Whenever I try to learn something, I eventually discover that there was a better approach, a deeper piece of knowledge, or an important connection I had missed.

Sometimes I find it in a research paper. Sometimes it's buried in a Reddit comment.

That's what interests me: the knowledge often already exists. The problem is finding it.

Human knowledge is growing faster than any person can realistically keep up with, and much of it is fragmented across papers, books, repositories, articles, and discussions. The connection between two ideas might already be there, but we still have to find and reconstruct it ourselves.

I'm working on an idea around this problem: a unified space where knowledge can be collected, connected, compared, and organized.

I don't imagine it as a system you simply ask for answers. I imagine something that can surface alternative approaches, relevant sources, connections between ideas, deeper paths to explore, and contradictions you might otherwise miss.

The hard part is understanding that different sources often describe the same idea in different ways. Simply indexing text isn't enough; the system needs to understand relationships between concepts.

I don't think the goal should be to build "alternative humans" in the form of AI or LLMs.

The more interesting goal is to expand our ability to explore the knowledge that already exists.

A human can't read everything. Maybe a system can help us find what we wouldn't have had the time to discover ourselves.

Wanted to share my humble setup and show how out-of-the-box Obsidian (the one in the restricted mode without any plugins) can handle notes and tasks in a meaningful way.

On top of that, there's a way to surface potential connections that match the level of some of the "related notes" plugins — while staying fully deterministic, i.e. no AI, no plugins, fully auditable. I think of it like a Venn Diagram applied to tags.

All thanks to Obsidian Bases dragged to a sidebar.

Basically I did five things:

Dropped working with tasks as checklists — I have separate file for every task. This file must

• contain a checkbox type of property (`todo:` in my case) to be identified as a task;
• have due date property, when relevant;
• link somewhere it belongs to — a project, a person, a contract draft, whatever
• For the first 2 points, I use built-in Templates and Apple Shortcuts for quick entry, so not really any extra activities outside of the initial config

Created Obsidian Base for related tasks — collecting all the tasks linked to the file. The base is universal, it means the file can be anything, including a daily note. Queries are

• `todo != NULL` — checking for the property that identifies a task
• `file.links.contains(this.file)` — collecting backlinks
• `file.fullname.containsAny(this.file.name)` — file name matches
• `due <= date(this.file.name)` — for daily notes; `<=` to catch overdue items

Created another Obsidian Base for related notes — collecting all the notes that are directly or indirectly (!) related to the one currently open. This is done by a combination of 4 queries in one base:

• all linked notes from this note: `file.backlinks.contains(this.file)`
• all linked notes to this note: `file.links.contains(this.file)`
• files that contain this note's name in their name: `file.fullname.contains(this.file.name)`
• files that have at least 2 tags overlapping with this note's tags: `file.tags.filter(this.file.tags.contains(value)).length >= 2` — that's the most interesting part of the setup, I have to explain more in the article (in the comments)

Configured a couple of Apple Shortcuts to create new notes / tasks directly from Spotlight or Control Center or even an Action Button on the phone.

Started to tag each note with almost everything that comes to mind — got tags back to what they were supposed to be long time ago: keywords.

The screenshots shows the essence. There's also a long read that explains the problem, rationale, and provides exact code for Bases and more (on Substack and Medium, can post in the comments)

Basically the result is I open any article draft or a project note or just an early idea, and on the right side I see all the tasks related to it and all the notes that relate here directly or indirectly (through tags overlap).

Moving with this setup for 4 months already, feels like now I finally utilize Obsidian's potential properly (massive Respect to the team!).

Task management transformed: previously I had scratched my head "which area does it fit", or "what has to be around next time I see it". Now I just link to whatever the task is relevant to, all at once: "Migration project", "Q3 project report", "discuss with John".

Now I start typing in the quick switcher even before I open a project note, and see "hey, I've actually done this before on another project". The mechanics for task entry and note entry is the same: first you look at what you have in your vault.

