I work in research, so spend a good portion of my day taking notes, gathering information, and analyzing everything I collect, all with the ultimate goal of pulling things together in a final written product. For the last few years, Bear has severed as my primary note taking app for this purpose. My system in Bear has worked very well and I haven’t really experienced too many pain points. I use it alongside Apple Reminders and Raindrop.io.

Over the last couple of years, I have seen a lot of people using and promoting “personal knowledge management” apps. During this time, I have also did some reading about the [Zettelkasten note taking philosophy](https://zettelkasten.de)). As a result, I’ve tested out a few of these newer knowledge management apps to see if they could replace or compliment Bear. I started with Notion, and also played around with Coda, Obsidian, Roam, and (most recently) Craft.

While these personal knowledge management apps had their own nice features, none of them could (for me) compete with Bear. Craft came the closest because the app’s visual presentation is beautiful and it works nicely on iOS. However, like Notion, I found myself quickly bogged down in Craft with the customization of my notes and making things look a certain way, which ultimately distracted me from taking notes and reviewing and analyzing the information I collected. Some of these apps also had issues that were ultimately dealbreakers, such as the lack of a native or fully-functional iOS app, the inability to easily extract my information from the service, or questionable privacy policies.

After playing with each of these powerful and expensive apps/services, I kept finding myself right back with Bear because it just works on all my devices.

As I’ve learned more about the Zettelkasten approach, I’ve found that Bear is a fantastic app for implementing the Zettelkasten method. While Bear doesn’t offer backlinks, those can be easily inserted, much in the way one would do if they were handwriting notes. Also, Bear's flexibility and truly distraction-free writing means that I don’t waste time with formatting and modifying how my notes, and instead focus on the organization and analysis.

How do others see Bear as compared with these newer personal management apps? Has anyone else found the same things I have? Something different? Anyone else using Bear as their Zettelkasten?

My PKM/Zettlekasten Workflow

Hi all, I've spent most of this past week researching Personal Knowledge Databases (PKD), Digital Gardens, Zettelkasten and the various tools available to bring these concepts to life. This is a very basic workflow that I am still tinkering with. I will probably go through many more iterations before I reach a workflow that I am happy with.

The purpose of my PKD :

My purpose is twofold:

• To encourage mindful consumption. I want to retain more form the articles, books and videos I consume. This means that I consume less than I used to, because of the time it takes to record my thoughts, but I retain the material better.
• To boost my creativity. I recently graduated with a degree in Industrial Design an have yet to find a job due to COVID. During this downtime, I want to build up a personal PKD that I can duplicate and connect to projects from my (future) work.

My work flow:

I try to keep this as simple as I can.

1. Notes from the media I consume are written into Notion, on a page meant for collecting my Literature Notes.
2. These notes are condensed into Permanent Notes that go into Obsidian.
   1. I use tags to mark the source of the knowledge and what type of media it is. (Ex. #Wired, #Article). I put relevant links here as well, instead of inline, to keep the actual note looking clean. These are usually relevant topics. (Ex. [[Philosophy]] [[Neuroscience]])
   2. I haven't yet figured out the perfect format for my Permanent Notes or a good naming convention. I've read that a proper Zettel contains one single idea and a unique name. I can't bring my self to break up multiple ideas from literature notes into distinct ideas yet, since I don't want to loose the interlinking of those ideas from the source but also because I am quite a wordy person.
3. Future. Once I land a job and begin working on design projects, I will duplicate the .md files from my PKD to my Work Knowledge Database and add my work notes and research onto it, allowing my personal media consumption to boost my creativity at work.
   1. I don't expect that keeping the personal component of my Work Knowledge Database will be too difficult since in the worst case scenario, I manually copy over some .md files from one folder to another.

I know that there is a lot I have yet to figure out and that I am probably posting this workflow prematurely. I am very excited and intrigued by this concept and needed an outlet for my thoughts. Thoughts and f

Hi,

I got inspired by some articles about personal knowledge management systems. And I'm not happy with current solutions out there so I decided to build my own system.

>My Vision is to have one system which contains all my data so that even if the services around are shut down everything can be accessed.

