Rethinking my PKM part 5: How do you organize your notes?

[@MaxwellBuba]

We first make our habits, and then our habits make us. Good Quote.

[@mariuspretorius2130]

Thank you, for sharing your thinking process about note organization - and your personal development. It helps to clarify one's own thinking. Often there is a presenter that champions one of these approaches and convinces you that it is the only approach. Then you see a video from another presenter that convinces you in another direction. So, I appreciate this "neutral" overall view of all the different approaches.

[@mikemansour4634]

I admire your work so much , The Diagrams , The Addons , the Value , and your way of presenting it , this has way more value than paid content available,can’t thank you Enough ّ

[@sanzharedu]

This is my favorite overview of how to view PKM so far. Provides good compare and contrast highlighting merits of different approaches and helps understand the differences. Thank you!

[@VisualPKM]

Wow, thanks!

[@hotepstories]

Very helpful. Especially that you explain why a specific approach did or did not work for you. It helps a lot to assess whether I would be affected the same way. Also very helpful the way you share your plan for the upcoming way you plan to organize. Thank you very much

[@bagheera3008]

Mr Zsolt, you are amazing. Thank you for existing in this world. I view your work as a modern day Tim Berners Lee. Even now, youve reached and helped so many people in the obsidian community not just thru excalidraw but by taking the time and effort to share your thought processes. As someone in the property development field using Obsidian to manage my life, health and work, you’ve been tremendous. Just wanted to say thanks

[@VisualPKM]

Thank you for sharing. This means a lot to me. I'm so happy that you find my work valuable.

[@OttoVanluchene]

The past 1O years I've been looking for the right tools for note taking, with Obsidian I found it. Now I'm 2 years in looking for the right note taking system 😁

[@taolaoworld6515]

Thank you for sharing about 30 years of note taking. I find my self struggling with tools. I have tried take note using notebook (with a lot of them) , google doc, confluence, apple's note, notion and the most recent is obsidian. This is the only software that give me the hope that it would be the main note taking tool for next decade.

[@VisualPKM]

I am also very hopeful that Obsidian will stick around for long and it will continue to evolve and improve in the coming years. But even if Obsidian or some of its plugins become obsolete, plain text / markdown files will be easy to migrate to any future tool. This is one of my biggest learnings over the years and especially in the recent years when I tried to migrate notes from TheBrain and from Roam. It was doable, but took a lot of effort and I certainly lost some context/content in the process. Avoiding platform lock-in should be high on anyone's checklist, as well as it is better to stick with a mediocre system for a prolonged period then constantly switching tools an losing content in the process.

[@ManadayMavani]

@@VisualPKM I echo your thoughts about vendor locking. I tried almost all note taking apps like Evernote, OneNote, Notion and in the transition from one note taking service to another I lost many notes and insights as it was nearly impossible to transform one proprietary format to another. I have finally started using Obsidian and I'm loving it plugins like DataView and yours Excalidraw made the Obsidian experience topnotch. However, this time I have decided not to use too many Obsidian plugins to keep my notes vendor or plugins agnostic. 😊

[@luvinfunvan]

@@ManadayMavani Exactly! Obsidian is wonderful but its easy to over complicate process because of the plethora of plug-ins that are available now. Thankfully the basic feature set of Markdown provides easy transferability. Including the ability to convert the Wikilinks to MD links. KISS always applies :)

[@Mikarevival]

Great Job with your Video! You are an inspiration. I used atomic notes with my Synology Notes (I started 3 years ago). There was no way to link notes. I worked just with tags. I am a technician\programmer for a POS (Point of Sales) Company and I take notes about the workflow of programming or errors and fixing those errors. I am obsessed with Screenshots (for those who also are, I suggest Screenpresso. This is no advertisement. Just what I am really enjoying. I tried so many tools. My first was Lightshot. Just a little few functions. Not enough for me. A great alternative what I also used is Greenshot) and I use those in 80% of my Notes. I switched 4 months ago to Obsidian. Another world. I am really enjoying it. There is a lot of work to do and a lot of time is involved, but the satisfaction of finding related topics and thought has no describable value. I am still an "Atomic" guy, but I am more and more in to Daily Notes with links to the topics of that day. It means that I start with the daily note and I move on creating a separate note on the topic if there is more information about it that should be saved and remembered. Taking notes at this level can really change the way to live and, yes, you never stop to evolve. Keep doing your great work and take care. M.

