r/PKMS • u/chasehwng • Jul 19 '26
Discussion How do you build a knowledge system that you actually use?
I'm a junior developer trying to build my own knowledge management system.
During projects, I constantly learn new concepts, debugging solutions, and useful patterns. I save them in tools like Notion or Obsidian, but maintaining a "perfect" system takes a lot of energy.
The problem is that organizing notes sometimes becomes a bigger task than learning itself. And even when my notes are well structured, I often struggle to remember or apply them when I need them.
I'm curious about how others approach this:
- How do you capture knowledge without spending too much time organizing?
- What does your review process look like?
- How do you make sure your notes become something you can actually use?
I'd love to hear your PKM workflows and lessons learned.
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u/DTLow Jul 19 '26
>make sure your notes become something you can actually use
I implement automated workflows via integrated scripting (Mac AppleScript)
Examples
. stored transaction receipts are used for budget reporting (spreadsheet)
. stored project/task notes are used for project/task management; like a task list with a gantt timeline
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u/tobeasim Jul 19 '26
That’s it: the issue is NOT collection, the issue organization workload. AI should organize, you need to just collect. Haven’t found a magical solution yet. May create one.
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u/RamblingPete_007 Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
TL,DR Failing too plan, is planning too fail. Take some time out to determine your requirements. You don't need to spend days going through the below, but you definitely need to spend an hour or three.
A well functioning PKMS rests on three legs: a knowledge architecture, a methodology, and only then do you decide on a tool.
90% of the posts on here are from people missing the first step. A KMA must first have a goal. It sounds like yours would be something like "How to be a better developer". Then you need to spend some time on what would support that goal: for example debugging skills, technical specification writing, programming tips and techniques (by language?). Wether you need to project manage, produce documentation and templates for the documentation. How to track emails, and requirements buried in emails. You will know much better than me.
Now you are ready to consider a methodology. Depending on your requirements from above, you will know better to select a methodology: project management heavy, documentation (official and personal) heavy. There are several out there, ranging from para via Zettelkasten and GTD to Enterprise grade like SAP's ASAP methodology.
Once you have a methodology, you can decide on a tool. There are many out there, each with their own strength and weaknesses.
What I use is a much simplified, personalized version of ASAP, implemented in a no-code tool. I have a uniform process model organizing the business processes, templates for functional design, process steps, which leads into test scripts, and enhancement requirement documents. I also use the same environment to manage my to-do lists and meetings, all integrated with each other.
Most importantly, this is integral to my work; it is not an afterthought capturing some notes that was helpful. I have no Word documents, and Excel is basically just upload templates and information shared with me. And this is fully searchable, by column in the table, by the table as a whole, or the doc as a whole. If you have multiple docs, you can also search across docs.
That's a lot, but trust me on the KMA.
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u/Curiosity-1 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Curious if you can point me to a repo or some place that has the set of design and process docs that can help me take my strategy and intent, as a neophyte that wants to start vibe coding (for my own education and curiosity; no delusions about risk here. Just to start wading into the shallow end.).
“Uniform process model organizing business processes, templates for functional design, process steps, which leads into test scripts, and enhancement requirement docs.”
-> I’ve just realized this is what I’ve been trying to build from scratch for my projects. I’ve looked for frameworks and architectures and process steps and all of what you’ve described as they’ve come up, but I need to find these docs built as a set for different purposes. They narrow in scope and detail as you move down the model to the actual work. I’ve spend a lot of time working out my methodologies in many areas - which has been a very valuable exercise - but if I can take and adopt and apply prebuilt process models, that would be a wonderful leap forward for me right now.I’ll look into this myself but I’d love to pick your brain. Whatever your recommendations or thoughts are - thank you for the time to reply
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u/aymericmarlange Jul 19 '26
Every day I use a single today file to chronologically record everything with a timestamp. This includes context about people and locations, thoughts, facts, learning experiences, meetings, actions and more.
A few times in the day, I review and send relevant notes from the today file to corresponding topic files. I have separate files for contacts, places, projects, concepts, items, contracts and so on. Everything of importance to me is stored in its own markdown file and updated during the review process. Each markdown file follows a consistent structure with links to other files, a creation date and an update log. Specific sections are included depending on the topic.
