Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end.
A few days ago, someone jokingly asked if Henry Ford had a personal knowledge base in Obsidian... Well, sort of! He had something he called "jot books", where he journaled, kept notes, grocery lists, etc. Not dissimilar to how people use Obsidian. The Henry Ford Museum has fifty of these notebooks: https://www.thehenryford.org/search?Query=%22jot+book%22
How should we quantify the impact of Henry Ford's notebooks? How should we quantify the impact of spreadsheets?
Most people who accomplish anything take notes in some form, because writing is a way of thinking. We love to mythologize the tools and methods of accomplished people because we hope it will let us absorb a bit of their genius. But a good camera doesn't make a good photographer. Taking lots of photos helps.
Should you take notes? Probably. Does it matter what your method is? Probably not. Whatever works for you. Obsidian (or any other form of notetaking) is successful if it disappears and lets you accomplish your work.
I've realized that most of my tendencies to set up elaborate note-taking systems and frameworks have been an attempt to address my anxiety around learning and productivity. I'm constantly in the mode of "learning defensively" - questioning what I'm absorbing into my mental toolkit, how much I retain, and how much I'd be able to conjure if I needed to solve a problem in that domain. In this context, noting down whatever I come across in Obsidian canvases or webs of interlinked notes or making Anki flash cards gives me some comfort about what I'm doing, and of course satisfies the urge of organizing and categorizing things.
But when I relate these activities to learning itself, it becomes difficult to gauge how much of it is necessary. If I don't constantly serialize or test what I'm learning, how do I know I'm learning anything at all? And externalizing so much starts to feel like a burden and gives me less confidence in my own intrinsic ability to just go and do things.
I was going to post an "Ask HN" on this topic to see if other people related to this. If anyone has been in this mindset before and managed to break out of it, I'd be curious to know what helped!
I don't know your specifics, so I'm going to reply with what I've learned about learning:
I found reading a textbook, and typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough. Typically: definitions, quotes, and personal thoughts while reading. Did this for stats/comp sci/etc. Obsidian + markdown worked for that, even without plugins. Being able to text search is useful, which is why I don't hand write.
Anything beyond that you have to be cautious about paralyzing yourself from trying XYZ PKM.
Theres a quote from stephen king that goes somewhere along the lines of "during first draft don't try referencing or fixing grammar because it breaks your train of thought". I think similarly, when learning something, choose the thing thats most out of the way (usually the simplest) that is least likely to break your train of thought.
In terms of tracking how much you're learning, I'd be very very slow and incremental in what tooling/methods you pick. For me, I just trust myself after reading/notetaking a textbook. Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign. Being able to explain what I learned to someone else is a good sign.
> Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign
I agree, but having homeworks in itself is a big advantage! It means you're in a structured learning environment where someone has taken the care to create a learning path and added checkpoints with carefully designed problems designed to refresh + assess what you've absorbed until that point.
When you're learning outside the classroom (for yourself or on the job), there's this sudden loss of all bounds where you now also have to draw a line of what knowledge is reasonable to acquire and what is out of scope. For example, when working independently on personal projects, I sometimes get sucked into reading about the details of protocols, standards, RFCs etc. and have a difficult time deciding when to stop.
One answer is learn just enough to solve the problem at hand at move on, but if you're in a field like eg. security you feel an obligation to do your due diligence when designing something. And of course, with LLMs now it's possible to move past any problem without learning anything at all, so you have to be even more intentional in which things you do decide to learn.
I would add that writing down your reactions to the books and not the book content itself is helpful. If something reminds you of something else then write about that. I mostly throw away all these things as the point is just to write them not to read them back
I'm starting to break out of this mentality by noticing that
1. I excelled at my exams without any strange note taking systems;
2. I remember many details down the road, even things I thought I had forgotten. For example, I needed some Linear Algebra, and I was surprised by how much I recalled after 10 years, so much in fact that in 3 days I was on par with when I passed my exam. It would have been worth it to make an Anki flashcard for every theorem?
3. In the exam I used such method I just needed much more time that when I used my minimalist note taking. So much in fact that I question the efficiency of such methods.