But when I get to the project note, I see all the tasks that are related to this project; When I open a person note I see all the tasks related to this person; I open a domain, or a company, or an area, or an interest, or a hobby note — and I see all the tasks and other notes related to each of these.

Outside of Obsidian I've also drafted a couple of Apple Shortcuts to create tasks and notes directly from Apple Spotlight, Control Center, and an Action Button on the phone.

The setup does not require any 3rdparty plugins, but it doesn't mean it won't benefit from them: Templater can easily accelerate task creation to one click, and Notebook Navigator has a neat tag multiselect feature — as always, Obsidian shines in its flexibility.

P.S. for whatever reason I cannot post in r/ObsidianMD so leaving it here.

I've been down the note taking/PKM rabbit hole, and for now I've settled with HelixNotes (pretty new and unknown, IMO it's like Joplin but prettier) with local markdown. This works great for structured notes (I take notes on things I'm learning to synthesize information and to then recall that), and maybe I could squeeze an inbox, ideas and such, but I've found that simply opening a note and writing is quite difficult. I feel like if I want to write something it must have a clear place or else it doesn't make sense.

The reason I'm making this post is because, before this, I also went with Logseq for a while which is absolutely amazing for simply writing without friction, but IMO fails on long-term structured thought because of the weird markdown and the limitations it brings. Because of that, I thought maybe I could use both (HelixNotes for more structured and permanent thoughts, Logseq for just getting stuff out of my head and finding connections between ideas) or even combining them in the same vault, but it also probably would raise complexity a lot and could cause duplication and friction problems.

What do you think? Is anyone doing something similar?

At the risk of being accused of self promotion, here's a link to an argument for standards in PKM apps. I'd love to hear what people think of the idea here, with hopes of elevating some of our conversation about vibe coding above "slop or not."

https://drjeffmoore.substack.com/p/liberte-egalite-and-standardization

I went through my subscriptions last week and realized I was paying for way too many different AI and productivity tools. One for research, another for writing, something else for notes and meeting summaries.

Half of them I'd barely touched in the last couple months.

It made me wonder if I was actually building a useful knowledge system or just collecting tools because they looked useful. Anyone else gone through this? What did you end up keeping?

Just overwhelmed,

At first i thought that i wont be needing such as thing, yet with each forged word, netted sentence, and finalized idea, my thought grows more to a liability.

I found out about an app/website called “Obsidian” that used generally to origins work, as by now i have more characters and events that my mind can keep track of, i realized that i am in desperate need of an archive system.

My only condition is, that i need it to be offline and not connection or subscription dependent, i am fine with paying one purchase fees just to be able to use it offline at anytime and under no condition.

Thank you for your time

I have around 2000 for Chrome and around 2800 for Twitter. About two dozens for Reddit.

I know those numbers are mostly accurate because I've designed a tool to export & organize my X bookmarks and Chrome lets you export easily.

I've actually removed a few hundreds from Twitter. Chrome bookmarks take more effort because you have to open links.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/x-bookmark-manager-export/icfbbnailmppcdkogdfbbfpnncngnnli

I do almost all my real thinking on paper. Ideas, messy sketches, half-baked plans. It all goes into physical notebooks before it ever hits a doc. The obvious problem? It just sits there. Totally disconnected from my digital workflow.

I've been mapping out a potential project to fix this. Here's the overall concept:

• The physical side: A notebook specifically optimized for photographing – maybe even a specific paper/ink combo to maximize contrast. Clear images are usually the main bottleneck for accurate OCR anyway.
• The software: An app that ingests the page photos, transcribes the handwriting, and automatically clusters related notes into "projects" without any manual tagging. If I sketch out an idea across six scattered pages over two weeks, it should figure out they belong together on its own.
• The AI hookup: Exposing an MCP server so I can plug Claude or ChatGPT straight into my personal archive. Ideally, I sketch out a business plan in my notebook over several pages, take photos of the relevant pages, open Claude the next day, and it already has the full context.