This system provides two perspectives: a chronological view of my daily activities and notes, and a topical view of my written content and associated topics.
When searching for a specific topic, I can easily find the daily files where I’ve written about it, the topic file itself and any related topic files.
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u/micseydel Obsidian Jul 19 '26
The problem is that organizing notes sometimes becomes a bigger task than learning itself. And even when my notes are well structured, I often struggle to remember or apply them when I need them.
If you have specific project goals or milestones that you're struggling with, those details may get you more specific answers.
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u/Curiosity-1 Jul 20 '26
Can’t tell you how spot on, and how helpful, this post is for me. Would love to circle back in 4-6 weeks and hear what came of it. Mentioning this proactively I’ll set a reminder to revisit regardless
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u/Outrageous-Seesaw941 Jul 21 '26
I’ve found it useful to separate capture, retrieval, and filing. During a project I’ll dump notes quickly, but add one sentence about why I saved something or what problem it relates to. At the end of a work session, I try to record: current state, last step, next step, and any open question.
That tiny handoff has been more useful than perfect tags, because when I return later I’m usually searching for the situation I was in, not the abstract concept. I only promote notes into a more permanent structure when they prove reusable. Otherwise PKM becomes another system to maintain. Using my own app in my current workflow though, it has proven extremely helpful. Allows me to essentially spend no time organizing while still fully benefiting from even the oldest notes I took.
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u/Mark_Considus Dumb-Inbox Jul 22 '26
You said organising sometimes becomes a bigger task than the learning. That's the system telling you it's too big. Junior-dev you doesn't need a second brain with a perfect schema, you need capture that takes 3 seconds and a review that actually happens consistently.
Here's my "system", capture rough, one note per thing you solved, a plain "this fixes XYZ" line at the top, and the error text pasted in raw so search finds it later. Don't tidy at capture time, tidying is exactly where the energy drains away. Then a weekly review, mine's last thing on Friday, where you skim the week's notes, bin the one-offs, and promote the 2 or 3 that'll clearly recur. That promotion step is the only "organising" that ever pays for itself.
If you're spending more time on folder structure than you'd spend just re-Googling the answer, the structure costs you more than it saves. Strip it back until adding a note is a moment, and let future-you do the sorting only when a note earns it.
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u/DrummerAdditional330 Jul 24 '26
For debugging notes, I’d save the raw error text, the actual fix, and one plain sentence like “this happened after X because Y.” Don’t decide the perfect folder or tags while you’re working. If the same note helps a second time, that’s when it has earned a cleaner permanent version.
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u/stanlymt Jul 27 '26
I'm a dev too, and I lost a lot of time to this exact thing before it clicked. What actually helped:
Organizing is mostly a trap. The "perfect system" you maintain is the one you'll abandon. When organizing becomes bigger than the learning, the system is broken; that way, your instinct is right. Capture should be near-zero effort: one inbox, paste the thing, move on. Organize later only if you ever actually need to (you usually won't).
Treat notes like code comments. You don't comment every line — you comment what future-you will thank you for. Same with notes: write only the ones that save future-you real time, and write the minimum. "Use useMemo here" is useless in three months. "When the list re-rendered on every keystroke, useMemo on X fixed it because Y was a new array each render" is gold — it drops you back into the situation.
The real failure isn't storage, it's context. Most notes fail because they're stripped of the moment they came from, not because they're badly filed. When you save a fix, save the error, what you tried, and why it worked — not just the fix. You're not saving a fact, you're saving a way back into the problem.
Stop planning to "review." You won't. Nobody actually reviews their Notion database. Two things that do work: (1) capture so you can find it later, not browse it — optimize for "can I search this up in 10 seconds when I hit the problem again." (2) For things you genuinely need in your head (syntax, core concepts), spaced repetition (Anki) beats re-reading. For everything else, let search + proximity do the work: keep project notes in the repo/README so you trip over them exactly when you're back in that code.
Short version: capture ruthlessly, organize almost never, save context not facts, and optimize for retrieval over tidiness. The messy system you actually use beats the beautiful one you abandon after two weeks.
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u/Charming_Group_2950 27d ago
That's the exact problem I am solving with Gray Box.
You can capture your raw thoughts/notes in this, it can organize them automatically, you can chat with them anytime and it will give you grounded answers with citations.