My Goals with this system is:

• Longevity -> this should be my central system where I can find everything
• Own my own data
• Be independent of cloud solutions
• Searchability -> search though all my date at once
• Extensible -> this systems should be able to adapt to new situations
• Specialization for separate concerns, but all in one holistic system

The "file" types I want in the end

• Note
• ToDo List
• Docs (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
• Bookmarks
• Coding (Snippets, GitHub Repositories)
• Projects
• Google (Contacts, Calendar, E-Mails, Photos

What do I want in the end?

• Separate apps for separate concerns: one for notes, one for ToDo lists, one for bookmarks, one for "normal" files (like word, excel, PDFs)
• Everything should be shareable
• An API which can be used in several ways
• Allow 3rd Party solutions to store their data in the system
• Follow common standards, so that the data can be read even without the system
• Every information should be able to be linked to another information (example in the picture)

https://preview.redd.it/lte16668cod41.png?width=1646&format=png&auto=webp&s=d87af4b08f58d148295ab31fbf0a212a19a9c156

What I don't want

• Collaboration Features
• Save data only to 3rd party providers
• Reinvent the wheel, so if there is a common way to do something I want to use this one, e.g. I don't to build a new office suite

My questions

• How complex would you rate a system like this from 1 to 10?
• Which technologies would you use?
• Should I save things like notes and todos, directly in a database or should I use something like a YAML file?
• Would it be interesting for you?

I hope that the post will fit in well here, even though it is very technical.

Thank you,

l_hara

---

Twitter Account to get the latest news to this new project: https://twitter.com/The_Minerva_

I tried both and am comfortable with both of them. I am interested in using Paid service for a long term. So it is very crucial for me to make a right choice.

One Note

Pro:

• layers of information classification is more (notebook->section->pages)
• cheaper plans
• (long term) owned by microsoft, so there is no possibility of being sold to some other company and changing direction

Con:

• Sync issue seem to be a worry.

Evernote

Pro:

• Absolutely great sync between devices
• intuitive design

Con:

• Expensive plans

Is there anything I missed out to consider while making this choice? Please provide your inputs.

Hey everyone!

I love watching podcasts and CEO interviews on YouTube. However, I quickly ran into some big issues (see below). Luckily, since I'm a developer, I can fix these for myself. The solution turned out to be pretty good, so I decided to share it 🙂

Issues with existing solutions (ie. what this app is trying to solve):

Issue #1: Knowledge gets buried under grocery lists

Originally I used Google Keep, but at some point I realized that everything below a certain "scroll threshold" was lost forever unless I specifically searched for it. To combat this, Tag My Knowledge uses what's called spaced repetition. By reading something 10x with time in between, you remember it much better than If you read it 10x in a row. That's why Tag My Knowledge uses a feed-approach. Every day, you see random items so you subconsciously build habits out of them!

Issue #2: Note taking wasn't fast enough

Speakers talk pretty fast and while you can pause & rewind YouTube videos, it quickly becomes annoying. Even worse, you can't rewind live events. Tag My Knowledge is optimized to keep up with that. Adding knowledge takes as few clicks/taps possible. That way, you never miss some important off-topic nugget never again!

Features

• A single piece of knowledge can consist of a title, rich text description, a source (with optional link), tags and one or more categories
• You can modify your list of categories (up to 5). You can change name, icon and order.
• The first 4 will be shown as tabs at the bottom for quick access
• You can manage all of your tags in one place
• You can filter for tags
• You can toggle feed/history mode. History mode shows all your knowledge in chronological order (within that category), feed is essentially random (in reality, there's an algorithm behind it but whatever)
• Works on multiple devices (currently only on Android & other platforms via Progressive Web App)

Download / Where to get

• Website (here you find a demo video and you can also sign up for a newsletter to get notified on updates)
• Progressive Web App
• Google Play Store
• [Huawei App Gallery](https://appgallery.huawei.

Hey everyone,

I am looking for a system for personal knowledge and information management. I want to make actual use of all the useful information I come across in daily life and somehow archive the things I learn in a way that I can retrieve them easily whenever I need them. Just like an external brain of some sort which does the remembering whilst I do the thinking.

