system but I’m not an agent.

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I've taken hand-written, on paper, notes throughout my education, up to high school level. In university, I've switched to hand-written notes on a tablet device. At the end of uni, when I started working on my final thesis & Obsidian was becoming popular, I've switched to it and since then, everything I note is organized into markdown files or at least is somehow referenced through pure text.

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.

I also much prefer handwritten notes. The act of writing something down helps it to stay in my memory more than typing it up. The main for me downside is there's no Cmd+F for my handwritten notes.

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...

The premise of that article is neat, but it looks to be entirely LLM-generated (in addition to the header image) that it’s almost impossible to read.

I did notice that, and the other article I have saved about setting up Ollama on a Macbook Air is even more clearly AI. But I'm assuming/hoping the author had an LLM generate it from their notes/Github project.

I've both a handwritten notebook and an obsidian PKM. When in a meeting, I always have the notebook in front of me. I write plenty of stuff I believe I've to remember. It is really important for my understanding of what is at stake in the meeting. I can't skip it. This live brain dump is required for me. That being said, I almost never come back to what I manually wrote and when I do, I've hard time understanding the logic of my writing... How strange the brain works. It is like I'm using the handwritting to organize the information in my brain. But is done in such a way than I can't no longer understand myself like 24h after the meeting :)

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.

I think it’s less notebooks or typed notes, and more the issue of cargo cults built around frameworks and systems. Bullet journals are a handwritten PKM, aren’t they? And they were definitely a fad around the fetishized ideal of creating perfect notebooks.

Bullet journals are the opposite of a fad that fetishizes perfect notebooks. Proper bullet journals are very pragmatic.

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.

Okay, well I don't mean the sense of a perfect notebook that's pristine, so much one that is a panacea for one's knowledge-management needs. Like any productivity trend, it seemed like the bullet journal method inspired a cottage industry of influencers with their bespoke variants and people sharing their journals for the sake of it and heck I'd argue that if there are merchandise- pre-bulleted notebooks sold in stores- then your framework has become a more consumer-driven than pure productivity. But that's no better or worse than GTD, or Zettelkasten for that matter.

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