Say what you will about Tim Ferris, but maybe he was onto something when he said only learn the bare minimum to get something done and more than that is a waste (4 hour workweek).
That needs to start all conversations in this area. Not everyone had the same goals.
Second, what is your specific problems?
Again not everyone had the same problems. There are common problems with common solutions (often multiple conflicting solutions that work in isolation but perhaps not for your life), learning what works for others can thus be helpful. Beware, not all problems are big enough to be worth addressing for you.
The important part is find what works for you. Sometimes you don't need to measure what you learned - which seems to be your concern- if it is important and you learned it you will remember when needed. Of not you need to look it up again. It can be liberating to realize that you don't need to measure everything. Sometimes that isn't good enough though, so back to the first two questions.
Well if you write down a snippet of code, and later upi reliaze you need that code a gain but don't remember it but do remember that you must have written a note about it, then writing down the note was useful.
The issue I'm still working on is how do I find such notes when I don't exactly remeber what they were about.
These discussions always conflate the different types of "notes".
Broadly, there are two very different kind of notes. First, there are notes whose purpose is to be easy to find when you need to recall some bit of information. Then, there is note taking in service of learning.
These two are very different in goals and thus very different in terms of optimal strategy.
Also, there is note taking in service of creation, where the end goal is neither recall nor learning, but to create notes to share to other people, often for artistic purposes but potentially also for reference or learning. These are also different from note taking for personal reference or learning.
The reason I love the Personal Library Science space is directly due to its emergence of information features in a personal library against the idiosyncratic processes of resonance and attention in their creators.
The whole discourse around PKM is a problem of the pluralistic framing in modern society that we hide behind individuality while missing the basic points. "Use whatever works for you" is intellectually lazy, and the opposite isn't an authoritarian ontology that people think they are protecting against.
Instead the basics are this: Whatever system you currently have to store/search/synthesize/and share information CAN and SHOULD be introspected to improve itself. Some functions are matters of time and space cost/benefits, other metric functions are qualitative, but can be experimented against and improved greatly with creativity and testing.
>"Use whatever works for you" is intellectually lazy
it isn't in a space that's full of snake oil salesmen trying to peddle you solutions you don't need. The problem with the whole knowledge management thing is that it's full of people obsessed with appearing intellectual and productive while never actually producing anything worth mentioning despite their gazillion knowledge hacks, which was the point of the original article.
Just like any other 'life optimization' cottage industry, stop over intellectualizing, stop inventing problems that don't exist and do something useful instead is perfectly valid, much needed advice
I returned to hand-written notebooks. None of these knowledge management frameworks ever worked for me. Sure my agents have their own semantic memory system but I’m not an agent.
I've taken hand-written, on paper, notes throughout my education, up to high school level.
In university, I've switched to hand-written notes on a tablet device.
At the end of uni, when I started working on my final thesis & Obsidian was becoming popular, I've switched to it and since then, everything I note is organized into markdown files or at least is somehow referenced through pure text.
Having experienced all of these methods. I've found myself regularly searching through my vault and referencing older material. While the notes hand-written on a tablet, made it much easier to sift through vast amounts of material I was ingesting at the time. I find myself unable to re-use these notes in any meaningful way. They still exist, I can access them, but I don't find myself going back to them.
Old paper notebooks? Most of them are destroyed, lost, forgotten to time.
The knowledge management, with easily indexable and searchable contents, has this invaluable perk of being accessible at a moments notice. Keeping potential of being relevant.
I also much prefer handwritten notes. The act of writing something down helps it to stay in my memory more than typing it up. The main for me downside is there's no Cmd+F for my handwritten notes.
I read a post recently about using a local LLM to OCR handwritten notes that I intend to trial soon:
I think it’s less notebooks or typed notes, and more the issue of cargo cults built around frameworks and systems. Bullet journals are a handwritten PKM, aren’t they? And they were definitely a fad around the fetishized ideal of creating perfect notebooks.