Here's what I have been experimenting with so far:

• The Zettelkasten principle for more successful scientific writing and effective notes, however I found that it is too specialised on scientific notes and other things (like a simple list of interesting keyboard shortcuts for example) fall under the table. My goal is not to become a better scientific writer, I want to access relevant Information I gathered as quick as possible once I need it.
• Tiago Forte's "Building a Second Brain" is what I recently came across and the ideas sound very interesting to me, however I don't think they are worth 500$.

I'd love to use Evernote. It's easy to handle, offers a wide range of features and also looks great. But I am open to any suggestions. Thanks for your help!

Since there are still NOT many a lot of platforms for macOS for Stock Trading or Investing.

We cannot use DevonThink on Windows, so I am looking for an alternative.

Since my workflow involves Windows and iOS.

For Financial Analysis & Fundamental Analysis using Excel and Macros

And also the Technical Analysis.

to track back the investment decision that you make, and the reason why.

Hi everyone,

 

For the last year I've worked on Klepit, a personal knowledge management tool I initially built for myself. A dozen of my friends and colleagues have become regular users and I'm interested if it meets a need for a broader audience and how it can improve.

 

A year ago I began working on a new project and needed to learn a number of subjects rapidly. I realised I was poor at research and retaining it for the future. I would either read the article, send it to myself in an email or save it in a word doc and save it on my hard drive, which I'd forget about. I asked around and found everyone I spoke to seemed to have a similar problem so it seemed a worthwhile problem to tackle and at the very least it'd be a tool I'd use.

 

It started as a blog with note writing and evolved into a tagging system and finally into its current form. Interestingly it has evolved into a structure similar to how I learnt to do assignments in school.

 

The features are:

• create topics / sub topics (filing)
• save 'klepits' to them in a tile format, the article content is scraped and saved
• write notes with the content on the same screen.
• review all your klepit notes in a topic on one screen
• consolidate klepit notes into topic notes
• autogenerate references

 

In the limited exposure its had it seems to be useful for self directed learners, students and people who want to miscellaneously save and file articles and videos.

 

If you're interested in having a look this is Klepit - best on desktop with modern browser. Also here's my folder on entrepreneurship and another topic I found interesting, decision making.

 

I have found that researching and writing notes in a structured way has given me greater incentive to research as I'm creating something I'll use in the future.

 

I'm interested in hearing if:

• this is a problem you have?
• how do you currently solve it?
• would you use klepit? If yes or no, why?
• any random thoughts you have?

 

Thanks for reading :)

...or all the knowledge you have acquired through the years of expertise?

First some concepts, per Wikipedia:

• Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a collection of processes that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities (Grundspenkis 2007) and the way in which these processes support work activities (Wright 2005). It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers need to be responsible for their own growth and learning (Smedley 2009). It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management (KM) (Pollard 2008)
• Knowledge management (KM) is the process of creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organisation.[1] It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieving organisational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.[2]

I've worked in large and small organizations and one difference between them (among the many obvious ones) was the way they handled the collective knowledge of the individuals. In the large firm there was a knowledge repository that was basically the consequence of thousands of incidents and problems, their solutions and changes, etc.

I've always liked that approach. Not only it helps to organize knowledge, but also it improves performance and eficiency.

But now I'm working on my own, starting a small IT firm and I'm worried about my dependence in Google, Stack Overflow and the internet in general. I have my bookmarks in folders but recently I've been wondering if that's enough and I don't think it is. There are issues that are frequent enough that don't require an internet search, but there are others that I find every now and then that force me to search through lots of Google results because the last time I forgot to save the bookmark. I'm thinking

Hi I am running a server on Armbian so far I use Wallabag, Shaarli and Nextcloud to do all my stuff. But know i would like something well more connected. Does anybody know a service/software that can collect and index media off all kind and allows annotations or notes?

Trying to build my dream tool/app - a Personal Knowledge Management system with Spaced Repetition and incremental Reading.

It's basically another mind-mapping/concept-mapping software, but I'm focusing on better ways of visualizing and browsing your personal knowledge. All the features I need are currently supported by other software, but are split across several tools. No paid/free tool currently provides all of the features I'm looking forward to. So after 5+ years of searching and trying different things out, I've decided to build my own!

Having no experience with such an ambitious project, I'm stuck at the design phase. No matter what part of the project I look at, I feel like I desperately need help of an expert for that field.

