alt.hn

7/28/2026 at 2:21:10 PM

Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

 https://unattributed.cc/note-taking-and-personal-knowledge-management

by surprisetalk

8/2/2026 at 10:44:05 PM

Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end.

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.

by kepano

8/3/2026 at 10:57:45 AM

> A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end.

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.

by szszrk

8/3/2026 at 3:14:03 PM

The contribution of Excel, the most popular programming environment in the world, is undoubtable - therefore, not only has Excel accomplished something (popularize programming among non-programmers) but it's also easily measurable (it has done so more than any other technology in existence). It _is_ a genuine contribution to the world, by the tool itself, not just by what people use the tool for.

So, I disagree with this line of criticism - I think you very well can do those things.

by ddevnyc

8/3/2026 at 3:37:54 PM

I don't disagree here. I just pointed out that above commenter seems to dispute the author without having read the article in full. Turns out, some of us are just bad at communication :)

by szszrk

8/3/2026 at 1:26:25 PM

Indeed. My point was to agree with the author in their rebuttal of the original piece.

by kepano

8/3/2026 at 11:41:24 AM

Obsessing over the medium of work rather than the work itself has been a subculture since forever

by alansaber

8/3/2026 at 10:04:38 AM

>Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end.

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.

by voiper1

8/3/2026 at 2:00:44 PM

I agree with you. For example, [[links]] are a useful affordance for thinking that wasn't as popular before Obsidian. However the original piece was asking:

> 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]].

by kepano

8/3/2026 at 10:33:04 AM

From that perspective Org mode offers everything every other note taking app does.

Except a nice interface. Except syncing between devices. Except cloud backups. Except third party data breaches. Except paid support contracts.

by dotancohen

8/3/2026 at 2:50:42 PM

> Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?"

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

by swiftcoder

8/3/2026 at 3:39:50 PM

That is exactly the point I am making (echoing the author of the linked piece). Those tools did change the world. But I do not know how you go about measuring the net effect of it all. I can certainly share many anecdotes but what is the sum of things that happened and did not happen due to photography or spreadsheets or notes?

by kepano

8/3/2026 at 4:22:03 PM

> what is the sum of things that happened and did not happen due to photography or spreadsheets or notes

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...

by swiftcoder

8/3/2026 at 5:45:23 PM

We're in agreement. And it's not only the technological advances that came after, it's all the small life moments and personal accomplishments too. That's why I connected this to the Henry Ford example. How can we determine which of his accomplishments would or wouldn't have happened without his notetaking practice? He probably would not be able to answer that question himself.

by kepano

8/3/2026 at 12:13:21 AM

In his biography Richard Branson also talks about his personal notebooks, which he keeps and have some bookshelves worth by now

by bad_haircut72

8/3/2026 at 2:37:17 AM

He also has Dyslexia, so this would have been harder and more effort than for most other people. It probably help him overcome the short term into long term memory flow that a lot of people with Dyslexia struggle with.

by adamhartenz

8/2/2026 at 11:51:51 PM

Or lab notebooks from any lab ever.

by conception

8/3/2026 at 8:14:57 AM

Totally on your side here, asking for the accomplishments of a tool is strange. Isn't it easy to envision two people using the same note taking system extensively, with one achieving nothing and one really making it a tool that is essentially to their goals?

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.

by atoav

8/2/2026 at 8:27:30 PM

I've realized that most of my tendencies to set up elaborate note-taking systems and frameworks have been an attempt to address my anxiety around learning and productivity. I'm constantly in the mode of "learning defensively" - questioning what I'm absorbing into my mental toolkit, how much I retain, and how much I'd be able to conjure if I needed to solve a problem in that domain. In this context, noting down whatever I come across in Obsidian canvases or webs of interlinked notes or making Anki flash cards gives me some comfort about what I'm doing, and of course satisfies the urge of organizing and categorizing things.

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!

by udbhavs

8/2/2026 at 9:03:38 PM

I don't know your specifics, so I'm going to reply with what I've learned about learning:

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.

by jokellum

8/3/2026 at 12:51:06 AM

> ...typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough

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.

by monk_grilla

8/3/2026 at 1:41:40 PM

> I still don't know how or why to take proper notes

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.

by RugnirViking

8/3/2026 at 2:21:26 PM

BTW, this is darn near to being bullet journaling. It’s also almost exactly how I ended up taking notes after experimenting with bullet journaling and throwing out the parts I don’t really use.

by kstrauser

8/3/2026 at 1:45:47 AM

40 years ago we just wrote as much as we could down. The teacher usually hand wrote on the chalkboard. Some courses had slides, a precursor to PowerPoint. There is some reasearch that writing down on paper or with a stylus puts the stuff in extra places in our head.

by Projectiboga

8/3/2026 at 1:16:36 AM

I never learned to take notes. Good grades but think my notes were always rubbish!

by zippyman55

8/3/2026 at 12:33:35 PM

Taking notes is like lifting weights. You don't need the weights to be higher, and you don't need the notes to exist. The process of writing organizes thoughts.

