I used Apple Notes, Evernote, Roam, Obsidian, Bear, Notion, Anki, RemNote, the Archive and a few others. I was pondering about different note types, fleeting, permanent, different organisational systems, hierarchical, non-hierarchical, you know the deal. I often felt lost about what to takes notes on and what not to take notes on.
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- [note::See: shiny object syndrome]

Writing permanent notes was time consuming as f***.
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- [note::https://hyp.is/P0bPbu6GEe2L0Hv237EcYQ/www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/zkefis/is_the_concept_of_personal_knowledge_management/

The framing of "permanent notes" or "evergreen notes" has probably hurt a large portion of the personal knowledge management space. Too many people are approaching these as some sort of gold standard without understanding their goal or purpose. Why are you writing such permanent/evergreen notes? Unless you have an active goal to reuse a particular note for a specific purpose, you're probably wasting your time. The work you put into the permanent note is to solidify an idea which you firmly intend to reuse again in one or more contexts. The whole point of "evergreen" as an idea is that it can actively be reused multiple times in multiple places. If you've spent time refining it to the nth degree and writing it well, then you had better be doing so to reuse it.
Certainly there's some benefit for refining and shaping ideas down to individual atomic cores so that they might be used and reused in combination with other ideas, but I get the impression that some think that their notes need to be highly polished gems. Even worse, they feel that every note should be this way. This is a dreadful perspective.
You can always refer back to rough notes if you need to later, but polishing turds is often thankless work. Sadly too many misread or misunderstand articles and books on the general theory of note taking and overshoot the mark thinking that the theory needs to be applied to every note. It does not.
If you find that you're tiring of making notes and not getting anything out of the process, it's almost an assured sign that you're doing something wrong. Are you collecting thousands of ideas (bookmarking behavior) and not doing anything with them? Are you refining and linking low level ideas of easy understanding and little value? Take a step back and focus on the important and the new. What are you trying to do? What are you trying to create?]

Historically speaking, knowledge meant power. In the middle ages, anyone who knew more or was better informed than his/her peers had a considerable advantage. Today we are bombarded with new information every day and the challenge is a different one: Separating the wheat from the chaff. And naturally, personal knowledge management seems like a promising coping strategy.However, most of the stuff I read about personal knowledge management is about systems, apps, setups or plugins, and never really about its purpose. Why bother doing all this? Although it feels really good, creating organisational systems and collecting notes for the sake of retaining the information itself is a huge waste of time and will leave you hoarding useless data.
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- [note::There's an interesting tension here between "just-in-time learning" and "just-in-case" learning.
In modern times, we have access to an insane amount of information. Thus, creating systems (i.e. PKM systems) that make it easier to find and reference the information we need "just-in-time" can yield great benefits for the learner. However, there's a point at which these systems (i.e. PKM systems) can be overused and simply enable undesirable phenomena like shiny object syndrome and collector's fallacy.]

In general, more people need to let go of the idea of creating some kind of omniscient (second) superbrain that remembers everything and subsequently makes you do everything right. The things we're really performing well at are the things we did (and repeatedly failed at) 1000 times before. Think about how you learnt to ride a bicycle. Did you read a book about riding bicycles and took notes on it? I don't think so.Do you really want to take away something from reading all of those books and articles? Think about what you are going to (lastingly) change that represents the ideas presented in the text. Most of the time, that will be just one or two things; everything else will be lost until you pick up that book again, perhaps. But that's okay. Life is too short to spend it on personal knowledge management.
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- [note::> Did you read a book about riding bicycles and took notes on it? I don't think so.
Great point - though, I don't think this is a convincing argument in a number of cases.
For people who are failure-averse, embracing a learn-by-doing approach from the outset is often the best approach.
However, taking a learn-by-doing approach does risk forming bad habits/mental models. