Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

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!

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.

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.

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