[@VisualPKM]

Thanks for the feedback! Btw. I use Windows PowerToys for screenshots. It is free and very convenient - but I am not a screenshot poweruser for sure.

[@Mikarevival]

@@VisualPKM It was a pleasure. Thank you for sharing what you know.

[@JakeWoken]

Awesome explanation! Very clear. I'm settling on a mix of PPV with Topic-First in Obsidian. Great for productivity and building a second brain.

[@rodking7501]

Excellent presentation, Zsolt. Thanks for sharing.

[@cloud7899]

Your visual note taking approach is very appealing to me. I wanted to say thank you for such a well put together high effort video, take care!

[@havefunbesafe]

Nice! I take physical notes and upload my entire notebooks to Apple notes with hash tags for future reference.

[@YannyKo13]

Now I understand that what I've been doing are Zettelkasten Topic First while using different colors for the Action First system, without even knowing it. Thank you for this!

[@ademenchuk]

Brother, your visuals helped me a lot! Great work!

[@swsmoot]

I have been a 30+ year knowledge organizer using everything from outliners going all the back to MORE by Symantec, OmniOutliner, through TheBrain, folders of PDFs and text files, Scrivener, Notion, Craft, and now moving everything to Obsidian slowly. I'm finding that I will have to use a hybrid approach. I don't do daily notes at all since I usually dictate daily thoughts into a speech-to-text app and import that into my task manager or a running date stamped notebook currently in Taskade. The two main things I'm working on right now need very different approaches. First is my Life Book, which is my forward looking "Purpose, Vision and Reverse Journal". Instead of a journal that looks back, a reverse journal is what I am doing to look forward to realize my purpose and vision, principles, values, deep self analysis, consciousness growth, learnings, philosophy, Wealth Platform, giving and service focus, and everything that makes up my life. This gets printed to A5 paper from time to time to carry with me in a small leather bound notebook and refer to, plus I'm reading from it nearly daily. There are four major sections: 1-Foundations, 2-Preparation, 3-Execution and 4-Experiences. There are dozens of subsections so I'm finding folders first (topics) works best for this. The other project is a 21 year long (so far) research and writing project (I call it a life study) called Darkness and Light. This is a much more PKM type of project where structuring, interlinking and tagging are used much more than the first project. But it may also turn into one or more books in the future. As much as the idea appeals to me, I find that I am frustrated with atomic notes because it is too much work to get a comprehensive view of a topic in either project, so I am trying to figure out other approaches. One thing I would like to see in Obsidian is something I call synthetic temporal documents. These are documents that are described in some syntax that brings together (compiles) other pages within Obsidian, by transcluding linked or tagged pages as in- line references, sidebars or in some other way into a document that can be either temporary or made permanent if need be. This would make atomic notes more useful and would also be the basis for a second idea, which is a way of compiling book content similar to Literature and Latte's Scrivener app. Using Excalidraw has freed up my thinking and expression from long blocks of prose to pages of diagrams and charts to communicate concepts, facts, histories, Financial structures, investing strategies, etc. quickly and that feels liberating, so THANKS for that!!! For now, I have to keep exporting Obsidian and Excalidraw content to Apple's Pages app for laying out the Life Book for printing. Although I have 50 years of programming experience I'm not really interested in developing a solution for this because it does not align with my Purpose and Vision, and I don't take on anything that leads me away from my planned out path.

[@VisualPKM]

I love your synthetic temporal document idea. I've been thinking something similar. I also - I guess most people do - like to see the big picture. With atomic notes I feel I don't see the forest from the trees. I am currently digging into Zettelkasten much deeper than before. Exploring the concept not just for writing but for office work and PKM in general. An important concept with ZK is the sequence of ideas, it is not just a WIKI of linked notes, but trails of thought sequenced following a line questioning, exploration, etc... I have some thoughts of creating "synthetic temporal" views of these chains of ideas using Excalidraw markdown embeds. More to come on that during the next couple of months. As for the printing, I am not sure I understand you. Printing from Obsidian to PDF does not wok for you? Why? Just an idea, I recently saw a tweet from Nick Milo announcing that he is going to write a book 100% in Obsidian. It may be interesting for you to follow his progress and learn/share experiences writing and printing books in/from Obsidian.

