I recently used linked thinking in Obsidian to do some critical meme analysis for therapy. It was a good exercise in creating index notes, e.g. a meme crossing over Marvel and The Good Place wouldn’t fit in a folder for either one.
I’m just using emacs org-mode and Obsidian for task management, and keeping track of my learning new code-y things… but no backlinks or anything yet. Was trying Zettlr as well. Waiting for an excuse to get really fancy with it.
If Obsidian wasn’t around, I would look closely at Tiddlywiki and emacs org-mode. I wish I had Obsidian back when I was new to coding! And backlinks can be cool, and I do use them, but less than once a month.
I keep information I need to return to for work and personal life in there. I’ve been less disciplined lately as I’ve been doing a lot of journaling to explore my mental health needs
I’m glad to hear others are using their notes for mental health. I’ve been using intersectional memes as a way to connect similar patterns that are usually silo’d. Is there anything more you’d like to share on the topic?
Been using Roam on and off for a while. A friend of mine calls it her exocortex and I’ve been feeling similarly. As someone with ADHD it’s so nice to be able to offload a bunch of mental overhead to a place where I can just review it later without having to struggle to recall what I wanted to remember!
Even though I prefer Obsidian now, Roam was like being able to run after only having crawled with Google Docs. It changed how I approach thinking.
Can you describe what you like about Obsidian vs Roam? You’re not the first person I’ve heard say they switched.
There are lots of different ways to compare, but with Obsidian I like
- that I spend zero ongoing cognitive energy on security/privacy/availability concerns
- first-class aliases
- speed
- easy to backup continuously
- local graph view
- (while I don’t use it much,) the mobile app is much more solid
- the leadership and the business
- I find it easier to do long-form writing
I do miss Roam’s outliner and backlinks sometimes, but not enough to have bothered with a plugin yet. I also wasn’t sure about Roam’s future, and remained a paid subscriber to support them until I saw how the CEO had decided to moderate the subreddit.
I hadn’t been following the CEO’s behavior. The rest sounds excellent, I’d kill for a decent mobile app. My single greatest frustration with roam is the glacial loading speed on mobile since I’m usually using it to hastily type a note while out doing other things. Thank you for the rundown, I’ll definitely be looking into switching over.
I honestly don’t use the mobile app much, but when I tried to use Roam’s app in a doctor visit, it was embarrassing to wait 30 seconds for it to load. It was doubly embarrassing when I compulsively closed the app and had to open it again 🙃
I hope you post about your experience experimenting with Obsidian :)
Hey, I wanted to take some time to re-find it but this video was what pushed me to make the switch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x54XJrECvk
Never heard of PKMS before, but I’ve looked a few of them up and they seem cool! I just finished exams for this semester, but they seem like good systems for note taking. For example in my Java subject they were talking about data structures like Queues and Stacks that we learned in the algorithms and data structures subject so I could just link that inline.
Oh gosh, I really wish I had a proper PKMS back when I was at university. I would have done exponentially better, I’m excited for you 😆
I’m not sure if it counts, but I’ve been using Joplin for a couple years now to keep notes on various things in my life, ranging from gaming/movie logs to how to properly install some self-hosted service on a NAS. I’m curious to learn more about PKMSs though.
I would say that counts! Is there anything specific you’re curious about? Particular issues in your personal system or interesting things you’ve seen from others?
Sorry for the delayed response! No particular issues, just interesting to see that there’s a name and a community for this kind of system, and even that there is a system!
I’ve been trying to get into org-roam for research since I already use Emacs as my text editor for most of my other research needs (writing scripts, LaTeX, input files for programs). But I can’t keep consistency with PKMS in general. I last at most a semester and as soon as I take any vacation I lose all my habits.
I hope this comes across in good faith rather than pithy, but have you tried making a note of the habits you want to keep?
My main problem is going back to those notes. Whether I use Org+Dropbox, google docs/calendar, a physical BuJo, messages to myself on Whatsapp, etc… At some point checking the system slips my mind, regardless of the system.
That’s fair, I’ve run into that too. Is there anything that you do check? I’ve found that emailing myself and snoozing it (in gmail) helps since I’m an inbox-zero person.