Brennan could have gone about a better more interesting route that I would have agreed with more, instead of incorrectly blaming Obsidian and conflating it with a specific PKM framework.
I am an avid obsidian user and have avoided most PKM stuff, and instead just developed a PKM that works for me through slow incremental improvements and changes. The beauty of Obsidian is the plugin eco system, and I even was able to develop my own plugin for what I specifically wanted. I think that's what Brennan basically talks about in his "Question 3" section where he favors just making your own.
I do think that there is "choice paralysis" that people may have when jumping into Obsidian and trying to add plugins too early instead of discovering what works (and what doesn't) for them first.
His final point:
> After researching... well, research, a part of me feels a sense of relief. The fact is that I've been using ad-hoc, improvisational methods for research and knowledge management for my entire life. It's clear I haven't been missing out on deeper, richer understandings by way of more complex knowledge management systems.
I completely agree with this, and Obsidian is one of the best tools to do this! And Brennan corrects this in his update at the end of his article.
Writing the notes is more the point than re-reading them, at least for me. Writing stuff down forces me to kick things around and find a good structure, and that's where the useful stuff happens.
This is especially relevant today where there are thousands of attempts to create AI "voice to text" apps to automate away "boring" note taking. My daughter working in medical field says that she is contacted at least once a week "hey, we are startup having a novel idea for voice to text app". And she have to explain yet again that she doesn't want to automate note taking away. Writing is the process how we structure our thoughts and discover new things. This is how we learn.
Yeah, that's a good method. Never forgetting stuff is such an amazing side effect of putting them down in writing. Instead of throwaway notes, I write articles for my website now. I actually have fun re-reading those.
Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end.
A few days ago, someone jokingly asked if Henry Ford had a personal knowledge base in Obsidian... Well, sort of! He had something he called "jot books", where he journaled, kept notes, grocery lists, etc. Not dissimilar to how people use Obsidian. The Henry Ford Museum has fifty of these notebooks: https://www.thehenryford.org/search?Query=%22jot+book%22
How should we quantify the impact of Henry Ford's notebooks? How should we quantify the impact of spreadsheets?
Most people who accomplish anything take notes in some form, because writing is a way of thinking. We love to mythologize the tools and methods of accomplished people because we hope it will let us absorb a bit of their genius. But a good camera doesn't make a good photographer. Taking lots of photos helps.
Should you take notes? Probably. Does it matter what your method is? Probably not. Whatever works for you. Obsidian (or any other form of notetaking) is successful if it disappears and lets you accomplish your work.
I've realized that most of my tendencies to set up elaborate note-taking systems and frameworks have been an attempt to address my anxiety around learning and productivity. I'm constantly in the mode of "learning defensively" - questioning what I'm absorbing into my mental toolkit, how much I retain, and how much I'd be able to conjure if I needed to solve a problem in that domain. In this context, noting down whatever I come across in Obsidian canvases or webs of interlinked notes or making Anki flash cards gives me some comfort about what I'm doing, and of course satisfies the urge of organizing and categorizing things.
But when I relate these activities to learning itself, it becomes difficult to gauge how much of it is necessary. If I don't constantly serialize or test what I'm learning, how do I know I'm learning anything at all? And externalizing so much starts to feel like a burden and gives me less confidence in my own intrinsic ability to just go and do things.
I was going to post an "Ask HN" on this topic to see if other people related to this. If anyone has been in this mindset before and managed to break out of it, I'd be curious to know what helped!
I don't know your specifics, so I'm going to reply with what I've learned about learning:
I found reading a textbook, and typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough. Typically: definitions, quotes, and personal thoughts while reading. Did this for stats/comp sci/etc. Obsidian + markdown worked for that, even without plugins. Being able to text search is useful, which is why I don't hand write.
Anything beyond that you have to be cautious about paralyzing yourself from trying XYZ PKM.
Theres a quote from stephen king that goes somewhere along the lines of "during first draft don't try referencing or fixing grammar because it breaks your train of thought". I think similarly, when learning something, choose the thing thats most out of the way (usually the simplest) that is least likely to break your train of thought.