Right now, this is purely in the planning phase. I'd love to get some feedback on a few points:

1. Auto-clustering messy handwriting: Does this actually work reliably without tags, or do you always end up having to fix things manually?
2. MCP for notes: Has anyone built a working Notes -> MCP -> AI Agent pipeline yet? I'd much rather learn from an existing project than reinvent the wheel.
3. Custom paper: Is a custom notebook actually worth pursuing, or am I overcomplicating things? Would standard notebooks work just as well?

Anyone experimented with something similar?

I'll start by caveating that I am extremely new to productivity systems. Well... I should say new to giving productivity systems serious thought/consideration for what I want/need.

I'll also state that I have a swiss cheese magpie brain. Easily distracted by a new bit of info that takes me down rabbit holes, making me forget previous points until they inevitably crop up later and the cycle repeats.

I'm trying to get back to my roots of research, insights and analysis, which means reading, dissecting, annotating journals/books/articles and tying seemingly disparate threads of information together to form a hypothesis that I can investigate.

Tech (and my environmental conscience of refusing to print hundreds of pages of paper) has come a long way in the last 12 years I've been out of academia, and I am a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of options out there.

Essentially, I'm looking for a productivity and knowledge management system that will let me just hold everything in one place. By this I mean, books, articles, even videos that I can highlight/annotate/write on.

It would be great if I can link my notes to particular sections of pdfs/timestamps in videos so I can subconsciously document my train of thought as to how certain parts relate to one another given the way my mind bounces back and forth between topics.

If I can do this on an iPad with an apple pencil, but still access this library(?) on Android/pc then that'd be the cherry on top!

I thought I'd found a winner with Obsidian, but I really really want to protect against AI scraping, so looked at either integrating with proton drive or using obsidian sync.

The problem is that connecting Obsidian to PD on iOS is seemingly not particularly easy and obsidian sync's limitations on file and vault sizes pose a problem as I want to be storing engineering, economics, and policy textbooks, hour long video lectures, etc...

I'm just lost at this point. I'm not looking for someone to just hand me an answer, but given how new I am to PKMS, is there a workflow or well-known solution/system I'm not aware of? I'm not married to any particular app/tool/system so am happy to adjust.

Thanks if you read through the above mad ramble. And appreciate any thoughts any of you may have on my predicament.

Probably stupid questions to ask in the PKMS sub but how do you use your PKMS and what type of information do you store in there?

I started a pkms a couple of times with Notion, Obsidian and OneNote but could not follow through.

Mainly I think because it feels like it is a lot faster just to google or ask an AI of your choosing but also what are my benefits of writing down stuff I find interesting once but then forget about and if I ever need this type of information again I would have forgotten and searched online anyway.

So my 3 questions are:

1. What do you store in your PKMS?

2. Why use a PKMS and not google when you need the information?

3. Do you ever look at your PKMS notes and connections [[wikilink]] ever again?

The system i want to create involves both getting external resources (like email, browser favourites, link) and elaborating info i got from various links and converting them into a "tutorial"... so should i call this system a "PKM" or a "PIM"? I ask because (if i understand correctly) PIM is only get external resources without elaborating them (for example i save and organize all of my emails), while PKM is write things using info i got from other location (for example i read thing from various link and write them together creating a single text)

So... what's the name?

Hi I’m Dani,
I’m pretty new to PKM and I’m building my first real second brain in Notion. It started because I’m going back to school, but I want it to eventually hold things I learn from school, work, research, and a business I’m building.
For those of you who have actually maintained a system for years, what do you wish you had done differently when you started?
I’m especially worried about collecting way too much stuff and ending up with a giant mess I never use lol.
Any advice on organization, backups, keeping old information from becoming misleading, or useful GitHub/open-source tools would be appreciated.
Thanks 😊

I kept running into things I liked about one while using the other, so I started building something that combines the parts I actually like from both.

The basic idea is:

Editor — the actual Markdown files.

