On personal knowledge management systems
Are you supposed to use the tool you're being told you should be using? Are you comfortable not using that tool? Where does your discomfort come from?
My brother wrote a post about him using Obsidian / Notion for organising his own life, and pretty much concluded that it doesn’t work for him, because he has no knowledge to manage.
Which is true. But it’s also ambiguous, because does he not have knowledge? Or does he have knowledge, it’s just not worth managing?
This brought up an interesting conversation between us, where my point was that everyone has knowledge that could fill an entire PKMS (personal knowledge management system), some people just won’t do it, because their internal classification of the data means that it’s not important enough to jot down and link to it in Obsidian or wherever.
His point was mostly the same, with the added argument that if you’re fighting the tool trying to bend it into a way that it would make sense for you, rather than using it as a tool so it gets out of your way while enabling you to do awesome stuff, then you probably should pull the plug and not do the thing. In this case the issue wasn’t with Obsidian, or Notion specifically, but with PKMSs in general. Which is fair.
There’s also a further point that, in the technosphere at least, there’s this push of “all the cool kids are using THING, and if you’re not using THING, then are you even really part of our group?” Most of the time this is not spelled out explicitly, using these words – unless it’s vim for some reason, – but the end result is the same: people feel like they have to use certain software, they have to have the latest, bestest keyboard, they have to learn stenography, they have to be able to use a planck keyboard, they have to have 3 external monitors, they have to have a mirrorless camera to be used as a fancy webcam.
You don’t. Use whatever gets the job done. It might not even be React. It might not even be Tailwind. And bear with me on this, but:
It might not even be AI!
I don’t have much insight into other industries, but I wonder what unspoken expectations or peer pressures there are. Woodworking probably has one about using Festool branded powertools.
A fun challenge you can do is to ask yourself all of these assumptions, and figure out why you think you have to have them. Some of those answers are going to be valid. Others? Not so much.
Until next time!