Methods and systems for grasping, understanding, and making sense of any general knowledge or information.
Comments
This general “knowledge management” question is like a “time management” one — usually meaningless and sometimes a form of escapism.
When you don’t have any particular emotionally charged goal(s) in mind — no time/knowledge management technique would really make a difference.
But some of them might give you a good illusion of something important going on.
And as soon as you have specific important goal in mind (like preparing to specific exam, getting lawyer license etc.) — almost any approach you feel comfortable with will do the job.
You usually dont need to review possible options in advance, the goal itself gives you hints and guides (if preparing for exam means remembering a lot of scattered facts - you’d probably end up with some anki cards on your own etc).
I've had a different experience.
In the times where an emotionally charged goal isn't driving me forward, adhering to disciplined regimes for time and knowledge management has helped me to prepare and therefore perform better in times there IS a highly motivating goal.
There don't have to be two extremes of X-management (one fuelled by emotion and one dragged down by apathy). Like anything, building a discipline in the slow times will set you up really well for when you need to run hard in the fast times.
All that said, I use Roam Research[0] for my knowledge management now. I consolidate my thoughts and ideas weekly, and aim for evergeen knowledge[1].
[0]: https://roamresearch.com/
[1]: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z4SDCZQeRo4xFEQ8H4qrSqd68ucp...
Edit: formatting
By aristofun 2021-04-2610:16 You’re right. Discipline and habit is the king.
But i see that its near impossible to build a discipline without particular goal in mind.
By “emotionally charged” i meant “really important for you”, important enough so you even force yourself when you don’t feel excited about the goal.
By grep_name 2021-04-2614:46 I've found similarly that there's a lot of value in cultivating your knowledge base in between emotionally charged goals or spurts of inspiration, but highly disciplined / regimented approaches never worked for me at all for some reason.
For me, the key was switching to a totally non-linear but robustly inter-connectable note system, which turned out to be tiddlywiki in my case. Regimented approaches I found created friction for creating a new submission, and switching to just creating a 'tiddler' when something was on my mind (and then being able to choose to reference that content within larger ones later or not) has been one of the most liberating changes I've made in years.
By Tylast 2021-05-0111:07 Roam appears to have a similar graph structure to https://www.thebrain.com/ for nodes.
By lmarcos 2021-04-2612:35 Agree. All these management tools for knowledge and time feel like bikeshedding to me.
Obsidian was the mind opener for me. Simple to use. Backuped on Dropbox on my various machines, it is my ubiquitous personal knowledge base. The fact that you can copy/paste HTML from web pages into it makes me rebuild knowledge I get from the internet into my own version. Really really a fundamental tool for me. The Vi of knowledge.
PS: I don't know the other tools (notion, roam,...) PPS: a big downside in Obsidian, in my humble opinion, is publishing that knowledge on the web. Probably a static CMS on top of the .md file generated with Obsidian can do the trick. But it is a tedious step that I never had/wanted to investigate.
By unicodepepper 2021-04-2523:20 I have not tried this with Obsidian yet, but I know that Markdeep allows you to render .md files on the fly as HTML by appending some javascript to the unmodified markdown.
By jamie_ca 2021-04-2616:50 Yeah, it can tie in really nicely with a static site generator.
I use Notable rather than Obsidian, but it works the same (folder of .md files). My blog builds with Bridgetown, and I wrote a little bit of extra code to handle the wikilink formatting and build up an incoming link list, but it runs pretty cleanly. https://blog.tracefunc.com/notes/
By vcavallo 2021-04-2611:58 The .md publishing step you’re asking about is very neatly handled by Neuron (https://neuron.zettel.page/). The community is helpful and the original author of the project is a great guy and accessible on matrix.
you’ll be up and publishing in no time (for free and automatically to GH pages if you want)
By samstave 2021-04-2521:16 What about that post just earlier today for HTML-izing .md files in addition to turning them into presentation slides
By rasulkireev 2021-04-2522:411 reply The is the Obsidian Publish service exactly for that usecase. (https://obsidian.md/publish), although it is paid. I'm sure there will be soon, if not already, an open source extension that allows you to do that.
By lolive 2021-04-269:11 Several people I know simply donate money to the Obsidian project directly. But I agree that paying for their publishing service is more a win-win. You help the project PLUS you get the publishing service. I will probably do that. (and yell that I need this or that feature, that the service does not provide yet :)
I've used personal wikis and knowledge bases for myself and they work okay. vimwiki has been useful for me.
I find that I do some pretty cool stuff and then totally forget how I did it a year or 5 years later, mostly with coding. The open source projects I documented and explained are things I myself google to help me set them up in the future, so a way of codifying my knowledge has been to try to write about it and put that in public.
I set up development environments for myself a lot, so I wrote an article about how I do it https://modfoss.com/creating-my-development-environment.html and then put the code on GitHub as well https://github.com/symkat/modfoss_devel So if I don't do it for a while, I'll have a starting point and me-from-the-past explaining what I did and why.
By hashkb 2021-04-2520:50 I also use vimwiki extensively. It's always at hand.
