#11

PS: I wrote another post in the Knowledge Management area about my folder structure, thinking process and apps I use - in case of interest.

#12

I really love how you put this. I think this is in a sense more accurate than “a system for connecting the dots” or “knowledge management tool” or “second brain”. “Knowledge management tool” lacks a purpose and “second brain” is too vague". A system for connecting the dots" doesn’t really take into account what dots are relevant, which is actually what matters in the real world. I think “relevance-realization tool” really captures what’s missing.

On a related note, I think the process of realizing what’s relevant for a particular difficult problem is also another way to say “that’s an insight”. I’ve read a bit into the Insight Problem Solving literature, and insight can be thought of as a representational change that leads to solutions, which is maybe a more rigorous way to say that “you suddenly notice what’s relevant to the problem at hand”.

There are two (among several) widely known mechanisms that lead to insights - the kind of insights you can study in labs through nine-dots problems and the like, they are: constraint relaxation and chunk decomposition.

Making notes is, in a sense, externalizing representations, which means you can better detect constraints that are being imposed unnecessarily. Interconnected notes is a way to facilitate chunk decomposition, because an Evergreen note is similar to a chunk in that you can decompose it into other chunks which can help reconfigure your representation - or how you look at a problem. I think that’s how practicing PKM can facilitate the processes that yield insights.

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#13

This is such a great question. It prompted me to think about the practical outcomes of using Obsidian and how it tangibly helps me in my life. For me at least, I’d say it’s not a fad, but rather an approach to organizing and recalling my thoughts. It helps me to avoid that awful, overwhelming feeling of things “slipping through my fingers.”

I use three vaults in my day-to-day life: a Work vault for notes relating to my employer; a Personal vault for notes about my life, family, and creative work; and a Reference vault for notes that are useful to both (but particular to neither).

Since they are useful for different reasons, I’ll answer separately for each one:

Reference Vault

My reference vault is the most academic of the three, and I use it to remember and recall solutions to problems, especially technical ones.

Remember how-tos, examples, and other notes as I discover solutions to problems. It feels good to know that a tutorial or clever solution I discovered is saved for future reference.

Organize notes into meaningful topics. It’s hard to overstate how valuable this is. Since Obsidian is primarily a wiki, it’s easy to create useful topics and link pages in multiple places to make them easy to discover later.

Recall those how-tos and examples on demand. I use the vault in this way daily. Because the topics and notes are organized in a way that reflects the way I think, I’m never more than a click or two away from the information I’m looking for.

A notepad for sketching out thoughts, jotting down temporary notes (like this one), and experimenting with ideas. The Excalidraw plugin is great for this.

Work Vault

My work vault is a combination of project management tool, reference folder, and CRM.

Project management: Track status of hundreds of tasks and their projects. Provide regular reports to my supervisor on status of active, delegated, and stalled projects. The Kanban and Dataview plugins are instrumental for this.

Product management: Maintain summary and details of dozens of products. For example, it makes it easy for me to quickly review all our products’ backlogs, or provide a high-level review.

Reference: same as Reference vault above, but reserved for topics and notes specific to my employer.

Contact list: Having my common contacts as their own notes makes typing their names and referring to them very easy. For some contacts, I also retain interaction history so I can be reminded of important details in the future.

Design and Drawing: As a software developer, I often use this vault to sketch out software designs, system interactions, flow charts, and other diagrams. Excalidraw is excellent for this. And these diagrams are first-class notes that I can organize and search the same way as my text notes.

Journal: Maintain years of history on meeting notes, contacts and interactions, completed projects, and more. Useful when I want to see my notes from meetings, conferences, or past reports.

Personal Vault

Perhaps the most loosely-organized of the three, my Personal vault is where I work on creative ideas, games, keep notes on books and other research, and many other things.