[@swsmoot]

@@VisualPKM Zsolt, thank you for your response to my comment and providing additional useful information. I use PDF printing from Obsidian all the time for certain types of things like sharing information with other people. Reasons it doesn't work for compiling a book are: 1. To save "paper" space in the Life Book, I have it laid out in a two column format with a narrow font with most of my Excalidraw graphics exported to png and inserted in a landscape orientation while everything else in the book is in portrait orientation. No ability to control that kind of output in Obsidian PDFs. 2. I cannot bring together pieces of the Life Book at build time the way I want, ergo the need for Synthetic Temporal Documents. An example: in the subsection "Foundations - Who Am I?" I have 80 pages of information about who I am from my own self analysis and 7 other sources of information from Myers-Briggs Personality Types (I'm actually a balance of INTJ and INFJ so I have two sections for those) to Enneagram, to Trader Personality Types and more. Each of these is a separate sub-subsection to make maintenance and reprinting easier. I have to pull all of those together manually and put them into one Pages document to build the Who Am I? section of the book, some of them I haven't even loaded into Obsidian yet because it's easier to copy and paste text and graphics from the source documents and store them in a waiting document that I add the Obsidian content to. Further, I have another subsection "Foundations - Who Am I Becoming?" which ties together my "Foundations - Purpose", "Foundations - Vision", "Foundations - Who am I?" subsections with many pieces of content that are very important from the personality analysis, like what am I best at, which tells me where I will focus my time and attention, which I have to manually insert information from "Foundations - Spiritual/Metaphysical Principles of Time and Attention" which is a subsection at "Foundations - Life Principles". And I need to insert extracts of other stuff like strengths and weaknesses compiled from the 8 different sources on personality types. Synthetic Temporal documents would save a lot of time writing the "Who am I becoming?" subsection. I could compile the various pieces and fill the surrounding thoughts and ideas from the aggregated information and persist that document in Obsidian. 3. I cannot format important quotes and other asides like I want. I've recently begun to think about ways of adding not only page level meta data, but also block level meta data to the content in Obsidian and processing everything with an outside app or scripts to build something I can output to Pages or Pandoc or something else. I've got a third huge project that I'm getting into as a result of my Purpose and Vision that involves working with several networks of people and organizations focused on solving or ameliorating major interlocking and co-dependent systemic threats to stable governments, the environment, food security, excessive natural resource depletion, over-financialization, systems-thinking, systems design expertise, mapping and dealing with a bipolar system of attractors (catastrophes and dystopias) where both attractors are not good for humanity and our future, applicable first principles and mental models, etc. I want to build a hub of cross-disciplinary knowledge for this effort and that will also require dynamically reorganizing and compiling information to share with the groups. I'll keep watching to see how your ideas develop along this line and I'll check out where Nick is in his book endeavor. Enjoy your work and thank you. Best to you!

[@ll14m4n]

This video finally sorted out all that ton of information I've watched on this topic in my head. Huge thanks.

[@FourthDerivative]

Great video. I've discovered that an action-based approach works best for me; I don't necessarily need to know "where everything is", I just need to know "what to do next". Obsidian works really well for me for this purpose, but it's kinda great that we live in a time with so many options out there!

[@JasonBlair]

Thanks for this. I just finished Tiago Forte's book, and I'm settling on a note taking app now. I like PARA as a starting point, but this is helping me think through how I might modify it to the way I think, and to what I want my PKM system to be. Action First is great for keeping me moving, but I also want to organize my whole life and varied interests, not just current work. Your discussion, especially on the Topic First organization, is making sense of how I think about the categories of Areas and Resources.

[@VisualPKM]

The trick is to always try to think with the mind of your future self. When will you want to resurface the information? What words will you be using to find it? I sometimes do "after action reviews" when there is a note that took me more time to find than I would have liked. These after action reviews help me do a better job at storing notes the next time.

[@chr_aikicom]

Hi Zsolt, thanks for this smart video ! :-) I think ( 08:50 ) that zettelkasten system is not necessarily under "topic first", maybe only at the very beginning, when we create the very first structure. If we do it. Because the folgezettel fans will tell you that it is probably more a separate category as the notes are "inserted" (or numbered if digital) according to the nearest other note. There is no hierarchy.

[@forrestrperry]

Excellent video. Really like your deep-ish dive into how not just to conceptualize but also visualize a variety of note-taking systems, especially the hybrid ones of your own devising. Thanks also for your Excalibrain videos. I recently re-watched them-closely-and finally have Excalibrain set up to my liking.

