PKM
Personal knowledge management (PKM) is the idea that you should manage your knowledge externally with a tool. But be careful, the biggest problem with PKM is when you sharpen your metaphorical axe instead of chopping down trees, ending up the day with doing no work and grinding down your axes to nothing. Realistically, this would mean fiddling with your tools instead of using them to do the things you want to do.
Your system should serve you, not you serving it.
Strands
There are 4 approaches to organizing your PKM system, each with strengths and weaknesses.
1. Idea First
2. Topic First
3. Action First
4. Time First
Idea First
This would be the idea of atomic notes, each note has an idea and you organize them by connections between those ideas.
Topic First
Something similar to how you would take notes in school, you start with the notes known as a map of content and create notes around that.
Action First
You put the information in the place where it is most useful, whether it is in something you need to finish or where you know you will need it in the future. note that, when it doesn't matter where you put the note, this becomes less useful overtime.
Time First
You want to organize your information chronologically, this means having a daily note and putting the information on that day and it will automatically be moved to a note where it is most useful, you don't have to think about where to put the information since it is always in the daily note.
PARDEC
PARDEC is my alternative to the LATCH method for organization, it's an acronym that stands for:
- Process
- Alphanumeric
- Relationship
- Date
- Environment
- Category
These would be all the ways to find information that I know.
Process
This would be what stage of production something is in. A book could be being written, edited or revised for example.
Alphanumeric
This is a mix between alphabetical and numeric. Using this you can create a hierarchy similar to folders without their limitations.
Relationship
How this information relates to other information. There are two types of relationships, simple and complex. Simple relationships are "this relevant information is here", while complex relationships depend more on context to make sense.
Date
Anything related to time. The best format is year-month-day so it's easier to search because you can increase the precision as you add more information.
Environment
Environment in the geospatial sense. So cities, coffee shops, etc. Anything related to a place.
Category
Organize information based on shared characteristics.
Tools
Folders
Folders are the classic way to organize a computer, but they are actually a trap. Folders are a physical limitation of paper and there is no paper here.
In general, use folders when you want to separate things because you can only have a note on a single folder.
Tags
Tags unite, because a note can have multiple tags so a tag can contain a variety of notes.
If you can use hierarchical tags, you can create a folder hierarchy without the folder limitation.
Now I'll go over how I use tags:
Set
Set tags are the largest group of tags that work for any type of grouping you want to have with a tag.
'#set/PKM', '#set/school' for example.
If you want you can use the PARA method as tags, so you don't have to move files around, which kinda makes the Resources and Archive useless, but whatever.
ON
This tag is used to describe the general content of a note, something superficial and present in other notes to link them together.
'#on/electronics', '#on/physics' for example.
That's how Odysseas uses his tags and indexes, even tho he uses notes as tags.
Type
Describes the type of note, very explanatory.
'#type/daily-note', '#type/PDF' for example.
You can use Metadata to do this if you want to use fewer tags.
Metadata
The metadata of something should be in the same file you are working on.
To create metadata in Obsidian you can add properties with a command or put '---' in the first line of the file, or you can do it in the body of the file with the following format '[Property::Value]'.
Here you can put the Environment, Date and Process information.
Links
Links are the most powerful, flexible and therefore complex tool of all that I will talk about here.
The format of a link is to put two pairs of square brackets ([[]]) around the name of the note you want to link to. This is how you represent simple and complex relationships explained above.
If it is not obvious why a link is made you should always explain why so that when you return to the note you will not be left wondering what you meant by it. To get this further we can use '[Semantic::[[Links]]]', AKA put a link as a value of a property, then you can put briefly how these two notes relate to each other.
If you think about it, there's not much difference between a link or a tag, so the main difference in using a note with a link instead of a tag is that with the note, you can give context as to why the relationship makes sense in that context, and with the tag you can make hierarchy.
Maps of Content
Maps of Content, or MOCs, have 2 main functions, orient ourselves in or spaces of our PKM, and think about how this information and ideas relate to each other.
For the first function, a automated list of ideas work, but for the second one, the inconvenience of thinking and relating ideas is the point.
Maps are user interface, so considering what is not brought in is just as important as what gets in.
There is two ways of making a MOC, top-down or bottom-up.
Top-down means that you pick your topic of the MOC and then build the notes around it.
Bottom-up means you want to make a MOC using already existing notes and make them more manageable and useful.
Alphanumeric Identifier
To use the alphanumeric identifier, for example, you have a parent note with the ID 100 and children like 101.1 and 101.2, these notes can have child notes like 101.1a1 and 101.2b1. Be careful with this system because if you put a "10" or "aa" you might break the order because numbers take precedence over letters, so the note 10.10a would be above the note 10.9a even though the note was made first. This doesn't happen in Obsidian.
Zettelkasten or a Digital Garden
The Zettelkasten system is an information organization system focused on creating new ideas by putting together other ideas.
To do this we will use two types of notes, literature notes and permanent notes. Literature notes are your thoughts about a piece of media. Anything you think is right, wrong or interesting. Permanent notes are loose ideas that are free to connect. The value of an idea comes from how it relates to other ideas.
That's why we make one note per idea, to allow it to have as many connections as possible and to be able to reuse the same idea in as many places as possible. And that's why some people are against changing permanent notes, because changing the note would change its relationship with related notes.
In Nikolas Luhman's zettelkasten he used alphanumeric identifiers, but instead of using them hierarchically, he used them mainly as unique identifiers, this means that most of the notes were not in the "right" place, but in a place that allowed them to have some kind of relationship with the note above, because with paper, putting the note in the wrong place would mean not being able to find it when you wanted to.
