Every attempt at PKM has landed me in the same place: a huge mess

Knowledge management
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Hello All,

As someone with ADHD, the idea of a system that can organize a maelstrom of ideas into something retrievable is irresistible. (I imagine many can relate.) But every attempt, over decades, from pen and paper to Obsidian to Notion, has ended in a mess that becomes unusable. Once the system gets bloated, I start over with the best intentions, trying to keep things simple. I’ve lost countless hours in this cycle and hope to figure out where I’m going wrong before I start again.

I have thousands of ideas, thoughts, journal entries, research, etc.

I have various ways to jot things down quickly, but if I don’t categorize them, I know I’ll never look at them again, especially long journal entries. I used to record notes, which are automatically transcribed, but now I have hundreds or even thousands of transcriptions that are effectively meaningless. I don’t know what I’ll do with them, so they just pile up, collecting, not connecting.

If I try to organize them, that creates friction, and after a valiant effort, things get out of hand. There are too many notes and too many ways to link them, and many are just the same idea phrased differently.

Even with proper linkages, at some point, 200 notes on a topic become clutter, and there’s no way to distill it when I need it.

Sometimes I feel like all this effort to manually do what my brain cannot is futile. If I’m writing something and want to reference a topic, I get overwhelmed by too much information.

Should I stop trying, or is there a method that can help someone like me?

I was excited about AI in Obsidian or Notion, but the results were inaccurate or incomplete (e.g., “show me all my notes on a topic” or “how many notes do I have?” give partial results). Maybe I didn’t set it up correctly, but figuring it out was too overwhelming.

Best,

R

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Reading your post, i think the main issue is the volume of input you want to process. I had similar issues, but found that most quick notes or working notes for projects etc. are well suited for daily notes, which i barely ever “process” (they are mostly for organizing myself in the moment and for logging what i do, so i can look back at it if necessary). I really am not losing anything by not processing them, they are messy and that’s fine.

Apart from that i basically only have “library” notes (for longer sources), and “cards” (Zettelkasten notes). You probably are aware of Zettelkasten, but i like thinking of it as building mental models. Each note is a single concept or idea, and on the topic note i try to link all of those notes and structure them in a way that resembles a satisfying mental model of the subject. This makes it easy to find notes again & avoid duplicate ideas.

The most important thing is focus. Zettelkasten is really cool, but really energy intensive and slow. You do not need a gigantic linked note system about every little thing happening in your life and the universe. Don’t try to create a “complete” wiki, but something that resembles your individual goals and activities.

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If organizing during note taking isn’t working for you, maybe you just need better ways to find what you want even if it is “a mess”. Similar to the way Google made it easier to find thing on the mess that is the internet. You could start with the notes you already have in Obsidian without having to organize them first. In addition to the built-in search, there are several plug-ins that make it much easier to find notes later. Some that I use for this are:

  1. Smart Connections: Like Google for your notes. It gives you a sidebar with a ranked list of notes that are most closely related to the note you are reading/editing based on a small/local Large Language Model.
  2. Virtual Linker/Glossary: Provides automatic virtual links to other notes when a word or phase in the current note matches the name or alias of another note.
  3. Omnisearch: Provides a scrollable pop-up search window that shows excerpts of notes where the note text matches the search text.

Adding those (and I’m sure there are others I have not tried yet) to the built-in linking, tags, and local graph view and its pretty easy to find anything without having to organize it when you store it.

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adding to what clemp wrote.
Structure or categorisation is earned imo and emergent from working with my material. Any categorisation, indexing, tagging also is personal imo meaning no external standard as to how things should be organised applies in any way. Structures are personal tools and can be temporary. Which ones do you need and can add to over time while your interacting with your material? That way there’s a ratchet effect, but no need to structure everything as a separate task.

I start everything I do with a search in my stuff. I add to the things I find and seem relevant at that time as tags the things I was searching for. If I found a piece about gardening while searching for things about health, I will add that health relation as tag. Or as link to another note. This lengthens the traces of my work with my material, and longer traces I’m more likely to cross. Over time I will see the stuff emerge that is most relevant to me over time.

The start for me is when I save something external I always add the following 2 things: the reason I wanted to save it, what made me interested, in my own words (might include some tags). And always a link to something already in my notes that I associate it with.

For me the switch in mindset is that there is no intrinsic information contained in anything I keep, all meaning is in my own eyes when I use it later. Any structuring reflects that, and I work form the assumption there are no objective descriptors I must use as categories or tags etc.

Rather than organize/structure during note taking, I organize/structure during note using. With my initial remark and internal link as curation to help me on my way.

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I’m personally at a similar sticking point myself. As much as I appreciate Tiago’s Second Brain concept for organizing things, the awareness required for retrieval is challenging no matter how well everything is organized. My current rule is that if I want to remember it, it needs one of…

  • A due date
  • A “high priority” indicator
  • A future “note to myself” about the information
  • A project (to come up in my weekly review)

There are probably other things. Unfortunately, I end up with a lot of the “notes to myself” and I’m reviewing many notes during my daily review every day. I probably also capture too many things which makes remembering what is in the vault harder.