[@VisualPKM]

Thanks for the compliment. Awesome! I am glad you got ExcaliBrain working. I wish I had more time to work on ExcaliBrain… I see so much potential in that tool, I just can’t get to implementing my ideas.

[@paulahunt414]

I lovevyour videos because engqges all the senses, visual, audio, written. Etc

[@anthonysakin1151]

I really liked this summary. I've only discovered PKM recently ...and I appreciated a nicely done summary

[@OttoVanluchene]

Looks like I've mostly been an Topic First guy. In the past before Obsidian I made my folder structure based on Topics. With Obsidian the topic folders are still there but I try to keep them light, and move more towards a Topic Notes (MOC's). I borrowed the P from PARA so I move all my projects there, I also have many project but with Tags (Focus, Wip, Next, Someday) in Obsidian I can keep order. My Obsidian folders are now: Projects Wiki - Personal wiki with MOC's and Atomic Notes Resources - Items I saved but need to process. Move to Projects or rewrite to Atomic Notes or delete Journal with my pictures - My Journal pages together with all my pictures with a YYYY / MM Structure Nice overview of the systems!

[@VisualPKM]

Do you have both personal and work projects in Obsidian? Do you separate them or keep them in the same folder structure?

[@OttoVanluchene]

​@@VisualPKM Yes below each I have a dedicated one for work. I mostly organize work notes in a folder for each project, tho But only stuff I could "delete" if I would change jobs. I'm a developer and all my coding related or interesting information around my job as a developer I keep in my Dev Folder. As folder structure goes with light I mean that I try to keep it 3 levels deep. ( WIKI/DEV/JAVA for example )

[@raphaelmosaic]

This video conveys so much interesting knowledge in a clear and visual way, its crazy - backed it up as the number one video to share if someone wants to deepdive into PKM!

[@details.observer]

Very useful and balanced review. Thanks for sharing your knowledge, Zsolt.

[@jiangsir666]

Nice job. I realized that my note-taking system was actually Luhmann's card-box note-taking system, which was thematic. I combined the diary and content notes, and then put those belonging to a certain topic into the corresponding topic.

[@albo4life6082]

Amazing knowledge sir. Thank you for sharing. Please keep making more videos

[@ryanbartlett672]

Thanks. Watch your videos repeatedly over time and get more each time -- my goal is still daily notes first with the ability to adapt how I branch out as I go. Time is the root; I can experiment with other structures, but I have a home base.

[@tangentfox4677]

I found this overview very helpful for thinking about how various popular ideas relate to each other, as well as for thinking about how to define what I currently do. (With the architect/gardener/librarian idea: I'm a student that wants to be a gardener who keeps architecting for a librarian who rarely shows up. I often start with daily notes, that I try to organize into atomic notes, and then occasionally make topic notes about. The action-first process seems completely foreign to me, but seems like it might have some use with areas that I better understand what I'm doing.)

[@justdoc93]

옵시디언을 쓰면서도 이걸로 어떤 방식으로 자료를 정리할까 고민이 많았는데, 이 동영상을 보면서 정리가 많이 됐어요. 개인적인 생각까지 알려주셔서 도움이 많이 됐습니다.^^

[@thecookiemomma]

I'm kind of in the same camp as you are, but with a bit of a twist. I use a daily notes system combined with a linked system with my MOCs generated by dataview. I also use DV at the end of my notes that helps link mentions directly to, so I can find them that way. I know they don't graph that way, but it's a nice way to go. There's at least the one direction on the graph, so it works.

[@VisualPKM]

So at the end of your notes you have a DV query that lists all your links from the page? or all the backlinks to the page? This is just a list of links, or includes some sort of a short extract (e.g. the content of the summary:: field) for each link?

[@thecookiemomma]

@@VisualPKM I have a "see also" that just lists the pages, and usually I can tell by title the context. Either because the title is telling, or because it's a daily note that I referenced the idea in.

[@peetung]

Amazing summary. Thank you for sharing your year's worth of experience!

[@johnvodopija]

I found your presentation style and method using a mind map very engaging. Thank you. As a new user of Obsidian, and wanting to start my pkm focussed on private/non-work notes & ideas, I will gravitate to a topic-based structure using maps of content/indexes for each topic. Like you, I am certain my pkm approach will evolve over time. Thank you for explaining the various approaches/methods. Superb video. Cheers. 👍😎🇦🇺

[@rolf911]

Thank you for this special Video. The last Months I was searching "my way" between this different Perspectivs (BASB, LYT, PARA, Ahrens...) to organice my Collection of Notes and Tasks. This is a great overview.

