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- Hacker News
- 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.
by PaulRobinson - 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?
by galaxyLogic - AI are also good at reading. I'm not one to write lots of notes without a reason. For the first time I'm jealous of people who have a way to distill years of their inner thoughts.by axus
- 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.
by mpfh - 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.
by lilerjee - I did the same - I created MindForger for myself and it's the first app that I start every day and the last I close.
I also completely understand "bloat"/simplicity - my project may seem dead on Github, but for me it is "perfect software" - no more features needed, no bugs in what I use daily.
Some of my favorite projects got so complicated over the years that I stopped to use them. This is why Don and his TeX is the legend ;)
by dvorka - 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.
by jrm4 - I remember zim wiki! I used to love it! I think as a desktop app (if you will), it does a really great job! In my case, i eventually started moving away from work flows that were desktop-driven-only, hence felt zimi wiki lacked mobile support...so stopped using it about 8 or so years ago. Then i started to realize that a bunch of basic text files synced across my devices in the simplest fashion, and using whatever fast, easy tool text editor on said platform (e.g. Markor on mobile, Kate text editor on laptop, etc.) seemed to be enough for me. While i may not use zim wiki, i still think is a good option for many, and especially if their work flow revolves around the desktop/laptop.by mxuribe
- 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.by fasterik
- 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.
by _bramses - >"Use whatever works for you" is intellectually lazy
it isn't in a space that's full of snake oil salesmen trying to peddle you solutions you don't need. The problem with the whole knowledge management thing is that it's full of people obsessed with appearing intellectual and productive while never actually producing anything worth mentioning despite their gazillion knowledge hacks, which was the point of the original article.
Just like any other 'life optimization' cottage industry, stop over intellectualizing, stop inventing problems that don't exist and do something useful instead is perfectly valid, much needed advice
by Barrin92 - 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.by bauerd
- I think it’s less notebooks or typed notes, and more the issue of cargo cults built around frameworks and systems. Bullet journals are a handwritten PKM, aren’t they? And they were definitely a fad around the fetishized ideal of creating perfect notebooks.by Apocryphon
- I've both a handwritten notebook and an obsidian PKM. When in a meeting, I always have the notebook in front of me. I write plenty of stuff I believe I've to remember. It is really important for my understanding of what is at stake in the meeting. I can't skip it. This live brain dump is required for me. That being said, I almost never come back to what I manually wrote and when I do, I've hard time understanding the logic of my writing... How strange the brain works. It is like I'm using the handwritting to organize the information in my brain. But is done in such a way than I can't no longer understand myself like 24h after the meeting :)
Any thing else goes to the PKM in a structured and often actionable way. It is my notebook, my business development system, my todo list, my brain dump, my list of contacts, etc. What I particularly value is the easy ability to enrich a document with cross-links. This is for me the strongest point of PKM as the one I have in Obsidian.
by melicerte - I also much prefer handwritten notes. The act of writing something down helps it to stay in my memory more than typing it up. The main for me downside is there's no Cmd+F for my handwritten notes.
I read a post recently about using a local LLM to OCR handwritten notes that I intend to trial soon:
https://andrewdoering.org/blog/2026/remarkable-local-handwri...
by freshchilled - I've taken hand-written, on paper, notes throughout my education, up to high school level. In university, I've switched to hand-written notes on a tablet device. At the end of uni, when I started working on my final thesis & Obsidian was becoming popular, I've switched to it and since then, everything I note is organized into markdown files or at least is somehow referenced through pure text.
Having experienced all of these methods. I've found myself regularly searching through my vault and referencing older material. While the notes hand-written on a tablet, made it much easier to sift through vast amounts of material I was ingesting at the time. I find myself unable to re-use these notes in any meaningful way. They still exist, I can access them, but I don't find myself going back to them. Old paper notebooks? Most of them are destroyed, lost, forgotten to time.
The knowledge management, with easily indexable and searchable contents, has this invaluable perk of being accessible at a moments notice. Keeping potential of being relevant.
by high_priest - 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.
by jokellum - Because Obsidian is so barebones out of the box, people look for tools to help them organize things, hence looking for plugins.
I have to admit I'm one of those people that just doesn't "get" Obsidian. Every now and then when I have a specific thing I'm working on, I create a new vault, write one or two notes, and then inevitably never look at it again.
by sevenseacat - 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.
by Ferret7446 - > 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.
I would think the latter is the former. Do you mean the idea that hand movements of writing help retention?
by jolmg - Yeah, Obsidian has allow me to create a comprehensive back and frontlog of all types of media. And that is super useful to me, and I can make this little connect information base in a way no tools before it had really accomplished. The "queries" are much more natural and much closer to actual real paper notes.