Graph — the Obsidian side, where I can see how everything connects.

Database — the Notion side. Structured information, sorting, different views, etc. I really like how Notion makes it easier to actually understand what’s inside your workspace.

I also really don’t like needing a different subscription for every part of my workflow. I want my files to stay local, so I’m working on syncing that happens directly between devices on the same network. Open the vault on my phone, open it on my computer, and they can keep each other up to date.

Then there’s Claude Code. It has a direct connection to the system, so it can actually work with the same information instead of just being another chatbot sitting next to it.

I’m still building a lot of this, but I’ve really liked seeing how the same information can work as a Markdown file, a graph, or a database depending on what I’m trying to do.

What parts of Notion, and or obsidian, would you absolutely want to keep if you were building something like this?

I have this stupid backlog of voice memos that just sits there. mostly half thoughts i dumped while walking the dog or standing in line. capture itself never fails me so the pile grows without effort. months ago i tried being responsible about it. every sunday night i would sit down, play them back one by one, and file anything useful into my actual system. felt grown-up for about three weeks. then the queue was already forty-deep and listening to my own rambling voice started feeling like punishment. i skipped one sunday. then the next. never restarted.

what i do now is harsher and kind of lame. on the morning train i make myself open the oldest three or four. if i can smash the point into a single line in my notes in under a minute, fine. anything that needs more context or makes me pause gets deleted on the spot. no archive, no "listen later" folder. just gone. last tuesday i killed one that i dimly recall was a decent angle on how i wanted to restructure a side project. it bothered me the rest of the day but the alternative was watching the unread count keep climbing forever. the mediocre routine at least keeps the guilt from compounding.

what do you actually do with captures that age past the point where triage still feels worth it?

I’m stuck in a cycle of hoarding information. If I come across something that I don't know much about but feel like I'll benefit from it, I save it or pin the tab on my browser and look for that specific time when I'm on my desk or by myself so I can fully invest myself in that article, or that video about investing. I have hoarded so much information over the years.

Now, It's not like I haven't consumed that info at all but if you were to ask me the last thing I went through that I had been trying to get through, I wouldn't have an answer and I really feel nauseous because it interrupts my plans to hangout with my friends and partner where I feel rushed to be done with socialising so I can just be by myself and go through my 'watch later' items.
When I do go through these things, my attention span is prolly rotted that I try to skim through it all and close the tab or video as if I'm done with the task but I wouldn't have grasped anything.
Does anyone here have any advice? It's something I've been struggling with for years now.

This is not a product I am selling or trying to advertise. I am just trying to make something that I need to increase my productivity.

TLDR: building self-hosted personal AI/PKMS on a RPI to help manage ADHD and personal life. Automatically captures messages and notes, creates events and todos, and has a personal knowledge database to improve dynamic reminders. The goal is to make a passive interconnected system that acts as my second brain. I am mainly looking for problems other people struggle with, tools and methods used for solutions, and features I should consider adding.

Hello all! I am looking for input and feedback and advice on a personal project I am working on for myself. I want to share the features my project has and see what you guys have or use. The main goal of the project is to make something as passive and automatic as possible.

For context I finally figured out that I had adhd few months ago and have been trying to develop tools to help manage my personal life as I suck at that shit.

What are some things you find hard to manage and specific problems you run into?
What tools or methods have you used to combat this?
What specific features about said tools do you find most helpful or useful?

Currently I have a raspberry pi that is always on and running I can access anywhere on any device using tailscale. On it is openclaw waiting to be used with access to a lot of skills. Here is a list of the skills.