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.

by ent001

8/2/2026 at 10:38:18 PM

Great advice, thanks!

> 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.

by udbhavs

8/3/2026 at 8:46:08 AM

This is why I always recommend an education over self learning programming. I can absolutely see the argument in places like the US where it costs an arm and a leg, but in Europe and other places with free education it's pretty much a no-brainer to me.

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.

by sfn42

8/3/2026 at 9:06:08 AM

>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.

by tonyedgecombe

8/3/2026 at 9:02:54 PM

That will always be the case though. No education is perfect, it will lag behind infustry standard because it takes time for the curriculum to catch up and industry standard still evolves rapidly.

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.

by sfn42

8/2/2026 at 10:14:37 PM

I would add that writing down your reactions to the books and not the book content itself is helpful. If something reminds you of something else then write about that. I mostly throw away all these things as the point is just to write them not to read them back

by enos_feedler

8/3/2026 at 4:09:22 AM

Yep. I consider it essentially "explaining it to myself". It serves a similar purpose as trying to teach someone else - trying to write something concisely and clearly is difficult unless you actually understand it, and then it often feels obvious. So if I'm struggling, I should probably think about it more (which the struggling is also accomplishing), and maybe go back and reread it to make sure I get it.

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))

by Groxx

8/3/2026 at 8:44:49 AM

I think of myself as a thought hoarder - my anxieties center around not wanting to forget a thought, no thought left behind because I never know when that thought might (or might not) be useful.

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

by Towaway69

8/2/2026 at 8:38:09 PM

I'm starting to break out of this mentality by noticing that

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.

by mm351206

8/2/2026 at 8:37:14 PM

Can confirm.

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).

by cocoa19

8/3/2026 at 12:53:41 AM

He says that, but in practice he ends up learning everything he can, in order to try and figure out the bare minimum to keep doing.

by al_borland

8/2/2026 at 8:36:03 PM

What is the goal?

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.

by bluGill

8/2/2026 at 10:59:32 PM

> That needs to start all conversations in this area. Not everyone had the same goals.

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.

by udbhavs

8/2/2026 at 8:51:32 PM

Well if you write down a snippet of code, and later upi reliaze you need that code a gain but don't remember it but do remember that you must have written a note about it, then writing down the note was useful.

The issue I'm still working on is how do I find such notes when I don't exactly remeber what they were about.

by galaxyLogic

8/3/2026 at 4:04:10 PM

> 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.

by kashunstva

8/3/2026 at 12:37:57 PM

First of all you need to decide your goal. Why are you reading, taking a course, or writing down anything, in the first place?

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.

by ent001

8/3/2026 at 5:37:02 AM

The process itself is necessary, not the notes. I used to take notes in classes and meetings. At some point I realized I never read them because they were illegible. No structure, bad handwriting, just key words, no sentences. What I do now is play cards on my phone. It performs the same function of keeping my mind focused on the conversation rather than wandering off. I’ve learned to combine this with focused note-taking where I write down specific things to remember: tasks, facts, significant statements. But it’s the process that allows me to focus, the notes or gazillion solitaire games completed are a side effect.

by belZaah

8/3/2026 at 2:37:42 AM

Wow you take learning methodology so seriously. When it comes to learning (or in fact pretty much anything) I really hate structure. I thrive in chaos. When I want to learn something I just start and fill in knowledge gaps where I need, and just roll with it, and if I fall and make mistakes it's ok. If I don't retain something I don't care, it must not have been important and I can always pick it up again.

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.

by wolvoleo

8/3/2026 at 4:16:09 PM

It is funny, I like reading about standards and certifications! I'm definitely more on the anxious side which leads to information hoarding tendencies and trying to think as much as I can before I act. I would love to get pulled a bit in your direction and be a bit more trigger-happy with making decisions and putting out things.

by udbhavs

8/2/2026 at 9:07:00 PM

> how do I know I'm learning anything at all?

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.

by watwut

8/2/2026 at 10:24:19 PM

These discussions always conflate the different types of "notes".

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.

by Ferret7446

8/3/2026 at 1:44:49 AM

Yeah, Obsidian has allow me to create a comprehensive back and frontlog of all types of media. And that is super useful to me, and I can make this little connect information base in a way no tools before it had really accomplished. The "queries" are much more natural and much closer to actual real paper notes.

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.

by attheballot

8/3/2026 at 2:02:52 AM

> 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.