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Just wanted to say you should stick to Obsidian and regularly check for new plugins coming out, as well as try to familiarize with frontmatter (YAML) one step at a time, and get to know core technical aspects.
I’m using it for over 2 years, and I just begin to grasp the full power of organization it can bring to my chaotic, borderline ADHD thinking.
Some points:

  • please keep in mind that any kind of PKM system, Project Organization etc, are mostly subjective matters, and one great advantage of Obsidian is that you can shape it around your personal way of organizing things, given that you take the time to go deeper.
  • See what other people have created and be inspired. Every person finds an alternate route to address chaos and eventually contain it.
  • At first I thought I had to be some kind of coder to even get my notes right, and that kind of thinking was blocking me from exploring and taking leverage of Obsidian / Dataview features that I thought they didn’t matter as much for note taking.

I hope eventually through Obsidian you can tame PKM mess :slight_smile:

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TL;DR: Don’t try to organize the mess! Just pipe everything into one big bucket and let structure emerge opportunistically and organically if it really wants to

There are already some great answers above.

I second that one of the issues could be that you are trying to capture too much. As far as you capture your ideas and thoughts, I’d say that’s fine, but if you capture stuff from the internet, it can get you into trouble. That being said, I find it easier to simply capture stuff than to decide not to capture something; that’s why I have a “doom box” — everything that has no apparent dedicated place to go in my system goes there and maybe stays there for good. I call this "feeding a someday/maybe empire.” This satisfies my capture bias and sets my mind at rest. It also potentially resurfaces in serendipitous ways, or it doesn’t, which is OK.

I’m also a fan of daily notes. I have a global hotkey to spawn a quick capture workflow so that whatever app I’m in, I can quickly jot down thoughts that get added to my daily notes (links, ideas, thoughts, tasks, …).

Nick Milo’s “structure is earned” was also mentioned, and I recommend you follow that guideline. i.e., start without structure and let it grow organically once needed. For instance, sometimes clusters appear in my “doom box” — multiple related things emerge and I use that to promote these to dedicated folders outside of the doom box.

One thing that hasn’t been touched on yet is mental visibility. Everything you jot down somewhere will fade from your memory and thus cease to be helpful. You need to engage with your notes if you want to grow your knowledge base. This means spending more time creating instead of consuming/adding. It means crafting something new from what you already have. If you do this enough, your “earn structure” as a byproduct and organizing things will take care of itself.

Of course, it also helps to follow some personal protocols. I’m a fan of a small fixed set of folders on the top-level of your system, something like PARA and ACEx, yet I’ve developed my own. Few top-level folders will help you divide-and-conquer the mess.

Without more concrete examples, it’s hard to give more concrete advice. There’s a lot of PKM material out there. Just hang in there. Maybe these are just some growing pains to get through :wink:

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One thing you could try more is to add a time limit when you work on your computer. This might sound counter productive, you don’t have to be “productive” all times. Give yourself a good break, otherwise its easy to fall into tiredness.

It’s easy to over- think what you should do in obsidian, by all the possibilities (tools) and information at hand.

Another tip is to use the priorities and dataview. But don’t try to use over complex rules, stick to some keywords working for you.

Reduce your plugins and deactivate all of them. Afterwards you’ll notice if some plugins is really that vital to you.

Then, plan what topics are important to you and work just on them to reduce notes in one of your folders (merge or trash notes). Just stop collecting and curate your notes, before you start to collect again.

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I just wanted to share a different perspective on what’s already been said above.

I saw a video recently that made the argument that adding friction to you note taking process improves the quality of your notes. For example, for certain notes establish a relatively small word limit so you have to summarize instead of including a lot of detail.

As another example, if you have a formal process for bringing your thoughts into your vault, that process adds friction by slowing you down. This could range from simple limitations (e.g. no web clipper plugins) to something more involved (e.g. Zettelkasten method).

I have different types of notes for different purposes. I have a folder for daily notes that captures thoughts of the day. Sometimes those thoughts wind up being worthy of being a permanent note (which lives in a separate folder) with connections to other permanent notes, but most are not.

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I didn’t carefully read all the replies, but I’ll chime in.

Implicit in this sentence is that it’s bad that you don’t read them again.

I disagree.

I think journalling and sketching and writing is part of the thinking process. It’s perfectly ok if the vast majority of your writing ends up as temporary scratch notes. There was value in writing it down at the time. Sometimes I will search my old journals for key words. But I don’t worry about organizing it. If I find some old gem, I’ll maybe copy it into a more permanent place.

Let some of this noise exist as a stream. And keep the organized stuff much more constrained. That’s my approach.

“Halving requirements is the same as doubling capacity” - Nigel Calder

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