Why I Adopted a Networked Note-taking System

... and why you might need one too

My Problem

What if I could connect my notes and thoughts and "learned ideas" from different domains? A lot of these ideas appear to be connected and I seem to be repeating myself a lot.

This is the thought I had sometime in 2019. I was at the start of a career transition and was wondering which combination of my varied skill set to leverage for my next opportunity. I had a wealth of experience in customer development and startups, I was experienced in working as a product owner and cofounder, I had dabbled in Data Science and Quantitative research methodology, I could even code adequately enough to get an entry level role in a dev team and I had a masters degree and consulting experience in Management Information Systems. 

However, transitioning from a management role, I felt that all of these skills required some polishing up in-order for me to pursue the opportunities I was most interested in. Thus begun months of study, note taking and reading. Pretty soon, I came to the conclusion that my note taking systems were inefficient. My notes were in silos and I kept repeating myself. Most troubling, a lot of the concepts I was reviewing were related but I had no practical way of bringing them all together unless I created... More Notes!!! 

There had to be a better way, I thought. I needed a better way to cross-reference these concepts. A better way to ensure that my notes remained relevant and permanently useful. 

Beyond career development I also needed a better way to curate my numerous interests. From Pop Philosophy to Minimalism, Journaling to Cooking, Self-help to Pop Psychology and a bunch of other silliness that my brain liked to munch on.

And on top of all of this, I needed to find a better way to journal in order to manage anxiety and the occasional bout of existential angst. 

I needed a truly comprehensive system into which I could input this flood of information and retrieve, analyze and develop as and when needed. A personal knowledge management system.

The Solution

After a bit of "forum hopping", I noticed one particular suggestion coming up a few times: TiddlyWiki. 

TiddlyWiki promised the following: 

1. A way for me to create my notes about concepts and ideas in an 'atomic', standalone form. 
2. A way to link related notes to each other like web pages.

These features offered a non-linear way to organize and re-use my notes as building blocks throughout my Personal Knowledge Management System.

 

In my search for a solution, I also kept coming across the Zettelkasten system made famous by Niklas Luhmann and Andy Matuschak's Evergreen Notetaking System.  

In fact, Matuschak's critique of the approach some of the solutions to ineffective note-taking often take helped affirm my instincts about what to focus on: effective thinking and developing reliable insights over time as opposed to cool tricks and hacks of collecting snippets of information.

You can also learn more about Zettelkasten here.

Some Tools to Consider

You might be wondering now if there are any other tools that do this besides TiddlyWiki, well there are a couple of other popular tools that are specifically designed for Networked Note-taking. 

• Roam Research: This is the most popular of the bunch. When I started my search, Roam was "invite only" and so I couldn't get the chance to test its features. Since then it has launched a $15/month subscription. 

• Obsidian: Much like TiddlyWiki, Obsidian is free to use(sans the Publishing feature) and allows one to keep their notes offline. I've recently switched from TiddlyWiki to Obsidian and I strongly recommend it. I may write a post about it soon.

• Notion: A popular all-in-one workspace, I've never used it.

• Remnote: I love that they have built in Spaced Repetition

Regardless of the tool you choose, you would want to have the following in mind:

1. Make sure your notes are future proof. Your Personal Knowledge Database is supposed to serve you the rest of your life and possibly even serve others after you. Thus it's advisable to keep the notes in a format that won't be at the mercy of vendor lock-in or only work with proprietary tools. For this reason, I keep my notes as Markdown files. Vendors go out of business, services are sold to larger business, products change direction but as long as there are personal computers, text editors will always be able to read markdown files. 
2. It's very easy to go down the customization rabbit hole of networked note-taking systems. There are vibrant communities around each of these tools with a broad range of use cases. A quick search on twitter for #roamcult and #obsidian show the extent of the fandom, there are also cool features and plugins and templates being released regularly so it's very easy to fixate on the features of tools and the "right setup" instead of actually using the tools for effective thinking. My suggestion would be to simply go ahead and start with the most basic settings available. Over time, you will instinctively know which plugins would be most effective to add. 

If you've read the post up to this point, then I hope you've found it useful (or you're one of my friends checking out my blog). Either way, thanks. My next post will be about my personal philosophy for implementing Personal Knowledge Management Systems.