[@bobsssch]

This was so well explained! Your approach with a mix of daily notes, topic-first & 12 favorite problems is exactly what I am trying now,. I felt micromanaged by the PARA & ACCESS structure. However, using the 12 Favorite Problems as containers for my note-taking feels now like a good strategy.

[@VisualPKM]

I love questions. As a rule of thumb I think it is never the problem to find the right answer, but to ask the right question. The process of coming up with the 12 favorite questions (problems) really helps crystallize what I want from my PKM system.

[@janknorr2223]

@@VisualPKM That totally resonates with me. Without the right questions the answer could just be 42 ;) Do you have a video about your 12 favorite problems and how you handle them in Obsidian? I would be really curious about this :) Thanks for your great work!

[@samuelitooooo]

Thanks so much for this, as well as The Ultimate Guide to File Organization. I'm glad I came across this sooner than later because there were a lot of opinions and workflows that I didn't resonate with. This is exactly what I wanted as I'm thinking about moving away from Notion and Google Keep: an overview of many established systems that are out there, so I can see what I resonate with without figuring it out from nothing.

[@RickCrist-hn9wo]

Zsolt, thankyou for sharing information on PKM and VPKM. I use a topic first approach but I am still struggling with accessing data I need. I want to establish a system of learning that doesn't change every month, I need to study not structure stuff. I will be including Excalidraw in the process. Thanks for all you do.

[@TimMorris]

Thanks for sharing this, and thanks for your plugins. After more than a decade on Evernote, I'm migrating to Obsidian. My structure continues to evolve, but currently I like filing my daily note with content and then having topic or project logs that transclude content from the daily note. This gives me daily notes that I can see what I did or thought on a day and topical notes that I can see development over time.

[@VisualPKM]

you might find this video interesting: kzbin.info/www/bejne/p3qumJJne7OInc0 Consider turning your approach upside down, placing the content in the project and topic logs and transcluding the relevant parts in the daily note. This is a subtle difference, but I feel the primary retrieval is based on the project or topic not the day.

[@jrRim]

your content is gold. thank you so much

[@ryanbartlett672]

Always great -- love the color-dotted diagrams! Thanks. My goal is Daily Notes as the center. It acts as a journal, which has been a lifelong goal/struggle, and it appeals to my database brain where after many years of working in these systems, I think in terms of timestamps like creation_date, last_update_date, last_accessed . Daily Notes can cover those loosely at first, and hopefully tightly with DataView eventually. I have ideas about weekly/monthly counts of my most popular music, concepts, areas of focus, that would rely on time. I just need to get going -- being on my locked-down work computer 10 hours a day where I use Dendron/VSCode (so thankful for that PMK option!), I find it hard to switch over to Obsidian -- even with a KVM switch --- and keep the journal going. You could argue that forces me to summarize, because I have to rewrite it, but I feels like rework, and I really want that detail so I can use it on my next project. I saw your video on Google Keep -- maybe I could get myself to dictate as I go... Thanks again.

[@VisualPKM]

I find that a journal is very good for reflecting and clarifying things for myself, but I also find that I relatively rarely return to my daily notes pages. My experience dictating long stretches of text is mixed - at best. Have you tried installing Obsidian on the locked down PC? Else you could try Obsidian mobile on a tablet, or a web hosted version. I came across this: neverinstall.com/apps/obsidian ; though I haven’t tried it, but it does look promising.

[@mageprometheus]

Excellent again. Obsidian's design fits so well into designing a second brain. I think to make it sing as a project/task manager, becoming competent with the more advanced aspects of Properties, Dataview and Templater (even as far as javascript) are necessary. Scooping up, processing and correlating all the small parts will reduce the friction enough to make it work. In dedicated project/task management systems all that functionality is built in.

[@VisualPKM]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I think that in addition to automating your workflows in Obsidian learning tools like dataview, templater, javascript, etc. pays off outside Obsidian as well. You'll learn a set of highly transferable skills as you implement simple algorithms to automate your workflow. Obsidian is like an Operating system for knowledge work and productivity. It has all the building blocks and with a little effort you can extend these block to do practically anything you can think of...

[@mageprometheus]

@@VisualPKM I like this thought, thanks. I use AutoHotKey to make everything flow together between apps.

