🌲 Thoughts on Knowledge Management
Last Updated: December 2022
This is a rather informal note on my experience attempting to have a somewhat friendly relationship with the tools I use to do work, where work generally defined as “anything useful aside from twitter.” Please think of piece like a conversation over coffee more than a useful blog post. Anyways, here goes. I’ve tried a bunch of tools over the years some of which might be familiar to you too:
- Plain {txt, md} files
- Zim
- Evernote
- Workflowly
- OneNote
- Simplenote
- Coda
- Notion
- VimWiki
- Obsidian
- RemNote
- Logseq
- GoodNotes
I remember 1-4 being very simple though that might really just be me being a high school kid without a whole lot of skills. Coda was a wild ride and felt clunky in its early days but the idea was different and shinny to me and my friends. Notion was exciting again because of the same “build your experience” approach as coda. Throughout all of this, plain files kept coming back into my workflow. For example, I would keep a notes.md file for big programming homeworks when I was in undergrad. This was really hard to beat when anything else requires the additional overhead of switching to another completely different app (e.g. switching to the browser to pull up Notion).
VimWiki was an amazing upgrade because it pushed me towards linked files and it worked really, really well when combined with vim. The problem was images. I want to see images, like an equation or small drawings. Since vim is very terminal focused, I’ve long learned to not use it for anything that involves visual stuff.
In grad school, the need for at least nice ascii drawings became more prominent so I moved to Obsidian. This again worked beautifully for some time. Obsidian runs on md files so all my VimWiki notes moved over and now I could see images! Eventually, I wanted to draw. I played around with xjournal and a drawing pad, which worked to some extent. I could copy over pictures when I want them in obsidian. This however got really clunky as more of my work became handwritten stuff (drawings, scribbles, math-y stuff). I ended up getting an iPad to improve this part of my workflow which was a significant upgrade in terms of the writing experience. I slowly stopped using Obsidian as it became extra work to do the work in GoodNotes then bring it back into Obsidian.
At the same time, I liked some of what Obsidian offered me: collecting my random collection of md files into a cohesive system and a mobile app. So I kept looking around for something that provides what Obsidian offered but something I would keep using. I came across RemNote and Roam 1 and of course went with the free, open source, and markdown based alternative Logseq. I love the idea of a daily journal here: I have a place to write down stuff instead of creating random markdown notes. Yet, my journals are usually empty aside from my meeting notes or small fleeting thoughts. On the other hand, GoodNotes is a consistent daily tool now. It is free form, anything goes where ever I want it, and each day I just swipe up and start a new page in my infinite scroll of notes.
It took awhile but it finally hit me. It’s necessary for the tool to defend its value to me and it should never be the other way around– me finding ways to fit my workflow around it and justify using it. All these tools above didn’t stick around because their “value proposition” or whatever wasn’t high enough. In some ways, it feels like they are creating problems (which I never had) then solving them in impressive ways. They never stick around because I always come out the other end still wondering why I was using the tool and doing whatever it was telling me to do. Compare this to GoodNotes, where it solves real problems I had with physical notebooks (sharing, bulky size) and writing pads (slow, desktop centric, distance between hand and writing). The combination of my iPad and GoodNotes solves these problems and thus I have no reason to revert back to the old system. It is also necessary and not randomly added to my workflow, thus I can’t just stop doing it (at least not without stopping doing work all together).
Content Creators
At this point, I can imagine people bringing up things like “The Second Brain” and “Zettelkasten” to defend why these other tools are useful. I have two problems with these:
AFAIK, there is only small anecdotal evidence for why these frameworks are good. For example, Zettelkasten is famous for the creator of the technique who was apparently a prolific (scientific) writer. I’m not going to bother explaining why this isn’t sufficient evidence. More specifically, he was a scientist working in a specific area and there is no reason to think this will work for everyone everywhere. Hell, even within academia there are many areas where this might not work.
The people who really seem to be hell bent on selling these ideas are content creators, where “content” is videos about these techniques being applied to their content creation process. It’s kinda impressive when you think about it. The problem is: I’m not a content creator and these people have no clear insight into what my needs are. Thus they are guaranteed to always overfit using anecdotal evidence like the one mentioned above. 2
So in the end, it feels like much of this is just content creators making a living by talking about tools they otherwise don’t need or care about. Which is fine, especially because there is some useful information in there once in awhile. It does, however, mean many of these frameworks crafted by them, e.g. Second Brain, or pulled from academics in the past, e.g. Zettelkasten, aren’t really useful for me when thinking about these problems. I have many times wondered if this is even a real problem to begin with. The Gardeners have changed my mind a little bit on this.
The Gardeners
These are cool people with some attachment issues. I like them. More thoughts coming soon
My Dream Tool
Take your shoes off and sit down. There is no coffee. No chat. This was all just an ad leading up to my product.
Will be updating this soon with some thoughts that are currently stuck in GoodNotes.
In the mean time: if you are someone working in a field that isn’t reading and writing heavy, what do you make of this problem? There has to be something better than Overleaf and Google Docs for us but I don’t think it’s the tools above. If you do work in text heavy projects, I actually think some of the tools above could work for you. Or maybe not. Feel free to reach out in any case.