Stumbling into PKM
I stumbled into something this week.
In my dropbox folder is a “Notes” folder that is nearly everything that I have created over the last several years.
To be honest, I’m a little surprised that it has only 1656 notes in it. It seems to me that there would be more. Maybe I lost some along the way.
I’ve been using Notational Velocity, Simplenote, and NVAlt for that entire time.
My first note in this folder is from a project management training I attended on March 26, 2010, just about a month after my son was born.
So, what’s challenging is that these are not connected, ordered, or anything else like. There are some tags, but not a lot.
475 of the notes in there are notes from my podcast, Transformative Principal, which makes sense.
Anyway, for some reason, NVAlt wouldn’t load when I got my new computer. It would freeze and would never open. I needed a replacement, so I found an app called “The Archive” from the web site https://zettelkasten.de.
Here’s the stumble. Personal Knowledge Management.
Never heard of it.
I saw a post by MacSparky a couple weeks ago called “Why I’m Leaning Obsidian.”
After reading his post and watching a couple youtube videos by Linking Your Thinking, I realized this is exactly what I need.
Here’s my problem.
I have hundreds of notes from my podcast interviews. All saved digitally. I am in the process of writing a book, and there is so much content. I’ve tried using Devonthink to make it work, but that’s putting things into a locked a system, and I just really despise that! I can be committed to an app, but I’ve lost too much data over the years, which is why I have stuck with that Notes folder in Dropbox, and why I keep coming back to it.
All my notes are where I need them, but they are disconnected and I need a way to link them. Enter Obsidian. I have to do the linking manually anyway, so this might be a good thing.
As a side note, when I started the Cybertraps podcast with Fred Lane, he reintroduced me to Workflowy, which has been his PKM for years. I used workflowy, but it doesn’t work very well with Markdown, and the Export function creates some gobbledy-gook with the RSS feed in my podcast, so I end up having to redo a lot of things, which is also annoying.
The other thing I don’t like about Workflowy is that it creates a huge unordered list file as the backup, which is nice that it is all there, but it’s pretty useless without Workflowy itself.
So, I think I might give Obsidian a try for a bit.
## For the nerds out there
Notes created:
37 in 2010
91 in 2011
103 in 2012
78 in 2013
115 in 2014
108 in 2015
316 in 2016
236 in 2017
145 in 2018
123 in 2019
222 in 2020
82 so far in 2021 as of 03/19/2021