Create stories and games The most prolific output of my Personal vault is creative writing and game development. I use it to maintain notes on characters, locations, plots, maps, and more, and then print out what’s needed for the table. I can go back and review notes when I come back to a story later and need to remember what’s happened so far. I use the vault in this way about weekly.

Help process books, articles, and other items as I read them, research them, and try to understand and integrate them. These notes are somewhat ephemeral, but they help me focus my thinking, find patterns, and explore new ideas. I find this method especially helpful for digesting non-fiction.

Reference: As the Reference vault above, but for tracking things for myself and my family. For example, I keep how-tos for helping family members, links to manuals for our tech, and more.

Overall

I hope this summary is helpful – it was helpful to me to ask the question: is Obsidian is a practical help to my life or not? I think the answer is a resounding yes. :slight_smile:

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#14

I must say that was a damn good read ! I’m currently in the process of rebuilding the PKM part of my system because I realised it didn’t fit my needs at all. I struggled to re-use the knowledge stored in it and there was too much friction.

I work in mechanical engineering and now realise that I might be looking for very different functions in a PKM than somebody working in a more literate field. Your post helped me realise that second-brain, LYT, zettelkasten or frameworks such as those might not be suited to my needs. I need to figure out a purpose-built solution that works for me, and hope it will help as I undertake my upcoming PhD.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time of writing a post with so many details. Down the rabbit hole I keep going !

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#15

Can you please provide a link to this blog?

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#16

This?

https://andymatuschak.org/

Angel

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#17

Reading a book on the history of knowledge management.

Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age: Blair, Ann M., ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300165395

Some of the “challenges” of knowledge management and knowledge sharing were already being discussed 2,000+ years ago.

:slightly_smiling_face:

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#18

That book looks fascinating! I teach Latin at a classical school where “commonplacing,” keeping a copybook, researching with index cards, etc. Are practices we teach kids. I’m using digital PKM to teach high school students to write papers, and I think it helps that they’re already somewhat aware of analog PKM systems.

From the opposite point of view, I think we modern PKMers learn a lot by studying the knowledge systems of thinkers from before the computer age. I find it instructive to look at Cicero’s discussion of sententiae, medieval florilegia, and Isaac Newton’s commonplace books. In Latin class, I talk to my students about the use of pocket wax and ivory tablets, and how they played the same role as personal whiteboards, notepads, and note taking apps do today. Obsidian might be too young to give us accurate insight into what it can accomplish, but PKM as such is thousands of years old. The question that arises is—if these people could accomplish so much with such primitive tools, what am I able to do if I’m doing the exact same thing as them but much more efficiently?

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#19

@JAndrews2 I share your enthusiasm.

And it is good to know that we do not need to (re)invent the wheel.

:slightly_smiling_face:

#20

I had similar reservations. What is the purpose of all of this? I came to the conclusion that I don’t know, I don’t care and why does it matter? I do plenty of things in my life that don’t help me achieve anything beyond enjoyment. If you’re not enjoying your time with Obsidian, that’s a different issue. But if you are enjoying yourself then just have a bit of fun. Who knows. Something may eventually come out of it.

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#21

Hey @minhthanh3145 - yes I agree that “relevance-realisation” is a process description, the output of which is insight. And when we talk about finding “mental clarity” faced with a difficult problem or decision, what we mean is also that we lack insight…

Since we’re nerding-out a bit here, an interesting nuance around “relevance-realisation” that comes from Vervaeke’s paper is that he distinguishes between wisdom and analytical problem-solving. It’s a while since I read the paper (and ironically my notes are not to hand, ahem!) but I recall he made reference to Eastern traditions of thought in contrast with Western traditions… and his process term of relevance-realisation is modelled on the idea of wisdom. His line of argumentation was even quite humorous, noting that even really clever people can be pretty stupid sometimes, so logic and rationality are no magic pill.

