* Can prune old/outdated/now-irrelevant stuff
* Can learn/re-learn stuff
* Can consider re-writing/updating some the re-surfaced note, maybe because i have better understanding of some concept nowadays as compared to when i originally wrote some note
* Maybe some old ideas spark thoughts that generate new idea(s)
...etc., etc., etc.
You have inspired me to craft a little script to bring up random notes from my collection. Thanks! :-)
The author’s own gap fillers that he mentions sound cool, but his fixation on randomness makes me curious about what the purpose of his system is.
> If I’m not careful, my PKM apps become black holes where information goes to die.
Well, that's because just writing notes != learning. Obviously the information get forgotten.
I can't believe the author were so obsessed with PKM, but there zero mention of spaced repetition to help them learn and remember information. (Anki, Supermemo, or at least some Obsidian plugin with same function)
If you want to resurface them, you can show them in hierarchy(show children, or descendants in any level), search or filter by keywords, sort them by created time, URL, order, or other fields.
Resurfacing from current context can be very complicated, you should create some fields to track your activities, create many routines to handle these information automatically, and create relative UI. These are advanced features based on the current basic features.
1. I have a Daily Note which is my starting point of the day. Aside from some TODOs and some daily reflections, it also contains an image map of things that are currently important. This map gets updated (in a template) once every couple of weeks, depending on where my focus is. Currently it links to a big project for a customer, my running progress, a webdav tool I'm working on, and a book I'm reading.
2. Many of my note templates automatically include a dataview query which spits out a list of related notes. E.g. for People that will be a list of recent meetings and mentions. For Programming related notes there's a list of notes that link to it, like for Java I have ~200 other notes that point at Java, from Method References to Apache Commons libraries.
3. Lots of links. This makes the local Graph View somewhat useful for rediscovery. This includes links to things that don't exist yet (and may never exist). Like I'm probably not going to create a note about Mitochondria, but several notes link to it.
Some more serendipitous discovery might be nice. I've experimented with various Related Notes plugins, most are garbage which find similarities where none exist because they can't tell the note structure apart from its salient content.
The process of organization with the app on my phone is itself mindless enough that I can focus on the meaning of what I'm looking at.
That's the friction point in a lot of these PKM solutions - the process of using them is set up for Big Important Tasks. The process of using the interface interferes with the flow of thought.
As for rediscovery of old stuff, the best solution is to get comfortable with the fact that certain notes won't resurface and to let them die. This is actually a good thing. It allows you to keep focus on your interests as they evolve. Even the legendary Niklas Luhmann, whose paper zettelkasten was arguably the inspiration for the current lmk craze had what we called "black holes" in his system—there are several notes he filed that never saw the light of day again. This was by design. These systems are supposed to be dynamic mechanisms for helpings you think, not immemorial retrieval mechanisms. If that's what you want you might as well make every note chronological.
Trying to use a PKM strictly as a "remember anything at any time" is largely missing the point. The goal is to create knowledge by stringing relevant ideas together and, as Luhmann did, to use the system to produce surprises. The best way to do this for obsidian in particular is to use terminology and link liberally whenever some term occurs in a note even if it at first seems completely unrelated—that's what you want, you want the system to surprise you as you navigate h the graph of notes.
I've emulated some of the features the author wants in my obsidian using Dataview, but it's more the human ritual of review that accomplishes this for me.
I do agree, there is a good product there.
The LLMs are quite good at writing one-off Obsidian plugins, in my experience.
Personally, I’m on the other end of the spectrum. I’m still up for a good organization, and I do my own simplified version of PARA[1] + Johnny Decimal.[2] However, I’m beginning to tend more and more towards how Steph Ango uses Obsidian[3] while still maintaining simplicity and ways to walk out when needed. I’m either listing a list of files based on keywords, either via the Open command or the Search feature. I, sometimes, use a Universal Search Extension for Obsidian, but I can live without it.
My final thoughts, especially on the UX, are that, eventually, when it becomes commonplace to run a local LLM, I should most likely be just using Spotlight/Alfred or something to open, search, link, and all of that while I just keep adding contents into their own ”boxes” that I have categorized at the gate while filing the documents/content.
I’m not sure if I can even explain what I’m thinking, but the above is a precursor to what I believe will happen soon enough.
I know that some people use them to learn, however I've never found this method to be useful for me, so I just stick to spaced-repetition (Anki) to help me learn the relevant facts.
Done this way, I have two "stores" of information. In Obsidian I put information I don't want to memorize or at least not long term, like work related topics (terminology, the domain, etc), project planning, project details, roadmaps, and in Anki I put information I care about learning long term, like facts about X technology or language, vocab, etc.
Point is, i think obsidian is not the right tool for learning. SRS sounds like a better fit. I'd suggest taking the effort to learn how to make good clozes (card type).
nsavage•3h ago
Among other things, it breaks your notes apart into facts and entities, then stores those along with embeddings. This helps surface things you've seen before since it makes and surfaces links based on individual things, instead of the text as a whole.
In case anyone is interested, I wrote a bit about the process here: https://nsavage.substack.com/p/facts-arguments-theses-buildi...