To state things simply:

• We've a general graph - nodes and edges.
• A node is unit of personal knowledge (has attributes like Title, Description, File Attachments, Source, Timestamps...)
• An Edge connects two or more nodes (generalized edges) for providing parent-child, synonym, other relations.
• Each node and edge have a "type" associated with them. Thus, there can be specialized nodes and specialized edges.
• The graph supports adding/removing/modifying nodes and edges. It allows searching for keywords, executing queries like "common children of nodes X and Y") ...
• The application consists of a server that through an API can talk to a variety of frontends - web, desktop, mobile.
• The backend stores all the data and business logic
• The frontend provides various "views" for visualizing the knowledge graph, adding/removing/modifying nodes and edges, and searching information. The frontend queries for the required information via an API, renders the results, and sends API requests to modify the data.

I wish to build-in extensibility and data-portability into my application. So, via a plugin system, a developer can add new node/edge types, can add functionality to the graph, and support additional views for data visualization. I do not want the user's knowledge to be stuck in my application, so the data must be represented in an easy to process, human-readable json/xml like format.

I'm looking towards MongoDb for my database, but ZODB looks enticing as well.

However, I've absolutely no idea how to support extensibility! I've looked at Anki - a popular, extensible spaced repetition application, but I'm not sure their method of monkey-patching will work for my application (client/server architecture)

Any pointers wou

Hello, I'm aspiring to become a product manager, ideally for consumer facing iOS apps. I'd like to learn enough programming to not only supplement job duties of a Product Manager (not one yet), but also make fun apps on the side.

JavaScript would be useful for so many scenarios including existing software, google scripts, websites and even mobile apps. I understand JavaScript is useful in many scenarios and can even be wrapped in native mobile code through React Native and Phone Gap, but I'm worried there would be limitations that learning Swift / Objective-C would not bring up.

How different / more effort would it be to learn JavaScript to mock up or make mobile apps than Native Swift / Objective-C? What are some limitations (force touch? local notifications?)

So this is an idea that has slowly matured after reading Steven Johnson's "Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation" (http://amzn.to/qKhA9g) which is an excellent book.

Basically the idea is to off load your knowledge into a repository of some sort that is conducive to retrieval and relation to other topics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_management). What I haven't figured out is a good way of doing this.

Right now I'm sort of settling on using Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) for its wiki (and possibly milestones and tickets) to achieve this.

Other solutions I've seen range from simply a notebook (http://www.moleskine.com/) to using Evernote (http://www.evernote.com/) to using programs like DEVONThink (http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink/).

I'm curious if any of you have such a system in place and, if you do, what that system is. Thanks!

I'm tired of randos popping up in my and others' replies with "advice" that art school is a waste of money and you can teach yourself via the internet. Pixar is not going to hire me with a degree from the University of Skillshare.

Edit: yall are missing the point of this post. I'm not saying that it's impossible to make it without a degree, or that having a degree guarantees you anything. It's just that I know myself and my own learning style and school will make it a hell of a lot easier for me.

Hey all,I hope you're all doing well. That's an update after some months I've been idle about wreeto.

As many of you might now already, wreeto has an open source and a SaaS instance. I've been working on both (they're separate repos with big differences). Last year, I decided to invest the 100% of my time to develop the SaaS instance of the project.

There were a lot of failures following this decision:

• it requires quite a lot of time for me daily/weekly in terms of operations, server maintenance, security, deployments plus other stuff which is taken off development time
• it's harder to build a community and share my knowledge management vision with other people like me, I'm not a salesman, a marketeer, an entrepreneur or an investor. I know how to code and I want to invest all my time to it.

I have decided to abandon the SaaS instance and work 100% on the open source project. If the app succeeds in the future and gets some funding or investments, I will have lots of ideas into expanding it publicly, only as a premium offering and only for those who want this.

I have already started working on transferring code to the open source repository. New features will include:

• Projects view
• A new hierarchy of categories, tags and projects where everything is inter-connected
• New UI for the majority of features
• Digital Gardens
• Lots of fixes on backend and frontend, Rails v6 and latest gems

Also (drums rolling..) features that are on private beta right now:

• Backlinks
• A networked notes Graph view
• Attachments

Most of the features exist now at the SaaS instance and can be checked out (they're all free).