[@alexitosworld]

As always with these things one ends up having a mix of solutions ^^ i loved this summary! For me is a mix of folders to separate big areas and then topics and atomic notes, but it depends in the topic. I use daily notes mostly for work but everything else goes directly into other areas. What I love about obsidian is that it lets me mix all these workflows on the same app and use them depending on what I’m dealing with at the moment.

[@VisualPKM]

I also very much appreciate Obsidian's flexibility to allow different approaches in parallel.

[@andyandyju]

Great video. I don't use a single method for all, I'm using different approaches in different contexts. For example, I'm using a method similar to Zettelkasten if I've to learn in a subject, today I'm using to learn KMS theory and Obidian use :-). I'm using a method similar to ACCESS for organizing my work stuff, as a set of projects. But meeting and other temporal based stuff are organized using a temporal structure. There are some cross-reference between the three context, too.

[@nakoskyranos4080]

This chanel is probably the most cutting edge corner of the note taking conversation. You have made an incredible resource! Thank you! I would like to share this idea. I think that in obsidian, you can have all of these structures simultaniously! Either seperately, with different structures for different types of info, or all on the same content where structures are like views we can filter that content through. Thoughts?

[@VisualPKM]

Thanks for the compliment regarding the channel. I agree with you, Obsidian can handle all of these structures in parallel. I think what is important is to clarify in your mind which structure/workflow you use for which task. Doing everything at the same time or designing a system that is too complex will become a constant mental burden to work with and on the long term will inhibit note taking. Simplicity is king! However, I tend to agree that different structures fit different needs (i.e. my note taking in meetings, my project work for the channel and my reading notes on personal knowledge management) can all follow a different workflows, but all live nicely next to each other in the same Obsidian vault.

[@ksoonsoon]

Agreed and that’s what I intentionally work toward. A hybrid system that has the strengths of more than one approach.. great comment.

[@ricabude]

Man... I really enjoy your diagrams and delivery style, but the random sticky note system of your friend is "miraculously" hilarious 😅😅😅

[@jakobcarlen2004]

I run OneNote. I am a bit limited to corporate toolkit. The feature I appreciate is the connection to calendar meetings. It makes it really easy to recall what was said at a later stage. At least important in my work

[@VisualPKM]

I talk about meeting notes and daily notes in this video: ITS ABOUT TIME - How I integrate time into my Obsidian notes - GTD kzbin.info/www/bejne/p3qumJJne7OInc0 Minutes of meetings and action tracking are very important part of my workflow as well. OneNote is a very powerful tool, I also use it in the corporate environment. OneNote in combination with Teams for team collaboration and meeting minutes is a very powerful combination.

[@ИванПронин-ж3ш]

Здравствуйте. Спасибо Вам за такую работу это просто круто !

[@ksoonsoon]

Ok I’m going to use my seldom used “outrageous” adjective for your video. I am a relatively obsidian user and several of these approaches have been running around in my head as I am trying to sort out my personal approach and implementation. You did a fantastic job of summarizing what appears to be all of the current approaches and their derivatives. I will add one other note. Although my personal approach is a hybrid and part of it is driven off of the daily notes approach, that daily notes approach really better represents the bullet journal structure as a starting point with some enhancements that I felt were necessary and efficient given the more flexible nature of obsidian over the use of a physical notebook. My current struggle really revolves around the integration of a task manager and the calendar. Using those components that are native to obsidian seem to less than satisfactory and optimal, understanding since that’s not really what it’s made for. My current system is a little bit of a split between the use of obsidian, some integration with tasks regarding my daily notes and the bullet journal approach and to do list and also the open tasks from Todoist into a Calendar system, probably Fantastico that will allow me to schedule my work, including work on my tasks, in a more efficient and natural way. Thanks again and I really appreciate all the effort you put into these videos and how much it helps the community, specifically guys like me.

[@VisualPKM]

I think there are two very distinct use cases people tend to want (probably more, also probably would be a good video topic). Task management and knowledge management. I tend to agree with you that BoJo is a flavor of the daily note approach, also the daily notes approach fits a task management use case better. Obsidian is great in that it offers flexibility for your task management to co-exist with your PKM.

[@textnotepro]

@@VisualPKM " also probably would be a good video topic" - yes please.... that would be a good topic.

