I've started experimenting with Obsidian as a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system. Fragemented thoughts:
(Lots of this bullet-point format this week, but my brain is fragged from the heat and this helps.)
- I used to be a heavy Evernote user, but dropped off it years ago, mostly due to portability issues and feeling the app wasn't really developing positively.
- I've avoided centralising my 'personal knowledge' aka 'notes about stuff' since then. I've been happy with my workflow, which mostly hinges on using .txt files placed maximally locally to where they're being used (e.g. inside the relevant project folder) or in a couple of 'general use' folders, like one that essentially forms a scratch notebook.
- What these notes represent is generally:
- Scrappy, project-specific things (when notes turn into output, I generally format-shift to something else, but it's a loose, more easily manipulable starting point, somewhat equivalent to starting in a paper notebook)
- Lots of regularly accessed but unconnected notes like a journal, reading list, and so forth
- Scrappy bits of random notes that are useful only temporary
- Stuff I like and want to store to look back on at some nebulous future date, such as:
- poems
- recipes
- quotes and articles
- ideas for gifts for me and others
- .txt files + Dropbox + text editor on phone has been pretty hard to beat as a stripped-back toolset for me.
- But they've been very siloed off from one another, with a bunch of 'legacy' notes like poems being in, for instance, OneNote where I rarely think to look at them
- Obsidian provides structure and gets everything in one place, while working with Markdown files which will remain ultimately portable.
- I am unconvinced I want this structure or will benefit from it enough to justify changing well-established workflows, but I have enough interest to try.
- Actually, the nudge to organise things benefits me either way, even if I ultimately ditch Obsidian
Specific points of interest from using it so far:
- I think what I actually want is something that scans the contents of notes and suggests serendipitous links rather than forcing me to do more work to impose taxonomy. But also, if such a tool existed, I also wouldn't want to use it.
- Visualisation of connections between notes is actually really interesting for this blog. Here's what that looks like:
- It's already had me form a few serendipitous connections when drafting posts this week. Also, it's pretty.
- I find finding this connections/building out a view of where these thoughts connect over time to be a really interesting prospect; cf Generative Entropy (see, there's one now).
- It'll be more work to get linkages working for my archived blog drafts, since those don't use the same link format as what I post on the blog. Might still be worth it.
- Small annoyance: .md files break a lot of keyboard/typing support features on my phone's text editor, because it treats it as code, not text.