I don't really use any PKM tools outside of an instance of Kanboard and OpenProject for tracking the stuff I want to do in the future, but because of my mTLS setup and limited hardware in my homelab, using them ends up feeling slow and sluggish (Kanboard is okay except for mTLS, whereas OpenProject is just unbearably slow all the time).

I did consider having a personal Wiki a while back where I'd jot down the solutions to various problems that I encounter over the years, but instead opted for just writing the occasional blog post on my blog, which also ends up feeling even higher friction, because I still need what I write to have some sort of a structure and the expectation is that it will mostly make sense to a reader that stumbles upon it, not just me.

Maybe that was a mistake. It would actually be immensely cool to be able to reference solutions to a particular problem that I had 2 years ago, once I encounter it again but what I did back then has slipped my mind. Only as long as there is really good search (maybe even semantic search and automatic tagging) and it's easy to use. If nothing else, I can easily imagine that being another side project to work on, for the fun of it, a software package that I customize to my own needs and control.

> But what got me sober, what got me through the first one, two, three hard years - none of it was in those notes.

> It hit me: what got me here won’t get me where I need to be next.

Where was it, or, what was it that did?

I believe the author when they went through their system of notes and effectively found nothing that contributed to the most important parts of themselves, but I was also sort of waiting for the alternative answer that I thought was supposed to be coming...

I interpret this as humanity's struggle to get back to its habitat, real world and fall back to keep pace with much slower biological evolution. Tools - all the way from stone tools used for hunting, to the AI assistants - are compensation for the desired extra pace in evolution. We can't grow horns over night and grow large in size to rule the jungle, so we got our hunting tools.

But then we let the tools and thought dictate the biological human. Mind has always been a slave of the body, serving just enough intelligence as commanded by the body. But then mind grew to be the master, commanding the body and demanding faster evolution. When body could not deliver to the demands, mind went ahead and created artificial extensions to the body using tools, technologies and science. Mind no longer responds to the body signals leading to suppressed senses, unmet bodily needs, lack of intimacy with the ongoings of the body and total lack of basic understanding of purpose and function of body.

My “second brain” is almost entirely technical information and learnings. I can see why someone who uses it more like a fancy personal journal, for mental reflection and creative work, would delete it - but I would be devastated if I lost my notes, because they are key to my ability to quickly navigate technology and systems.

I find it interesting, that some (many? most?) people develop anxiety about the stash of never-read but captured content in their note-taking apps.

I would think I am normally this guy. The one, who gets anxious over exactly this kind of matter. However, the (almost-)never-read captured content induces two substantially different emotions in me:

* safety

* joy

Safety, because I know the content is there, in case i ever want to search for it (I do daily worklog, I capture web pages for later reads, I also draft my own blog posts / etc before posting it on intranet, and so on).

And joy! Sometimes, accidentally I find a snippet, a piece of knowledge, something I quickly jotted down during a guided tour 4 years ago somewhere in the Andes. I know that at that time I thought it's so, so super important to research the topic later. Even with zero connectivity, probably freezing and bothered by the wind, I went through the trouble of grabbing my phone and taking the misspelled note. Looking at this kind of notes brings back memories. A joyful experience.

The main problem of notes is that most tools are bad, Emacs/org-mode outshine the others, still having it's own hiccups (for instance a very limited transclusion support so far with org-transclusion and delve at the best).

Nevertheless for me it's my main digital life, I have all in notes (org-mode) and the result is another level of computer help in my physical life!

I understand the sentiment, but disagree with the solution. PKMs can be overwhelming if someone nerdy enough to use one ends up using it ineffectively.

The way I do it that I find works well is to have the following:

1. each day, have a journal page for a given day. Content only happens in the journal pages

2. have a series of topics that you tag. This system is up to you, but I usually find something with a hierarchy that is <=3 levels deep is best, e.g. I have "Job Search/2025/Company"

3. for each of the relevant tag pages, have those have some sort of "query" that will pull in all relevant tasks from all the journal pages, sort them by priority / state / deadline so you can see this all in one place (e.g. "What's the next step I have to do for my Nvidia application?" -> easy to answer with this system). Depending on your PKM, the hierarchy enables you to easily answer that question at a higher level, e.g. "What's the next steps I have to do for ALL of my applications?".

In each journal page, you can also write down a "task backlog" so minor tasks that you remember don't take up headspace while you intend to work on other major tasks (e.g. write down "get back to Joel about the Nvidia referral").

Regarding a point other folks have made: treat the journal and these tags as more of a "stream" of things you're doing in your life, instead of a collection of every-expanding obligations or a mausoleum of unexplored ambition.

I built this in Logseq, which seems to be the only one that has an advanced-enough query language to do this in that is possible to do local-only (no mandatory cloud data) in text files. If anyone knows how to build such a system in a different application, I'd be happy to learn! Logseq has been stale for a year or 2 as the authors are working on a much needed near-total rewrite which I'm not sure is ever going to arrive at this point.

>It hit me: what got me here won’t get me where I need to be next.

This resonates a lot. I always have this feeling when I am browsing old notes.

I regularly create a new folder with current date and work in it until it gets overbloated and then create a new one. Past ones remain until they are still relevant. If something is generally (evergreen) relevant, it gets placed in a text "longnotes.md" where they can also be searched and also found roughly by its date. Do whatever works for you.

I still use nvAlt (formerly Notational Velocity) for note taking. It is synced to a Dropbox folder. I can use the native Dropbox app to search, view, and edit the files. What I really like is the speed of note taking and searching in the nvAlt app. All my notes have a title in a loose format such as "project_name keyword ... keyword". It takes a second to find the note I need. Therefore, nvAlt serves as a bookmark manager as well. Obsidian feels clunky and slow, and I couldn't get it to switch to the .txt file extension (which is possible to edit via Dropbox on an iPhone).