This general “knowledge management” question is like a “time management” one — usually meaningless and sometimes a form of escapism.

When you don’t have any particular emotionally charged goal(s) in mind — no time/knowledge management technique would really make a difference.

But some of them might give you a good illusion of something important going on.

And as soon as you have specific important goal in mind (like preparing to specific exam, getting lawyer license etc.) — almost any approach you feel comfortable with will do the job.

You usually dont need to review possible options in advance, the goal itself gives you hints and guides (if preparing for exam means remembering a lot of scattered facts - you’d probably end up with some anki cards on your own etc).

Obsidian was the mind opener for me. Simple to use. Backuped on Dropbox on my various machines, it is my ubiquitous personal knowledge base. The fact that you can copy/paste HTML from web pages into it makes me rebuild knowledge I get from the internet into my own version. Really really a fundamental tool for me. The Vi of knowledge.

PS: I don't know the other tools (notion, roam,...) PPS: a big downside in Obsidian, in my humble opinion, is publishing that knowledge on the web. Probably a static CMS on top of the .md file generated with Obsidian can do the trick. But it is a tedious step that I never had/wanted to investigate.

I've used personal wikis and knowledge bases for myself and they work okay. vimwiki has been useful for me.

I find that I do some pretty cool stuff and then totally forget how I did it a year or 5 years later, mostly with coding. The open source projects I documented and explained are things I myself google to help me set them up in the future, so a way of codifying my knowledge has been to try to write about it and put that in public.

I set up development environments for myself a lot, so I wrote an article about how I do it https://modfoss.com/creating-my-development-environment.html and then put the code on GitHub as well https://github.com/symkat/modfoss_devel So if I don't do it for a while, I'll have a starting point and me-from-the-past explaining what I did and why.

I've been really happy with Notion (https://www.notion.so). I use standard pages with subcategories for personal notes/knowledge.

I wanted to go deeper for my company, so I bought the Notion system called Bulletproof workspace (https://www.notion.vip/bulletproof/) in December after er doing. ton of research, but found it a bit overkill. In retrospect, I think it was just my newness to Notion that made it seem so.

However, once we reached a certain point where we were overwhelmed and completely unorganized. I finally invested the time to learn how to use Notion and Bulletproof Workspace and it was amazing, now I use it for everything from onboarding, to brainstorming, to-do's, etc. It's quite impressive.

I highly recommend checking them out if you're looking to get organized. The flexibility is what really made it work for me since it works for everything. It's nice just to have 1 tool.

For overall memory, I generally just remember things instead of using all these fancy apps. Sometimes I'll make some notes in Typora (clean .md editor), but more often than not, I'll never revisit the file.

I'm a visual learner, so its really easy for me to recall past snapshots (static, not like a video) from my life, or how certain things looked at a point in time. It's not quite an identical memory, but it's not too far off either. Maps are a breeze, and even complex tunnel systems like the PATH in Toronto are easy to navigate.

For learning, it helps if you just throw yourself into it. Take 5 minutes and try to work at the concept. Usually this will turn into 30-60 minutes. I learned Kubernetes and AWS EKS this way.

For problem solving, I'll make some notes for brainstorming, todo lists, and any questions I have. Then when I go for my daily walk (~15km/2hrs), I reflect on the abstractions again (from memory) and try to refactor what doesn't seem perfect.

I do have a mind palace set up, but I don't really use it.

After trying out various ways, online and offline (including studying Luhmann's famous "Zettelkasten" http://ds.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/viewer/image/ZL1A1001/1/#topDo...), and the one that I stuck with is using plain text files.

One's knowledge is too valuable and important to entrust it to a particular binary format that can soon no longer be read. Plain text is durable, portable, easy to process using UNIX command line tools, it can be full-text indexed with a reasonable overhead. It can be version controlled easier than binary formats or formats with heavy markup.

I often summarize scientific articles, write down new ideas or need to preserve how I did something (run a system, install a tool) for later replay, and plain text is great for that for the most part. Occasionally, I used LaTeX commands e.g. for embedded $ maths $ or #hastags to tie together files by topic for indexing.

Importantly, my workflow is OS independent (I mostly use Linux and occasionally MacOS X/iOS) and editor agnostic (I use Sublime and Emacs).

I would very much like to hear from others how they address their KM needs.

Try Anki, a spaced repetition flashcard software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anki_(software)

It is intended for memorizing things, but the fact that it forces you to divide knowledge into pieces small enough to fit on a flash card also helps to organize it.

And you can have different card stacks in Anki, so there also is categorization of knowledge.

Cf. the "Zettelkasten", a physical flashcard system which is actually intended at organization, not memorization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten

Anki can be used to emulate that digitally.

Plain text. I keep metadata embedded in the content of each file. I keep only one k:v pair per line. e.g

    "topic: D3",   
    "subject: scales",
    "context: Side Project"

Use grep and awk to slice, group, dice and join as and how I want.

Incredibly flexible, a bash-like shell is my only dependency. Works with any search engine that i've tried. Easily replacable parts. Check into git regularly.

Some scripts I use

  ## group by topic. search for lines that start with "topic". print topic and the file name
  grep -i "^topic" *.txt | awk -F ":" '{printf "%-25s%s\n",$3,$1}' | sort

  ## find all files containing the "topic" tag 
  grep -i "^topic" *.txt | awk -F ":" '{printf "%-25s%s\n",$3,$1}' | sort 


  ## find all files NOT containing "topic". useful for cleaning up 
  grep -iL "^topic" *.txt

  ## find first 10 files not containing "topic" and open each in vi sequentially
  for f in $(grep -ilL "^topic" *.txt | head); do vi $f; done