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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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/

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Blue water bridge! Sarnia!

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