What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really? · brennan.day

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'Scholar's Books and Objects (Chaekkeori)' by Unknown in the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910), ca. 19th Century. | Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (edited by the Author)

I'm somebody who writes a lot—half a million words and 200 blog posts in the past 8 months. I'm also someone with an unrelenting curiosity to better understand our world. Beyond that, I also graduated with a degree in English literature with honours, with a 3.8 GPA. So, it should be no surprise I've done extensive research on how best to do research, which resulted in me diving into the world of personal knowledge management systems. These are the systems and methods of keeping track and sorting the notes we take, along with any other writing we do.

PKMs have existed for many decades (this paper is from 1999), and digital notetaking apps such as Evernote have as well. But if you know what I'm talking about, you probably associate the idea with the application Obsidian.

Obsidian has been out for six years now—has there been an increase in public-facing understanding and knowledge?

I think it's safe to say that, while there have always been courses and lessons on productivity people sell and buy, the unique values and principles of Obsidian (local plain-text files written in Markdown, data privacy, portability, "future-proofing," etc.) give the ideas and the people behind them a certain higher-brow purpose and epistemological value.

With applications like Evernote or Todoist, there has always been a more inherent focus on the nebulous concept of productivity: getting things done x10 faster and more efficiently so you have more time to get more things done. There has always been a professional business aesthetic associated where the implicit understanding is to maximize profit with the least amount of effort. Even in more personal modalities, it's about being mindful about throughput and how to increase it.

The aesthetic understanding of applications like Obsidian are different—there is a more, seemingly noble cause of pursuing knowledge and curiosity. To synthesize the endless sources of raw information and transform them into personal important wisdom to share with others.

And please don't get me wrong, I think that's a wonderful goal to pursue, I mean it is clear on my site that this is exactly what I'm dedicating my life towards.

My concern is in the lack of critical examination of what these complex, robust systems are producing: Has there been a meaningful increase of understanding and creation thanks to personal knowledge management systems? This is the question I want to investigate and try to answer.

PKM Examples

Before trying to answer that question, I want to first go over specific examples of personal knowledge management frameworks so we have an understanding of what I'm talking about, exactly.

Organization-first systems

PARA (Tiago Forte): sorts everything into Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives, organized by actionability rather than topic.

Johnny Decimal : a strict numeric taxonomy (10-19, 11.01, etc.) originally for file systems, now used for notes too.

LATCH (Richard Saul Wurman): Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy. Less a system than a checklist of the five ways any information can be organized.

Note-linking / emergent systems

Zettelkasten (Niklas Luhmann): atomic notes, each one idea, linked to other notes rather than filed into folders. Structure emerges from the links, not a predetermined hierarchy. Uses "Folgezettel" (sequential branching IDs) in the original paper-slip version.

Evergreen notes (Andy Matuschak): a modern gloss on Zettelkasten: notes should be atomic, concept-oriented, densely linked, and written/rewritten over time rather than left as one-off captures.

Maps of Content (MOCs) : popularized in the Obsidian community; instead of folders, you build index notes that link out to clusters of related notes, and can have many overlapping maps.

Digital garden : notes published in a semi-public, always-growing, non-linear state (as opposed to a polished blog post), often explicitly showing "seedling → budding → evergreen" stages of an idea.

Capture/workflow-oriented

CODE (Tiago Forte, pairs with PARA): Capture, Organize, Distill, Express. A pipeline for turning raw input into usable output rather than a filing scheme per se.

Progressive summarization : also Forte's. Each pass through a note, bold/highlight the most important parts, so a note gets more distilled each time you revisit it.

GTD (David Allen): technically a task-management system, not PKM, but it's so often bolted onto PKM setups (especially with PARA) that's worth listing. Capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage.

Older/analog roots

Commonplace book : centuries-old...