Which is fundamentally a reference sheet, it's not for learning.
That might be why interacting with dedicated PKM-centric communities and content is personally so exhausting.
by attheballot - 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!
by udbhavs - The process itself is necessary, not the notes. I used to take notes in classes and meetings. At some point I realized I never read them because they were illegible. No structure, bad handwriting, just key words, no sentences. What I do now is play cards on my phone. It performs the same function of keeping my mind focused on the conversation rather than wandering off. I’ve learned to combine this with focused note-taking where I write down specific things to remember: tasks, facts, significant statements. But it’s the process that allows me to focus, the notes or gazillion solitaire games completed are a side effect.by belZaah
- First of all you need to decide your goal. Why are you reading, taking a course, or writing down anything, in the first place?
Otherwise you're just gonna be doing busy work to feel like you're doing what you're supposed to.
Do not suppose. Decide what you want to achieve and slice that into things you can do inside of a day.
On the other hand, if you have nothing to achieve, anything goes. Just read, think about it, go for walks.
Just don't get caught in between, busy and going nowhere.
by ent001 - Well if you write down a snippet of code, and later upi reliaze you need that code a gain but don't remember it but do remember that you must have written a note about it, then writing down the note was useful.
The issue I'm still working on is how do I find such notes when I don't exactly remeber what they were about.
by galaxyLogic - What is the goal?
That needs to start all conversations in this area. Not everyone had the same goals.
Second, what is your specific problems?
Again not everyone had the same problems. There are common problems with common solutions (often multiple conflicting solutions that work in isolation but perhaps not for your life), learning what works for others can thus be helpful. Beware, not all problems are big enough to be worth addressing for you.
The important part is find what works for you. Sometimes you don't need to measure what you learned - which seems to be your concern- if it is important and you learned it you will remember when needed. Of not you need to look it up again. It can be liberating to realize that you don't need to measure everything. Sometimes that isn't good enough though, so back to the first two questions.
by bluGill - Can confirm.
Say what you will about Tim Ferris, but maybe he was onto something when he said only learn the bare minimum to get something done and more than that is a waste (4 hour workweek).
by cocoa19 - I'm starting to break out of this mentality by noticing that
1. I excelled at my exams without any strange note taking systems;
2. I remember many details down the road, even things I thought I had forgotten. For example, I needed some Linear Algebra, and I was surprised by how much I recalled after 10 years, so much in fact that in 3 days I was on par with when I passed my exam. It would have been worth it to make an Anki flashcard for every theorem?
3. In the exam I used such method I just needed much more time that when I used my minimalist note taking. So much in fact that I question the efficiency of such methods.
by mm351206 - I think of myself as a thought hoarder - my anxieties center around not wanting to forget a thought, no thought left behind because I never know when that thought might (or might not) be useful.
It becomes a problem of organising my thoughts so that I can find them and reconnect them and bundle them together into ideas. Which later might become understanding and wisdom.
Obviously this is not nothing new, Zettelkasten is solving the exact the same problem. And through out history many collections of notes have been found and archived. These systems will benefit much from LLMs, purely for the organizational advantageous.
I have taken another approach inspired by mind maps to create my own visual PKM[1]. It has become a giant scrapbook with notes, videos and imaginary, ideas and half-finished projects, and everything in-between. The advantage is that it's a giant visual program, it's a mind map created using a visual programming environment. I'm constantly extending it with new tooling to help me keep my thoughts in order.
In the end, it's the tweeking at my scrapbook while adding to the scrapbook that then causes more tweeking until something arises that was expected but which is very much welcome.
[1]: https://blog.openmindmap.org/blog/mind-maps-for-busy-minds
by Towaway69 - I don't know your specifics, so I'm going to reply with what I've learned about learning:
I found reading a textbook, and typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough. Typically: definitions, quotes, and personal thoughts while reading. Did this for stats/comp sci/etc. Obsidian + markdown worked for that, even without plugins. Being able to text search is useful, which is why I don't hand write.
Anything beyond that you have to be cautious about paralyzing yourself from trying XYZ PKM.
Theres a quote from stephen king that goes somewhere along the lines of "during first draft don't try referencing or fixing grammar because it breaks your train of thought". I think similarly, when learning something, choose the thing thats most out of the way (usually the simplest) that is least likely to break your train of thought.
In terms of tracking how much you're learning, I'd be very very slow and incremental in what tooling/methods you pick. For me, I just trust myself after reading/notetaking a textbook. Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign. Being able to explain what I learned to someone else is a good sign.
by jokellum