In fact, Vervaeke (borrowing from Dreyfus) refers to a good “problem finder” rather than a good “problem solver” - the definition of a problem-finder being the ability to create a problem nexus, ie a problem that is connected to other problems and that if solved would solve those problems too. In other words, related problems are ‘relevant’ problems.

On your point about constraints, I also agree. I was just listening over the weekend to Lex Fridman’s podcast interview with Elon Musk (the latest one, they’re friends so he’s had Musk on the show a few times). Musk described (with examples) his now well-known approach of “thinking from first principles” which in a nutshell is about boiling down a problem to its axiomatic base: the most fundamental principles to which the problem is anchored, and which you know are true at a foundational level. He then ‘reasons up’ from there… and then checks his conclusion’s plausibility/possibility by referring right back to the axiomatic base. I think this idea provides a good mental framework for defining the boundary of relevance… if he can make the best rocket engine ever (better than NASA) and start so many disruptive businesses using this approach, then I figure he’s onto something!

A final thing Musk said is that “all the answers are out there” and are relatively easy to find, if only you can find the right questions: that’s the hard part. Questions (about relevance) are at the heart of effective learning. As another neuroscientist, Beau Lotto, says, “every new perception starts with a question.”

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#22

@Angel provided the home page, but the specific article I was thinking of is this one: How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding

It’s an article about how to write good Anki card prompts, or questions. If you’re new to the idea of Anki cards, you can find some breadcrumbs to follow in this article for more background.

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#23

@CAD_O - yeah, I know what you mean about that “friction”… and the rabit hole! I think there’s also a ‘habit hole’ BTW…

#24

Are you writing somewhere about these connections? I’m a Latinist (in a Classics PhD program, but take the long view of Latin, mainly work on Early Modern Science) and I’d LOVE to think along with people who have a sense of both the modern PKM landscape and exactly the sorts of authors and tools you mention.

#25

I just watched this video that shows some creative and fun ways to use Obsidian

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#26

How cool! My PhD is in medieval philosophy so I also focus on postclassical Latin. I find the question of premodern PKM fascinating and would like to explore it more someday but I’m definitely living off of the expertise of other scholars.

I think the study of premodern PKM has got to be linked closely to memory, since so much of knowledge management in those eras would have been done in their minds: it’s known that in ancient and medieval times intellectuals made a discipline of organizing their memories in ways that we rarely do today, since we can offload much of that work to paper or computers. To my knowledge the canonical studies here are those books by Mary Carruthers, which I’ve only read a little of but everyone speaks of highly. I often hear the medieval memory compared to a filing cabinet or a computer file system; there could be an article for someone to write comparing it to a wiki or Obsidian (etc.) vault.

Within my own field, I’ve noticed how the use of authoritative passages from the intellectual tradition become touchstones for certain debates and questions, and understanding this can help you interpret a text. Two passages in opposite parts of a massive book might be linked by the quotation or paraphrase of a Bible verse. Or a quotation from a Church Father or Aristotle might be quoted whenever a certain debate comes up, which means that seeing that quote in a passage might give you a clue to what you’re about to read about.

The tradition of commentary does similar work, too: if everyone is commenting on the same texts and asking the same questions of those texts, you have a uniform way of organizing ideas across authors. This still works today: I can’t tell you how many times, when I was wondering what an A said about X, my dissertation director would reply, “Well, X is covered in in section N of Lombard, so look up A’s commentary on N.”

None of that is exactly PKM the way we think about it, but it’s pretty similar: nonlinear knowledge networks that extend and enhance memory.

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#27

I am going to contribute a relatively boring data point (unlike other comments with full of enthusiastic pursuits/professional achievements).

  1. My memory is really bad, to a point that I would forget where I wrote the notes. I’ve just been through a couple of major purchases, it’s so difficult to keep track of things like: contracting quotes, couch shopping, take down a ref number from a customer service phone call, etc… I really like the fact that, the moment that I type [[ and one keyword, I can pretty much find what I need, and all the interactions I had in the past.

