#personal knowledge management

[just-queue]

I can't tell if starting a zettelkasten system is actually going to solve my memory problems, help me organize my thoughts, and become a more knowledgeable person or if that's just the neurodivergent "oh pretty shiny new toy" talking

[moonlightvigil8]

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.

[daytura]

Variable structural constraints and learning demands — Does a Zettelkasten work well for studying technical subjects?

Extended reddit discussion.

Emergency_Season_231 (OP): ... Some say it's just good for increasing knowledge, while others say it's can be also a regular study method for scientific subjects. I'm studying cybersecurity, which involves a lot of scientific information ...

daytura: In my experience, I had a hard time organizing factual information beyond classifying it under higher topics/subjects or identifying related claims at the same "level" of specificity. Even in my TiddlyWiki for my cogsci research, integrating "higher" (qualitative) theories and philosophies with grounded empiric findings has been somewhat of a challenge.

I strongly recommend spaced repetition for memorization, and notebook/file-folder systems for archival.

assuasiveafflatus: Can you give some further explanations or resources for thr notebook/file-folder systems?

daytura, extended reply:

Disclaimer: I don't have academic or official resources. This is my personal understanding of categorization and synthesis as mental tools.

I think of notebook/file-folder systems as your OG note-taking programs like OneNote, Google Docs + Drive, VSCode + local folders, operating system desktop metaphors, etc. Categorization itself works well when the information is already pre-structured from a textbook, lecture, etc.; when the information is generally known; when you can triangulate it across many different sources. The bulk of the work comes in forcing yourself to evaluate and place a specific claim, statement, or fact in light of a larger topic or trend. This way, you start to build an intuition for how experts and researchers have structured the field. These systems can help recall because you can start from the top and trickle down mental "locations" without the need for direct point-by-point accesses (like you would expect from an index, though indices are still very useful).

e.g. If I know something about kinship relations (e.g. affinal kinships are based on marriage), I would categorize it like so: statement about kinship relations --> human/human relations --> sociology/cultural anthropology. The categories are simple and rigid, but that's the point; after internalizing this structure, you can exploit it to accommodate new (to you, known to experts) information as it comes up in further studies.

Unlike the "next-gen" networked note-taking apps of our decade that try to make your information as fluid and malleable as possible, OG note-taking programs don't expect you to update your categories often, if at all. These categories support more instrumental needs like passing a final or digesting an intro course for our major. (Interestingly, the aging but stalwart hierarchy-first VSCode extension, Dendron, directly answers this issue by allowing you to refactor your hierarchies with regex. My favored workflow is the "amoeba" pattern, where you dump information into a single note and "bud off" different trends as you see fit.)

The trouble arises in developing new ideas or seeing how claims/findings systematically fit together in a (sub)category. At a certain point in your learning, you may have to transition from learning "world models" from the field and start developing your own, because your understanding(s) thus far won't get you further. These world models seem to be the real meat of learning. Unfortunately — or excitingly — your world models can be wrong. This requires further innovation and testing.

Consider the idea that culture acts as dynamic, highly optimized "software" for inflexible and aging hardware (humans have been anatomically the same for thousands of years). Where the hell did this come from? Well, it came from me. This might be a good analogy in the field ... but I would expect more extensive experimentation and discussion in the literature for this claim, if it is actually a known analogy that can foster extensive research. At the moment I just don't see it. It's also not a particularly solid claim either, the more I re-read it.

More structurally, we cannot exclusively categorize this statement under (at the very top-level) anthropology OR computer science, even though insights from both almost certainly can facilitate a novel line of thought. Cognitive strategies are an instantiation of variable cultures (anthropology?) --> cognitive reserve can be modified by learning new cognitive strategies (software updating?) --> culture and strategy fuse at the level of enacted behavior (another synthetic claim??) --> enacted behavior supports activities of daily living (gerontology??). At a certain level down the line, this is just cognitive science.

So we see that the development of this claim requires a level of originality and interdisciplinarity that may never have occurred within a rigidly structured categorization system in the first place; it might've occurred in a (day)dream, in a networked knowledge base, in a conversation with a friend, etc. The structure of the note-taking system, in a sense, propagates itself by altering the claims that can be developed under its "hull" and excluding undeveloped or structurally incompatible claims. (See also: Medium essentiality).

To me, there are two ways to solve this: you can embed a claim under two (or more!) categories (then you'd be working with tags), or you can say everything/nothing is a category start to create/follow relations between notes based on functional analogy. Neither of these paradigms are perfect either, and fusion attempts take a lot of work. At this point, you'd have to do the best you can with the tool available to you. Your thoughts and learning have exceeded the page. :-)

[gredi-bird]

the best thing about using a zettelkasten system for organization is you get to play with your funny little cards instead of actually facing your problems

[wanderingmindthoughts]

currently reading "building a second brain", as part of my efforts towards this blog but also in general in my life -my phd is demanding a lot of knowledge-organization skills that I don't really have. I want to use this blog as an organization tool about my thougths and beliefs, but I'm still hesitant on how personal I want to get. like, I'm okay sharing philosophical concepts and developing them, but I don't think I want to publicly think about my trauma and personal relationships. I would love to use this for my academic stuff, but I guess I can get into trouble about sharing research before it's published -so it may be prudent to use some kind of private note-taking tool for that (I'm considering logseq)

[leftcollectionreview]

Introduction

So Tumblr is new to me. TBH posting online is new to me. But I'm trying to be more proactive about exploring and synthesizing my own thoughts, so I'm going to try and make a habit of it. I can do a more thorough introduction another time, but I want to identify two topics that are going to be important to me.

Being transgender and living in a society that is awful because of it. Particularly having that identity politically weaponized and used as a cudgel against me and others.

Political organizing, particularly field and union organizing. There's quite a bit of content on here about union organizing (which we love) but not very much about the reality of politically organizing strangers.

Personal Knowledge Management. I'm trying to use this for accountability and learning in public. There seems to be a small but active PKM community on Tumblr, so I'm excited to see what non-mainstream, non-productivity PKM takes I find.

This middle one is particularly interesting to me. Yes, going outside sucks. Talking to strangers sucks even more. Talking with strangers who disagree with us sucks the most. But it's also the only way that we're going to see the political change that we want to see. Many people don't know a single person that has a different political affiliation (or don't know that person does). We need to get out there and talk with folks if we ever want that to change.

And whoever came up with the rule to never talk about religion and politics was obviously full of shit and privilege. Talk about politics all the time. Make people uncomfortable with the reality of their choices. Make good trouble.

[journey-to-awesomeness]

This is my graph view in Obsidian at the start of 2023. Exploring the nodes quickly reveals that it's comprised of mostly work-related notes and projects. This year, I hope to expand to more personal thoughts, ideas, and notes.

[abstractfairy]

periodic reminder that the things online can be taken down and deleted. Unless you have them downloaded on your a pc you *own* (not even the cloud can save you) then you are exposed to linkrot

fight censorship and fight linkrot by downloading a copy of everything you love and find important

if you want some technical support or creative examples see the subreddit r/datahoarder