I would think the latter is the former. Do you mean the idea that hand movements of writing help retention?

by jolmg

8/3/2026 at 10:25:42 AM

I think more the idea that wrestling with new ideas and distilling them down can you help you to understand something, even if that note is then immediately thrown out. The purpose of the notetaking in this case is not for future reference.

by adamzenith

8/3/2026 at 8:13:27 AM

They are absolutely not the same. e.g. the Cornell method is for learning.

> 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.

by Ferret7446

8/2/2026 at 8:33:16 PM

Note Brennan, who wrote the article this one is responding to added an update: https://brennan.day/what-have-note-taking-pkms-accomplished-...

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.

by jokellum

8/3/2026 at 2:35:25 PM

Because Obsidian is so barebones out of the box, people look for tools to help them organize things, hence looking for plugins.

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.

by sevenseacat

8/3/2026 at 12:09:42 AM

For the purposes of learning something new, I don't find traditional note-taking or the idea of "knowledge management" all that useful. I find the best way to learn is to do projects. Sometimes the project might be creating a set of notes on a certain topic, but the notes themselves are more or less disposable. It's the process of writing them that forces real learning to happen. It makes you work through problems and identify areas that you assumed you knew but really just had vague notions and misconceptions. Once I've moved on from a topic, I'd rather refer back to a textbook or online resources if I need a refresher.

by fasterik

8/2/2026 at 8:35:23 PM

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.

by bauerd

8/2/2026 at 9:28:15 PM

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.

by high_priest

8/3/2026 at 10:14:58 AM

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.

by melicerte

8/2/2026 at 9:06:07 PM

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...

by freshchilled

8/2/2026 at 9:21:03 PM

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.

by disposedtrolley

8/3/2026 at 8:07:46 PM

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.

by freshchilled

8/2/2026 at 9:42:48 PM

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.

by Apocryphon

8/3/2026 at 7:18:02 AM

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.

by gsinclair

8/3/2026 at 7:25:30 AM

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.

by Apocryphon

8/2/2026 at 10:13:08 PM

The reason I love the Personal Library Science space is directly due to its emergence of information features in a personal library against the idiosyncratic processes of resonance and attention in their creators.

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.

by _bramses

8/2/2026 at 10:47:20 PM

>"Use whatever works for you" is intellectually lazy

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

by Barrin92

8/2/2026 at 11:12:48 PM

Half right, but no. It IS intellectually lazy precisely because as you pointed out, snake oil salesmen exist in the space. Because of them, well meaning people who can inform people of the very real trade offs of different storage or search techniques are all bucketed together without nuance, which is by definition lazy.

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.

by _bramses

8/3/2026 at 3:20:27 AM

Feom https://brennan.day/what-have-note-taking-pkms-accomplished-...:

"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?

by galaxyLogic

8/3/2026 at 5:05:18 AM

AI are also good at reading. I'm not one to write lots of notes without a reason. For the first time I'm jealous of people who have a way to distill years of their inner thoughts.

by axus

8/3/2026 at 11:35:20 AM

I used Joplin, Sphinx doc for many years ago, but I don't use them recently.

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.

[1] https://metaessen.com/

by lilerjee

8/3/2026 at 11:55:30 AM

I did the same - I created MindForger for myself and it's the first app that I start every day and the last I close.

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 ;)

by dvorka

8/3/2026 at 1:05:12 PM

My app metaessen even is simpler than your MindForger.

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).

by lilerjee

8/3/2026 at 9:59:45 AM

I really thought Evernote would scratch this itch nearly a decade ago (or so it feels). But it ended up being a WORN service (Write-Once, Read-Never).

Would love something better than markup but not as CPU intensive as Evernote.

by the6threplicant

8/3/2026 at 10:11:27 AM

There is a pedagogical theory that states a student only really learns something when they apply it.

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.

by PaulRobinson

8/2/2026 at 9:11:39 PM

I realized about the time I bought my first Moleskine that there existed in me a predisposition to fawn, for the lack of a better word, over the stationary and shift my mind towards not the subject matter that I should have been writing about, but the execution of writing in that it has to be this perfect thing rather than a messy exploration of thoughts where things are thrown away constantly and information becomes out of date. That there exists very little reason, if any, to archive any of it once it’s been written. And if it does have to be archived, that it’s done at a much later stage when more of the what-matters has been determined and everything else pared away.

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.

by mpfh

8/3/2026 at 3:23:41 AM

Using Logseq[1][2] for years and quite happy with it, especially since it has apps for tablets/iPad and phones as well, while being completely FOSS.

[1] https://logseq.com/

[2] https://github.com/logseq/logseq

by xvilka

8/3/2026 at 5:03:01 AM

I liked (and used) logseq for a while (since I could easily relate to the idea of outliner). But their development stalled; now they have moved to db based structure.