  2. It kinda forced me/helped me to grow a habit of organizing things before I forget or leave it. It’s just so easy to write things down, and so easy to retrieve. One example - I had the idea of a small home project last year but did not have the bandwidth. I did some basic research and saved links and my thoughts in obsidian, with pretty much no format or structure. Last month I was able to fully recall my idea and did everything in a weekend. I am so glad those ideas didn’t just go to nowhere and I’d need to start fresh.

Side note: this habit is really beneficial in the work setting. Every end of day if I can write down a brief summary of what I did and what I should be doing the next day, it boosts productivity, reduce the booting time in the morning, and also helps writing your self review (sadly my company does not allow Obsidian so I am using Foam at work).

  1. I don’t like using apps. To be specific, I dislike those fancy apps that only do a very specific thing (like a todo) or a full website that keeps track of some niche things you use, along with a bunch of features you don’t need. I keep pretty much all my tasks management, short-term/long-term todos, journals, book notes, anything (as long as it’s not a data table) in Obsidian. In return, things become a lot simpler when you look at the relationships between them: a task is attached to a topic, that was mentioned on day x, day y, and day z.

  2. It makes journaling a lot easier. I’ve been switching journal apps over the last decades. Some are difficult to use, some are no longer supported/died, some requires internet, some are simply ugly, or slow to load, and I had quite a few physical notebooks, but my handwriting makes it not pleasant to read… Obsidian is just too easy to open and type something. In terms of why it’s an achievement - journaling helps mental health!

  3. It’s just way easier to program something to manipulate text. Couple line of python, done.

Overall I don’t think I am using Obsidian for the “hard core” PKM stuffs. They are not really knowledge knowledge (if you think knowledge is something you get from a MOOC or a book)? But I still have things that I need to remember, that I can’t, by my little poor head.

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#28

Oh, another link that I forgot about: the structure of the Bible, especially the Old Testament. There’s a school of interpretation of the Bible that argues that the Old Testament writers used key words, phrases, and motifs that go over the head of modern readers, but to original readers connect different passages together in intricate ways.

For instance, there is a recurring tree motif throughout the Bible, beginning with the Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge in Genesis 3, stretching to Abraham entertaining the divine guests at the Oak of Mamre, to Moses at the burning bush, to Psalm 1 saying the righteous is like a tree, to Jesus cursing the fig tree, to the trees with healing leaves in Revelation. Whenever you see trees, you’re supposed to think back to the original two trees.

Similarly, there’s a motif of “seeing,” beginning with Eve seeing that the Tree of Knowledge was good to eat, to Aaron “seeing” the Golden Calf, David seeing Bathsheba, and so forth.

It’s not that these are tracking a “theme” in the modern sense. It’s not just that trees symbolize something in the Bible. Rather, when you see a certain word, you’re supposed to think, not just of an abstract idea, but of all the other stories you’ve read that use that word.

In essence, these words and motifs are wikilinks for your memory: each story contains links to other stories that help you interpret it. In fact, scholars sometimes actually call these “hyperlinks.” You’re supposed to read them in a nonlinear way, as a web of connected stories rather than a series of page turns.

There’s a great little group of scholars that are doing serious academic work in this area and also creating podcasts, videos, etc. for a popular audience at The Bible Project.

#29

Never knew that… fascinating! It reminds me of the book “Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid” by cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter… he does something similar in that book, and you effectively learn about his idea of ‘we think by analogy’ in a similar manner to how you describe the Old Testament…

#30

I’m a really big fan of journaling too. Personally, I still use a combination of paper and app-based journaling in Apple Notes. I love the tactile feel of a fountain pen on good paper in a nice leather journal… old school!

More recently I’ve been using GoodNotes, which has the best hand-writing to text OCR that I’ve found aside from Evernotes, which I no longer use but had really good handwriting recognition.

If Obsidian had handwriting recognition… that would be truly amazing!