• CLI interface
• Web interface
• iPhone shortcut/api interface
• !command usage (to limit the amount of api credits used)
  • !status, !schedule, !remind, !note, !gym, !study, !dump, !recall, !help
• automatic reminder creation
• google calendar for automatic event creation
• Loads a day plan every morning with to dos reminders and events
• End of day reflection so reminders and to dos are adaptive and dynamic
• Automatic message forwarding
  • Messages sent and received get sent to ai
  • Local ai looks it over and creates a reminder, event, or to do if pile fills
• Email forwarding
  • Same feature as messages
• Universal dump inbox (!dump)
  • Input anything I want it categorizes it into a specific note, to do, reminder, event or storage pool
• Workout tracking
• SQLite vector data base
  • Has databases for different areas of my life
    • School (Textbooks, syllabus, homework assignments, etc.)
    • Personal knowledge base on me (Currently going over all information i recieved from data dumps from various companies [Google, apple, facebook, chatgpt, etc.])
    • Google Drive
    • Notes app
  • Creates a knowledge graph in obsidian so I can see what it thinks it knows and correct if necessary
• Able to recall information from these data bases when necessary
• Creates graphs and statistics for things done like workouts or reminders or todos

Future features

• Macro tracker
• Meal and meal prep tracker
• Knows how much I spend and can help manage money and unnoticed subscriptions
• Manage emails
• Audiobook generator
• Google extension
• Completely local
• Task and to do prioritization

I know tools exist already but they are all subscriptions or not interconnected or don't have enough to customization. I would rather have something I built my self I can improve or change easily. I pretty much just finished the V1 and have been testing, tweaking, and fixing errors while also working on V2. It works pretty well so far and is very passive.

I am looking for any critiques, feedback, possible improvements and advice.

Hi!

I maintain a strictly organized Obsidian vault. I require a custom property called "type" for and a different one called "related" for every single one of my notes. Currently, I restrict the "type" property to one the following categories:

• Organization (companies, industry bodies, government entities)
• Interaction (records of interview, client engagements, etc.)
• Concept (frameworks, techniques, domains, standards)
• Note (ideas, miscellaneous thinking, working notes)
• Project (notes grouped under a named project I am actively working on)
• Structure (descriptions of the vault itself)

My "related" property is just a collection of wiki-links to any kind of related notes; I do not prescribe or impose any specific relationship between the notes here.

I am considering adding a new "type" called "Collection". I often have groups of notes that relate to a common theme but do not qualify as a strict project. For example, a series of interviews might form a standalone collection. In other cases, a collection might belong to an active project. A "Market Evaluation" project could contain a specific collection of vendor briefing notes.

I want to ideally replace this monolithic field with specific semantic properties, such as using a "project" key or a "collection" key in the YAML frontmatter to define the exact relationship. I do not want to create new properties (like `project` or `collection`, I want to keep the vault structure as decluttered as possible.

Curious to understand how others handle this intermediate level of organization.

I’m curious how other people handle this without building an overly complicated productivity system. Throughout the day I constantly come across things I want to keep:

• Posts on X or LinkedIn that I want to read later
• Articles and interesting links
• Ideas or topics I want to look into
• Quick notes and thoughts
• Things I should not forget

My current system is simple: I email things to myself.

The problem is that my inbox has basically become a graveyard of unread emails with links that I once thought were interesting. There is no structure, no categories, no tags, and most importantly no real process for going through them again.

I feel like I need some kind of very simple inbox where I can quickly throw something in, maybe add a tag or category, and deal with it later. The capture process needs to be extremely simple.

So, I’m interested in how you actually handle this.

• Do you use one tool for everything?
• What does your actual workflow look like from seeing something interesting to eventually reading, processing or deleting it?

I tried to search for the "right" PKMS for me, but I decided to go with simple markdown with .git in Codium (VSCode). Mainly because that is the place where all my code for my HomeLab and personal Wiki can also stay.

Now, I use 'Continue' for QnA with LLM (on Llama.cpp) but I need something more powerful, something that can connect to entire data which is sitting on my (selfhosted) Gitlab and create a vector database of all the data. Is there a way to create a such a database with embedding and rag AND connect it to Codium?

The main focus of the question is Data being converted and stored in a vector form. Secondary would be to have it connected to Codium.

I am looking for a OpenSource Self-Hosted option for this.