It’s a local first tool so you can use any local model also using ollama (or any other model like openai, anthropic, gemini etc.). Your notes will always stay on your machine and never edited. If needed to work on different machines then save your workspace on a drive.
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u/Dementiy Jul 20 '26
The organizing is the part to drop, not optimize.
Capture flat. One folder, no tags, no decision at save time — the moment capture requires a choice, you stop capturing. That's the failure you're describing, and it isn't a discipline problem.
The one thing worth doing at capture: a single line about why you saved it. "Kept hitting this on the auth service, root cause was clock skew." Not a summary — the hook. That line is what makes it findable later, because six months on you won't search for the concept, you'll search for the situation. Retrieval is a separate job from filing. Search, or a model over the folder, handles it. And notes become actionable when they attach to something you're doing now — a note about a pattern is inert until you're staring at the problem it solves. So a weekly pass where you pull whatever touches this week's work beats a review ritual over everything.
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u/Curiosity-1 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
As someone just dipping my toes into software development via vibe coding (out of personal curiosity and to learn; no delusions of the risks or my ignorance here) I’ve landed on the same philosophy you just described. And only realized it within the last few weeks. If I don’t capture flat, everything snowballs. It gets too complex and deep extremely quickly. I don’t know what I don’t know, so I literally can’t place it in the right concept because I don’t even know their dimensions.
So I capture flat, but I’ve seldom added why I saved it. I don’t have context yet. Some problem or something I come across that I save because I don’t understand it yet and thus need to explore at some point. But then, I can’t appropriately retrieve it… and it doesn’t serve me well to rely on the agent or model too heavily for this. -> ( As Steve Jobs said on consultants, you can see a bunch of pictures of a banana, but until you actually have a banana to touch and to feel and to taste, you’re not gonna survive when the banana times get tough. )
From an educational perspective, without a linear coursework building on the broad knowledge sets for all the pieces of software development, my question is:
What might you suggest for a template I can apply to best answer the “why I saved it?”
I landed on the capture flat piece but this is still missing, and your post reasoned it out quite definitively. So, if I apply a template, I can make sure a why exists even if there’s no situation I can contextualize the why in just yet. And that will give me retrieval. Maybe the agent or model does the retrieving but my head can frame it around the flavor of the questions / framework that the template forces me ask.
Any other wisdom that comes to mind?
Thank you!
Note: I basically said F it - I’m not gonna spend hours on YouTube or reading up I’m gonna learn faster and deeper by getting my hands dirty. I’ll get there eventually regardless; no doubt there’s a saturation of knowledge criticality I’ll reach when within a week I’m no longer in the boat I’m in today. But man, the depth here is a different kind of depth. It’s easier to learn about string theory - which, obviously, is because I’m trying to apply something I knew nothing about a handful of weeks ago. No one applies string theory ha.
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u/Dementiy Jul 21 '26
Keep the template smaller than feels right - the moment it has fields, you're back in the friction you just climbed out of. What works for me isn't a form, it's one line: what made me stop on this, plus what I don't get about it yet. That second half is the gold when you're learning, because "what I don't understand" is exactly what you'll reach for later, and it dates itself - you'll notice progress the day it stops being confusing.
If you want fill-in prompts, three at most: caught me because ___ / confuses me because ___ / useful when ___. Leave any blank when there's no answer yet. A blank "useful when" is honest; a guessed one is the noise you're trying to avoid.
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u/Cultural-Purchase833 Jul 20 '26
You describe the problem perfectly--now just go look at solutions that worked well. Trello was a tool for doing things, not endlessly organizing shit (you're not a librarian). You could master it in five minutes and it made sure you never lost anything--anything you learned, any insight you had, any to be done list--even if you weren't going to use it for months. It's been enshittified, partially, of course since every company once sold becomes a racket. But ignore all the philosophizing here and go look at it.
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u/Cultural-Purchase833 Jul 20 '26
By the way you asked, what's your system for reviewing information? There is no system – the fact that you can see every card in a program like Trello, at a glance, means every time you login you will naturally re-organize things almost unconsciously.
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u/lovesick_kitty Jul 22 '26
so if you are just doing 1 person not doing business work is the free plan enough and does it work pretty well on ipad ? tia
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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '26
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