[@HealthyLiv1ng]

This was great as I'm trying to figure out the best approach. Can you share more on the overview of Nick Milo's approach, how it works, if you have tried it, and can share any feedback on it? I've visited is YT channel and have looked into it but can't get a bigger picture overview of it.

[@sabagolshahi]

A very informative video! Thanks!

[@ed_nico]

Another fantastic vide0 - thanks for sharing!

[@stamatispsarras]

Thank you for the video, really nice reflection. I tend to have daily notes as a scrapbook and make separate notes when I feel I have an interesting snippet that I will re visit. Daily notes have queries through dataview on the notes created at that day, this makes it easy for me to resurface notes created at a particular day, although my memory can only go as far as a few weeks back. However, I feel that there is no real reason to "pick" a style as long as notes are interconnected, multiple points of entry is key. I am a bit conflicted with folder and hierarchy styles. What were your issues with PARA? I am not using this but was looking at it and ACCESS for inspiration, so interesting you brought them up!

[@VisualPKM]

My main challenge with folders is maintaining a clean structure. Over time I find that files tend to get misplaced (in Obsidian it takes serious amount of effort to always create new files in the folder you want them in). But even on my desktop filesystem I find that it requires constant attention to ensure project files all end up in the right folder. Obsidian does a good job of updating links when moving files, but moving folders to the archive outside Obsidian usually create problems with broken links. This is maybe because majority of my projects aren’t writing projects, but software projects, video projects, web projects, etc. I wish there were tools to efficiently maintain the location of folders and files.

[@stamatispsarras]

@@VisualPKM folders offer an opportunity to make project related information self contained, I am thinking this is helpful, when you are collaborating and you only want to share 1 folder with someone. But I am not sure moving finished projects to archive (like in PARA) adds on organisation. I much rather have an active project list or kanban, and archive the card, or change a frontmatter keyword on the project page. I see your point with clean structure, you will need to accept, up to a certain level deep you are "clean" I guess!

[@paulahunt414]

You are so right. It is all coming from the same just label a different name

[@maxhuk]

Very insightful 🙏

[@canalbalbinatech6574]

Você é um gênio. Thanls!!!

[@patrickfarley8864]

Thanks a lot, very appreciate

[@DariusNmN]

Excellent. Thanks.

[@ZXCai]

Very impressive, could you share the Excalidraw note in the video?

[@VisualPKM]

can you DM me on Twitter?

Very good content, thanks! I use my gtd contexts as folders in Obsidian, so it's similar to the PARA approach. When I switch to Obsidian from Evernote I tried daily notes but it creates a lot of notes outside his context folder, so I abandon the use of daily notes

[@VisualPKM]

Yes, I share your feeling that the DNP creates lots of files (litter). So what is your typical workflow when there is a new topic you'd like to note down? Right-clicking the context folder in the Obsidian file explorer and selecting to create a new note? Or you have summary notes per context and you add a new link there, then click the link to create the page? or?

@@VisualPKM I usually create the note by right click on the context folder. My summary notes are created automatically by zoottelkeeper plug in. It works for me!

[@andrewpullins8817]

My system seems to be way too chaotic at the moment. I started with a folder based structure, always wanting to link to other notes, but never found any helpful apps that could link notes until obsidian. Now I feel overwhelmed by the possibilities of this system and my map is a hot mess.

[@VisualPKM]

yes, overlinking is also a challenge. When I have crowded notes I like to spend some time to do some cleanup (gardening). I create subcategories and remap links.

[@andrewpullins8817]

@@VisualPKM most of my notes are orphans, then the rest surround MOCs that randomly connect to other notes which are also connected to MOCs. The graph view while pretty at times, has not been as useful as I was hoping.

[@VisualPKM]

@@andrewpullins8817 Try ExcaliBrain. I don't find Obsidian GraphView useful either (only pretty), but ExcaliBrain I use every day. It is also sort of a graph view, but more focused and more context centric. ExcaliBrain is transforming how I use Obsidian.md kzbin.info/www/bejne/nYDOn5yDoKmDr68

[@dmk1913]

To me the topics first approach seem to fit as that is the natural way to locate a note for me. Seeing the summary helped me think of cases where i might like to locate via time or where content first might make sense. What i am worried about is how to follow these approaches for different notes in the same vault without making a mess. How were you able to try all these approaches safely without lot of rework?

