Your Personal Knowledge Management Isn't Personal Enough
As a person with ADHD, I go through various subjects of hyperfocus over time. Some stick around, or at least come back time and again. One of those is personal knowledge management (PKM), especially with the software Obsidian. Recently, this hyperfocus came back after I found a PKM influencer who was talking about the Zettelkasten (zk) method using obsidian and how they also have ADHD.
I have heard of ZK when I first started my PKM journey many years ago. However, I leaned towards Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain (BaSB) methodology as he also started his method because of his ADHD. Somewhere in there is a thought about bullet journaling (Bujo), or the reason I convinced myself I deserved a Remarkable 2, also created to try and organize thoughts in a way that is ADHD friendly.
So many different methods for similar ideas can make a mess of any system if you try to get it perfect. Luckily, the P in PKM is for Personal not perfect. So here is my personal journey that hopefully helps someone else.
Why even do this?
Why take notes? Why write a journal? Why build a second brain? These are the questions each of them started at when creating the system. For ZK, it was taking notes to synthesize them into future writing. For journaling, it was to capture the thoughts of life and be able to look back on life. For building a second brain, it was to simplify the work your brain needs to do so that it can focus better one thing at a time and easily find "memories". One could argue that each is basically the same thing, but that is likely because you can see your own needs in all three.
So, what are my own needs? Working in tech, there is always something new to learn and I'd like to be able to reference things I've read in the past. As a Developer Advocate, I need to create content in the form of blog posts, videos, workshops and more. It would be nice to have a collection of notes for that work. In general, I want to have a collection of memories to use as inspiration for all sorts of creative pursuits that I might try in my ADHD journey. I also want to collect therapeutic and psychological tricks into a sort of personal owner's manual.
If I were to distill it down, I want a tool to make my creativity flow well.
“I want a tool to make my creativity flow well.”
What do I build?
My recency bias has me lean towards the lessons I'm learning from Tony Ramella's Flow Vault which is heavily based on ZK. However, some of the aspects of BaSB are really nice too. Especially the CODE method of thinking about the process of taking notes. In reading more about ZK (How to Take Smart Notes), I see that it's all about creating something for the purpose of writing rather than keeping a personal wiki. That aligns with my desired value to attain from PKM mostly. There is still some value in having a personal wiki for my personal operations manual. Especially if I don't limit myself to writing. I could see it helping with my improv work or when I'm streaming.
This means I'm going to have to combine the idea of a wiki with ZK and make it work with the Flow Vault, since I did pay for the premium vault template.
The Structures
The PARA structure from BaSB breaks information into
- Projects - projects you are working on
- Areas - areas you like to study, pretty Wiki like if you ask me
- Resources - General useful info, more contact/phone book like than wiki like
- Archives - where projects go when you won't let them die
ZK seems to be broken down as such
- Source Notes - The intake of some form of information. Book, article, video, etc. for citations often
- Main Notes - Core notes which are synthesized ideas. Generally atomic.
- Index Notes - Ways to connect different (atomic) notes on a topic together
The Flow Vault seems to broken down as
- Flows - a mix of goal, projects, tracking of both, and reviews of your week/month/etc.
- Input - Basically an non organized inbox for new notes (The C in BaSB's CODE) and daily journal entries
- Tools - Templates, cheat sheets, snippets and other things that make the Obsidian vault work but don't really have much to do with other PKM needs
- Zettelkasten - A home for all the stuff mentioned in the ZK list above.
Mapping the structures together
When I started thinking about restructuring, I created a mindmap in Obsidian to get my brainstorming going. Did you know you can map charts, graphs, and mindmaps natively in Obsidian using Mermaid JS?
For the purpose of simplifying as much as possible (thus making it more likely that I will use the system) I decided to map everything to the Flow Vault in some way. Here's where I went.
- The PARA P (Projects) from BaSB maps perfectly into the Flows section of the vault so I will keep it there.
- The PARA first A (Areas) maps to the ZK main notes pretty well. They might need to be made more atomic for PKM purists but I have another acronym I try to remember, YAGNI. It stands for You Aren't Gonna Need It. I'm paraphrasing but it means, until the work provides value, hold off on doing it.
- The PARA R (Resources) will likely map to either main notes or tools, so that work will happen upon organization.
- The PARA final A (Archive) probably maps to the bits left over after a project is finished. So, some of those will just be kept with completed projects or deleted entirely if they are specific to the project and already represented in those pieces.
- Luckily, ZK maps perfectly to the Zettelkasten folder so no work there. However, there is one section I want to speak to - Source Notes
- I'm not an academic. Never really have been. So the idea of citations in the modern (non-academic) world of links seems like extra processing for my brain.
- I'll take what works about source notes, my highlights and associated notes from books, articles, etc. along with the goals of why I'm reading something and link ideas to the originals where necessary. But author names don't always come easily to my brain so remembering by them is odd to me.
Conclusion
My current structure is okay for now. It seems to work but there are more structures to contend with. What about task management? What about clearing out that note inbox on a regular basis? What about future what abouts? I'll write more on that in the future. For now, I'm having fun with my current hyperfocus.
What questions do you have about setting up Obsidian for your PKM journey? Do you have your own ideas for personalization? Let me know.
