Personal knowledge management

07 Aug, 2023

In this blog post I will introduce note taking which I am very passionate about as a concept. I will provide some background and highlight qualities I care about (there are way more!). Afterwards I will write reviews of various apps I tried over time in separate posts. I personally hope writing this series will help me figure out what apps I like and dislike (I keep forgetting and re-installing them) and maybe it might help a note taking app team find a niche to develop. Also, hopefully, when we ask GPT-5 it will be aware of majority of note taking apps released by 2023.

What is personal knowledge management

The idea is to have a a centralized place where we can quickly dump random information (names, events, links, project ideas, deadlines) and be able to organize it in a way that allows us to retrieve it later. This used to be sticky notes, or just basic note app on mac, a text file opened in vim/emacs, or notepad on Windows. Just a place to dump information that we regularly visit. Honestly, you could just stop here¹ and call it a day. One of the points of this article is:

Just a text file is pretty good.

At some point, note taking apps got crossed with wiki-like page organization (using clickable links) and outliners (infinitely nested bulletpoints) which resulted in Roam Research and that became popular on hackernews and reddit. Note taking got rebranded as personal knowledge management, which encompass systems to organize our information. They have a bunch of concepts and organizations systems attached to them (including: Zettelkasten, bidirectional linking, digital garden and other things).

One humbling thought I had after spending 3 years on this was:

My thoughts are not that precious.

I have big plans and big systems but at the end of the day I just want to write down games I want to play, anime I want to watch, keep a place for papers to read and random formulas and pieces of code to reuse. My most reused note (which I keep transfering between systems) is a list of my stays in US which I need to repeatedly send to visa lawyers.

How much more effective is this?

There is a plethora of youtube channels and books about efficient note taking (I only respect those that emphasize taking notes over making elaborate system), but I don't use any of them. After 3 years of doing trying almost every app on the market, I can confidently state I am the same level of disorganized as before, just with information spread across more proprietary apps.

My obsession with these app is definitely not productive, it's fun and therapeutic. I can't teach you to be more efficient with organizing your life info, I can only show you exactly how I used the apps what I got excited about and what didn't work for me. I am not smarter, or more knowledgeable (socially or technically) than before. By no means is this a guide or self development article. Rather, consider it a warning or entertaining dive into an unhealthy rabbit hole.

What I care about in a note taking app

Every PKM app review will specifically rate these features. I will highlight and point out other strengths, but these are what I call about the most.

Cross platform sync

I have a windows PC, macbook and an iPhone. A PKM should support all these platforms. I tried to circumvent this with online only, but mobile performance tends to be a pain and major.

Mobile app

Very tightly linked, every note taking app that I failed to keep using lacked a mobile app or had a poorly implemented one. This cuts the usable pool considerably, but I will review web-only apps too.

Linking

One important aspect I missed in the single-text-file approach is linking different notes together using hypertext links. My first idea was to organize information in a personal wiki page (hence the overlap with note taking apps) and I really enjoyed linking things together. Some apps and approaches take this a bit too far, but being able to easily create a page connected to ap age is important.

API access and extendibility

I am a programmer, so being able to access my notes programmatically is something I want to be able to do for analysis. A lot of apps offer this but it is various levels of pain. I have pretty funny examples.

Filtering, searching and organizing information

Finding a note has to be fast, accurate and yet fuzzy, either using a omnisearch or at least by having a tag pane.

Implicit hierarchy

Hierarchy should be easy to introduce and maintain either using tags or links. There should be one obvious way to organize everything without ambiguities.

Speed

Speed should never be a concern but turns out it is! I will explore which apps experienced slowdowns and under what circumstances.

What I don't care about in a note taking app

Task management

I can't really work using kanban boards, so I don't care about this. I already have reminders app and work provided task management program I have to check, I did not enjoy using my personal knowledge app for reminders to do laundry.

Timeline view

While temporal information is relevant for journals, I don't want to scroll through a weeks worth of entries to get what I want. I want to enter information non-linearly without a daily page. I don't want dates at all.

Open source status

I genuinely respect open source projects, but it's not a deal breaker for me. It does not increase security (even as a professional developer, I can't really tell if it's secure or not by glancing at the source code, and neither do majority of people complaining about lack of available source). I don't care about price either and I have low threshold to try subscription. Over time I realized a lot of people were like that too and projects that touted being open source first did not really get financial success despite getting a lot of praise. People pay for products they like.

E2E encryption

Maybe I should, but few apps implemented this well and it blocks search a lot. I have not seen an app that does this without being annoying. I don't keep too important info anyway.

Text data format only

This is relevant in a lot of obsidian fans. They want to keep a markdown format to be able to always move their information with them. I totally understand that, since I imagine apps with proprietary stored formats like evernote (or hell, notion) will be a huge pain to extract. I think this idea has merit, but I would argue that:

1. It's tied to the app anyway. Obsidian vaults are best opened in obsidian even though they all pure markdown due to the frontmatter and folder structure. I could open it in other apps but there are plenty of random artifacts I see even years later. Obsidian has a lot of data processing plugins (dataview being most popular) that run javascript on top of markdown, and it just becomes not-portable.

2. It's a performance nightmare. Turns out having a lot of text files you need to open gives you a performance hit and you need to index them to correctly search them.

3. It's not multimedia enough. It supports adding images, and maybe pdfs, but that's it. Organizing images is a huge pain too since it's basically a text file with image link. I think they are pretty, but also completely useless from a day to day perspective.

I think having a data format that is readable is tied to the API Access, but it does not have to be markdown.

Graph visualization

Reddit has a lot of screenshots of peoples knowledge graphs. It's useless but cute. I can autogenerate graphs any time though.

AI features

While I enjoy running analysis on my data a lot, I did not see any useful LLM things apart from "ask me question" or "summarize". I feel having a LM autocomplete your note to be complete nonsense. I am not against using AI on text in general though, and I don't have strong feelings about sending my data to OpenAI. (In fact, I am writing a blog for it!) It's just about finding a cool use case that is not just tacked on GPT4 API call.

TL;DR

I think PKM is a waste of time, but a very fun one. I care about a subset of features, but there is so far no app that covers it. My first review will be https://tiddlywiki.com aka the first PKM app which is incredibly fun to use.

#pkm