I’ve heard of PARA but haven’t really tried it. Do you have any idea how you’d handle meme crossovers? I wouldn’t want to have folders for any particular show since a meme could be in 2+ shows.
I used to use Google Docs primarily, and yesterday was migrating some old notes out of it. I tried Notion, excited about timelines, but ultimately found Obsidian/linked thinking to be better for me.
I recently started using Obsidian to organise all of my research notes, including over 1k source documents.
Have you had any interesting insights, or hit any particular pain points?
PDF handling has been the trickest part, as virtually all of my sources are PDFs. Omnisearch and annotator mostly handle it, however I forsee coding in my future.
I have a PARA structure in DEVONthink, though it’s mostly “Resources” for interesting web articles.
It’s getting hard to find old articles in search engines (even DDG), so if I see something interesting then I add it to Pocket. DEVONthink then reads my pocket RSS feed and stores a PDF version which goes into its full text index so I can find it again later.
I have a lot of papers and manuals and things in there too – anything I think might want to find later.
I like your PDF pipeline! I do that manually sometimes but I usually just grab text. I’ve been meaning to dig into RSS too, with my primary feed (reddit) largely going away and Lemmy not having as much content right now, I want to curate a new, more mindful feed.
I use Obsidian and today was thinking about how I would “never” use Evernote for certain reasons, but I was just looking at your link to DEVONthink and I realize that I’d have to use a service like that for certain scanning/searching features if I had to scan papers as it sounds like you did.
Do you have any favorite personal examples of DEVONthink doing something that is ahead of the curve? Also, how was effort of scanning?
DEVONthink gives me a leg up with the Pocket flow because it has a built in option to automatically create PDF versions of articles in an RSS feed. Other than that, I don’t really take enough advantage of its power user features. If I were to start over today, I’d probably take a serious look at Keep It which seems like a lighter tool. It’s really its full text index and some of the incidental metadata features (like having the source URL for anything exported from a browser) that keep me using it.
The papers I stash there usually come to me as PDFs. When I need to scan a physical paper I usually use Scanner Pro from my phone and export to DEVONthink from there. It has built-in OCR that’s always been good enough for searchability.
Honestly? I use it for fun, mostly, at the moment. The first thing I really flexed it for was playing Elden Ring and actually understanding what’s going on story-wise, because I love FromSoft’s narrative style but without taking notes it’s impossible to keep it all in your head.
I’m doing the same with Dune right now (actually doing a reading club thing on Discord) and eventually I’ll do so for Gene Wolfe’s Solar Cycle, probably the most FromSoft-ish books ever written.
I’m also writing an Elder Scrolls supplement for the TTRPG Mythras, using it to store links / info about obscure websites that seem cool, and generally writing down anything I want to keep written down.
I struggle to understand using Obsidian for scheduling / task organization kinda stuff, because I can’t make Obsidian yell at me to go do something. I just use the calendar on my phone and alarms for that. I’m not disciplined enough otherwise. I see Obsidian more like a personal wiki builder.
dude, that sounds awesome! i never thought to use such system on big narrative things. maybe that way reading leo tolstoy would be easier.
I stumbled onto this forum despite never having heard of PKMS. Does using Notion’s applicant tracker to track people who want to rent my room count?
I guess the difference between PKMS and KMS to me is primarily who’s using it. So yes? 😆
Oh my god! I was browsing a lot of instances and didn’t know where to start such kind of community! I am so hyped, that my favorite instance, with my favorite subreddit in exile, has this community. Your community is the reason I made an acc here. Let’s goooooooooooooooooooo.
Okay, so to answer your question. I came to pkm stuff through Zettelkasten. I am still at the begining of my journey. I am currently reading the Tiago Forte book. I really like the idea, that BASB is about getting things done and Zettelkasten more of a… i dont know… a real second brain?
Anyways my favorite setup for obsidian is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6ySG7xYgjY
Actually I was searching for good open source note taking app with mobile and desktop synchronization, but not a single one allows to create a folder inside of folder!!! It is so frustrating.