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.

by jjude

8/3/2026 at 5:44:41 AM

It's an open source software but I think we have to start restricting the definition of FOSS to remove software that have a requirement for continuous to sign a CLA and the organization is VC funded.

by nibbleyou

8/3/2026 at 12:54:16 AM

I like obsidian because linking stuff is fun. It doesn’t have to be a serious thing, you know.

by juiceland

8/3/2026 at 2:53:25 AM

I think my notetaking undergoes a transformation each year. Last summer I made a remembrance agent plugin in obsidian which has been useful for collecting my notes on technical info and cross referencing. I still have a notion zettelkasten, but it’s become more of a tool for my creative writing. I expect this year to take the leap on building things more like remembrance agents to enhance my recall when doing creative work.

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.

by mmargenot

8/3/2026 at 9:21:01 AM

I’d been a user of Obsidian, Notion, ClickUp and tried a myriad of other tools until I realized that Apple Notes and Reminders did the job just fine and worked perfectly across devices. Opening obsidian in my phone never felt natural, and most of the time I just want to write a quick note or add a quick task which didn’t feel as intuitive on my phone using third party apps. Also, the voice recording and transcription options in Notes are the best one I’ve used so far.

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.

by 0x4e

8/3/2026 at 10:49:30 AM

Your comment resonates, but one issue with Apple Notes is that functionality is very limited on Windows and Linux. Apple doesn't expose any APIs for Notes so it cannot be integrated with ChatGPT/Codex/Claud. At best there are community plugins which scan the local DB running on a Mac. This would not work on iPhone.

I would love an open, cross-platform Apple Notes.

by Gareth321

8/3/2026 at 11:07:09 AM

Functionality is great across Apple devices. I think they are really adamant about their lack of interest in making their platforms open to other OSs.

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.

by 0x4e

8/3/2026 at 11:20:08 AM

Thanks! I'll take another look and see if I can live with the limitations. One recommendation I got from this submission is Anytype, so I'm also scoping that now. I feel like I've test-driven a hundred apps over the decades :-/

by Gareth321

8/2/2026 at 8:29:26 PM

AI memory systems have replaced that for me. AIs will actually read those things too. I never read my own notes.

by matheusmoreira

8/2/2026 at 8:47:13 PM

Writing the notes is more the point than re-reading them, at least for me. Writing stuff down forces me to kick things around and find a good structure, and that's where the useful stuff happens.

by noelwelsh

8/2/2026 at 9:00:23 PM

> Writing the notes is more the point

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.

by matheusmoreira

8/2/2026 at 9:33:58 PM

This is especially relevant today where there are thousands of attempts to create AI "voice to text" apps to automate away "boring" note taking. My daughter working in medical field says that she is contacted at least once a week "hey, we are startup having a novel idea for voice to text app". And she have to explain yet again that she doesn't want to automate note taking away. Writing is the process how we structure our thoughts and discover new things. This is how we learn.

by obscurette

8/3/2026 at 10:53:17 AM

Could you recommend some options? I'm ready to go all-in on AI notes but the application options seem really limited. I've been using OneNote for a long time but integration options for ChatGPT/Claude are limited. Also no vectorised notes. I feel like there's a big gap in the market right now for a plug-and-play tool.

by Gareth321

8/3/2026 at 8:33:06 AM

There are two books people ITT may be interested in: How to Read a Book (a classic that everyone should read), and Make It Stick. The latter goes over the current state of learning research and it's helped me out, but both of them complement each other pretty well. As far as our current understanding of learning goes, the following is about the most effective way to approach it:

- 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.

by helterskelter

8/3/2026 at 5:28:09 AM

Oh, I have all the thoughts about this.

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.

by jrm4

8/3/2026 at 2:15:19 PM

I've taken a lot of notes and done a lot of "scratchpad thinking" over the last 20 years, something I started in college but really got into in grad school. I've tried Evernote, OneNote, Obsidian. I've tried little journal apps on my phone. I wrote my own little "microblog" in Django to make it easy to collect and annotate links, quotes, snippets, and images from around the internet. And what I always keep coming back to is plain text files and folders of saved images and files, as well as paper.

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.

by olooney

8/2/2026 at 10:06:38 PM

Blue water bridge! Sarnia!

by ajma

8/3/2026 at 1:14:22 PM

[flagged]

by sharpnick

8/3/2026 at 12:03:32 AM

[dead]

by 1saadcodes

8/2/2026 at 10:26:42 PM

An LLM generated Obsidian ad. Still not interested, sorry.

by cynicalsecurity

8/3/2026 at 12:01:44 AM

yeah, it smelled Slop.

by eager_learner

8/3/2026 at 12:56:21 AM

Which parts? Didn't feel like it to me, and the two paragraphs I copied into pangram were negative.

by usef-