[@VisualPKM]

The series is called "rethinking my PKM" exactly because I have similar concerns. My current view is that you only need a few (2-3) different workflows (note taking patterns) and apply those consistently. Some of these might include task management (e.g. BoJo), pkm (e.g. Zettelkasten), CRM, project management,...

[@lufom]

Please, just out of curiosity, how long do you take for creating a summarized diagram of ideas such as this one? Do you draw it from existing already "mature" notes/content, or on the fly while thinking about it? Thank you and congrats on the amazing work! Both your didactic and your info diagrams are amazing !

[@VisualPKM]

These are typically evergreen notes that I develop over weeks, sometimes years. They usually start with a simple visual, that I start to add to and modify when ever I come across relevant information or I have an idea.

[@YannyKo13]

Hi Zsolt! How are you? I was trying to make my own mindmaps today and Excalidraw keeps bugging, it does not hold the objects everytime I duplicate them, they just select it. How do I fix it?

[@VisualPKM]

what do you mean it doesn't hold the object? I do not understand what you are trying to do and what you are experiencing.

[@YannyKo13]

@@VisualPKM I'm just making a basic mind map diagram, and I was wanting to duplicate a circle, there are times that when I duplicated the object, the cursor cannot hold the object for it to be dragged, it just selects it. It often happens when I'm drawing for sometime. Happened a lot this afternoon. I checked my mouse and keyboards, there were doing fine...

[@VisualPKM]

@@YannyKo13 got you. Let me experiment with that to see if I can reproduce it in my own environment

[@maheshsanjaychivateres982]

very helpful

[@cossack4930]

How do you know Obsidian is the right tool for you?

[@VisualPKM]

I think PKM is rarely a tools question. You can achieve similar workflows in a wide variety of tools, and there are a lot of options out there today. I think consistency, i.e. sticking to the same tool for years yields better results, then always hopping on the newest and greatest. Obsidian is very well built, has a very strong ecosystem of plugins and a very active community, and it is free. I also place high value on platform independence, and having my data in markdown files on my computer. Obsidian has a bit of a learning curve, but once you've mastered the basics, it becomes very intuitive and convenient.

[@cossack4930]

@@VisualPKM Thank you. I found you through the excalidraw hype as I just discovered Obsidian, but I’m learning so much more than Excalidraw from your videos. Markdown and the coding nature of Obsidian is very intimidating to me as a non-coder. I’m content with living in the MS ecosystem - mostly because of familiarity, low-entry, and I don’t see MS going anywhere in my lifetime so I’m not worried about .md vs. .one formatting. I found a few addons for OneNote like OneTastic and OneMore which increase its functionality. I’m wondering - can OneNote get closer to Obsidian’s Second Brain capabilities with using these type addons, Zapier, inclusion of OpenAI (via macro, Zap, etc.)?

[@VisualPKM]

@@cossack4930 OneNote is a very good note taking app. It has good handwriting recognition, and also efficient in team working setups. I miss the ease of linking documents using the [[wikilink]] format. If OneNote would support wiki links and maintain a database of backlinks, it would be a very powerful competitor to some of the new linked notes tools. as for OpenAI and the other new tools, I am not yet convinced that those need to be integrated as a plugin. I am happy to have a browser window open next to my notes window, and to copy paste content from on to the other. So overall I think OneNote is a robust choice.

[@anasyusuf1607]

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

[@MahadevanIyer]

Its Part 5

[@VisualPKM]

changed it. thanks. :)

[@RajmahendraR]

The mindmap from the video: This link is broken.

[@VisualPKM]

Good catch! That was a quick and dirty way to share the link. I now uploaded the mindmap to my ko-fi shop. You can download it for free or leave a tip if you'd like. Thanks for the comment and letting me know about the broken link!

[@mikhaeldito]

Isn't this part 5?

[@VisualPKM]

could be that I got confused with numbering…

[@c4ss1uslab]

🙏🙏🙏

[@wolfich4684]

3 творчесий подхоод, пропустил черзе себя

[@chrishelphinstine]

ouch was 666th like

[@quynhtrinh4209]

Thanks for sharing this

[@pk-mind]

Hi Zsolt, thanks for this smart video ! :-) I think ( 08:50 ) that zettelkasten system is not necessarily under "topic first", maybe only at the very beginning, when we create the very first structure. If we do it. Because the folgezettel fans will tell you that it is probably more a separate category as the notes are "inserted" (or numbered if digital) according to the nearest other note. There is no hierarchy.