In terms of tracking how much you're learning, I'd be very very slow and incremental in what tooling/methods you pick. For me, I just trust myself after reading/notetaking a textbook. Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign. Being able to explain what I learned to someone else is a good sign.
Great advice, thanks!
> Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign
I agree, but having homeworks in itself is a big advantage! It means you're in a structured learning environment where someone has taken the care to create a learning path and added checkpoints with carefully designed problems designed to refresh + assess what you've absorbed until that point.
When you're learning outside the classroom (for yourself or on the job), there's this sudden loss of all bounds where you now also have to draw a line of what knowledge is reasonable to acquire and what is out of scope. For example, when working independently on personal projects, I sometimes get sucked into reading about the details of protocols, standards, RFCs etc. and have a difficult time deciding when to stop.
One answer is learn just enough to solve the problem at hand at move on, but if you're in a field like eg. security you feel an obligation to do your due diligence when designing something. And of course, with LLMs now it's possible to move past any problem without learning anything at all, so you have to be even more intentional in which things you do decide to learn.
I would add that writing down your reactions to the books and not the book content itself is helpful. If something reminds you of something else then write about that. I mostly throw away all these things as the point is just to write them not to read them back
I'm starting to break out of this mentality by noticing that
1. I excelled at my exams without any strange note taking systems;
2. I remember many details down the road, even things I thought I had forgotten. For example, I needed some Linear Algebra, and I was surprised by how much I recalled after 10 years, so much in fact that in 3 days I was on par with when I passed my exam. It would have been worth it to make an Anki flashcard for every theorem?
3. In the exam I used such method I just needed much more time that when I used my minimalist note taking. So much in fact that I question the efficiency of such methods.
Can confirm.
Say what you will about Tim Ferris, but maybe he was onto something when he said only learn the bare minimum to get something done and more than that is a waste (4 hour workweek).
What is the goal?
That needs to start all conversations in this area. Not everyone had the same goals.
Second, what is your specific problems?
Again not everyone had the same problems. There are common problems with common solutions (often multiple conflicting solutions that work in isolation but perhaps not for your life), learning what works for others can thus be helpful. Beware, not all problems are big enough to be worth addressing for you.
The important part is find what works for you. Sometimes you don't need to measure what you learned - which seems to be your concern- if it is important and you learned it you will remember when needed. Of not you need to look it up again. It can be liberating to realize that you don't need to measure everything. Sometimes that isn't good enough though, so back to the first two questions.
Well if you write down a snippet of code, and later upi reliaze you need that code a gain but don't remember it but do remember that you must have written a note about it, then writing down the note was useful.
The issue I'm still working on is how do I find such notes when I don't exactly remeber what they were about.
> how do I know I'm learning anything at all?
I keep "proofs" of past performance. Like a drawing or a name of netflix series I barely understood or a text I wrote.
Once in months, I check that stuff and see myself understand the series better, see that I do better pictures etc etc.
When I feel anxiety, I check old stuff and compare it to the new stuff. It brings pleasure.
These discussions always conflate the different types of "notes".
Broadly, there are two very different kind of notes. First, there are notes whose purpose is to be easy to find when you need to recall some bit of information. Then, there is note taking in service of learning.
These two are very different in goals and thus very different in terms of optimal strategy.
Also, there is note taking in service of creation, where the end goal is neither recall nor learning, but to create notes to share to other people, often for artistic purposes but potentially also for reference or learning. These are also different from note taking for personal reference or learning.
The reason I love the Personal Library Science space is directly due to its emergence of information features in a personal library against the idiosyncratic processes of resonance and attention in their creators.
The whole discourse around PKM is a problem of the pluralistic framing in modern society that we hide behind individuality while missing the basic points. "Use whatever works for you" is intellectually lazy, and the opposite isn't an authoritarian ontology that people think they are protecting against.
Instead the basics are this: Whatever system you currently have to store/search/synthesize/and share information CAN and SHOULD be introspected to improve itself. Some functions are matters of time and space cost/benefits, other metric functions are qualitative, but can be experimented against and improved greatly with creativity and testing.