The only unfortunate thing is that for notes already stored in older version, won't be compatible with the upgrade due to lots of changes in the database structure. It's always easy to export notes to a zip file in markdown format and import them after upgrading.

I strongly suggest a clean, new installation.

I've been using wreeto in my Synology NAS (DS220+) for the past year and works perfectly. I am going to create a gitbook (or something similar) with instructions.

Finally, the roadmap now includes applying more security and polishing the experience. After that, I will be posting my plans regarding AI enhancement, external Integrations and more.

/r/wreeto

[discor

When I applied to do my MLIS, I was told by several people that all of this would be useful in the private sector, often for more money, if there weren't library positions going.

When I graduated, I was approached to work for a Big Company for very good money, if only I had certification in an Expensive Software Package (uh, OpenText). Which I didn't. The job description itself called for a mandatory Computer Science degree. So they looked like they made an exception for me, if only I had the cert.

In the two years since I've searched for information management, knowledge management, even document management jobs. In that time I've seen three non LIS positions that asked for an MLIS and another three (I think) which asked for an MIS and a list of specific technical courses. The three private sector jobs looking for the MLIS also demanded minimum five year's experience, naturally.

But everything either needs a Comp Sci degree or one of a number of 1 or 2 year certificate courses - and none of the ones requiring the cert courses pay enough to cover rent and student loan repayments. (I think about $25 an hour is my "eat ramen out of packets, pay rent, taxes and loans" floor level at this point)

But every so often people will airily and vaguely announce that "everyone" is looking for LIS graduates to do knowledge/information/whatever type jobs. And I then go on a several day bender, searching high and low and end up looking at all the same sort of things. But the results are the same.

Now, I do see jobs in the US that require MLIS and don't need five year's experience. But I am not in the US and I am absolutely no position to move there.

I know the usual answer is to "think outside the box" and "network" but I don't have a network, otherwise I would use it (no, really: I know lots of very nice people, none of whom are in any position to help me out here. Thinking outside the box sounds an awful lot like cold calling companies and trying to scam my way in, which sounds...uh not hugely practical nowadays.

So what did people do?

What search strings did you use? What certs did you get? How did you position yourself?

A few years ago, I was working on a PhD in a branch of AI called machine learning. In a long story that I don’t care to go into involving a high school friend going through an existential crisis, I spent some time with an Orthodox Christian priest. Most of you don’t know me, but this was unusual for me. And, pretty early on, I realized that most of the assumptions I had about this man and his religion were wrong and I needed to listen if I were to truly understand.

One of the things about trying to understand a 2,000 year old religion in its original understanding, is that you quickly get a history lesson along the way. And, as a man that has grown up in the west, it was amazing to see how foundational this man’s religion was to almost everything we know here.

As a researcher, it had become ingrained in me that knowledge is a fundamentally detached process. That’s a fruit of the enlightenment, after all. And we live in post Enlightenment times. We observe and we seek to replicate. And the fruits of this perspective have been profound. Almost all scientific knowledge is the result.

But, at the time of the birth of this man’s religion, knowledge was different. It was essentially entirely experiential. To know something is to experience it. Want to know what Paris is like in the Spring? Go there. Feel the breeze against your skin. Smell the food. Meet the people. That’s what it meant to know. And, most profoundly to this man, to know G-d was the same way. He said the theologian is the one who prays. To know G-d is to experience His “energies”, even though He’s unknowable in His “essence”, terms he tried to explain but always felt a bit elusive. A theologian must first become a poet, he said.

I’m not Orthodox. I don’t honestly spend much time thinking about big ideas: they’re too big for me. I’m out of my depth. And I get overwhelmed. But, I have found myself reflecting on this great fundamental historical shift of knowledge. And, what has changed for me is not that I don’t believe in the modern perspective of scientific knowledge anymore. I am a scientist. And I contribute too this grand process in a tiny, tiny way. But, I’ve also come to see that it doesn’t capture all knowledge. To know my best friend, I can’t read about her. I have to spend time with her to do such a thing. There are certain places where knowledge still makes sense primarily as experiential. And I think this has been good medicine for my 5 instinctual retreat to detachment. I shar