>"Use whatever works for you" is intellectually lazy
it isn't in a space that's full of snake oil salesmen trying to peddle you solutions you don't need. The problem with the whole knowledge management thing is that it's full of people obsessed with appearing intellectual and productive while never actually producing anything worth mentioning despite their gazillion knowledge hacks, which was the point of the original article.
Just like any other 'life optimization' cottage industry, stop over intellectualizing, stop inventing problems that don't exist and do something useful instead is perfectly valid, much needed advice
I returned to hand-written notebooks. None of these knowledge management frameworks ever worked for me. Sure my agents have their own semantic memory system but I’m not an agent.
I've taken hand-written, on paper, notes throughout my education, up to high school level. In university, I've switched to hand-written notes on a tablet device. At the end of uni, when I started working on my final thesis & Obsidian was becoming popular, I've switched to it and since then, everything I note is organized into markdown files or at least is somehow referenced through pure text.
Having experienced all of these methods. I've found myself regularly searching through my vault and referencing older material. While the notes hand-written on a tablet, made it much easier to sift through vast amounts of material I was ingesting at the time. I find myself unable to re-use these notes in any meaningful way. They still exist, I can access them, but I don't find myself going back to them. Old paper notebooks? Most of them are destroyed, lost, forgotten to time.
The knowledge management, with easily indexable and searchable contents, has this invaluable perk of being accessible at a moments notice. Keeping potential of being relevant.
I also much prefer handwritten notes. The act of writing something down helps it to stay in my memory more than typing it up. The main for me downside is there's no Cmd+F for my handwritten notes.
I read a post recently about using a local LLM to OCR handwritten notes that I intend to trial soon:
https://andrewdoering.org/blog/2026/remarkable-local-handwri...
The premise of that article is neat, but it looks to be entirely LLM-generated (in addition to the header image) that it’s almost impossible to read.
I think it’s less notebooks or typed notes, and more the issue of cargo cults built around frameworks and systems. Bullet journals are a handwritten PKM, aren’t they? And they were definitely a fad around the fetishized ideal of creating perfect notebooks.
Note Brennan, who wrote the article this one is responding to added an update: https://brennan.day/what-have-note-taking-pkms-accomplished-...
Brennan could have gone about a better more interesting route that I would have agreed with more, instead of incorrectly blaming Obsidian and conflating it with a specific PKM framework.
I am an avid obsidian user and have avoided most PKM stuff, and instead just developed a PKM that works for me through slow incremental improvements and changes. The beauty of Obsidian is the plugin eco system, and I even was able to develop my own plugin for what I specifically wanted. I think that's what Brennan basically talks about in his "Question 3" section where he favors just making your own.
I do think that there is "choice paralysis" that people may have when jumping into Obsidian and trying to add plugins too early instead of discovering what works (and what doesn't) for them first.
His final point:
> After researching... well, research, a part of me feels a sense of relief. The fact is that I've been using ad-hoc, improvisational methods for research and knowledge management for my entire life. It's clear I haven't been missing out on deeper, richer understandings by way of more complex knowledge management systems.
I completely agree with this, and Obsidian is one of the best tools to do this! And Brennan corrects this in his update at the end of his article.
Blue water bridge! Sarnia!
An LLM generated Obsidian ad. Still not interested, sorry.
AI memory systems have replaced that for me. AIs will actually read those things too. I never read my own notes.
Writing the notes is more the point than re-reading them, at least for me. Writing stuff down forces me to kick things around and find a good structure, and that's where the useful stuff happens.
This is especially relevant today where there are thousands of attempts to create AI "voice to text" apps to automate away "boring" note taking. My daughter working in medical field says that she is contacted at least once a week "hey, we are startup having a novel idea for voice to text app". And she have to explain yet again that she doesn't want to automate note taking away. Writing is the process how we structure our thoughts and discover new things. This is how we learn.
> Writing the notes is more the point
Yeah, that's a good method. Never forgetting stuff is such an amazing side effect of putting them down in writing. Instead of throwaway notes, I write articles for my website now. I actually have fun re-reading those.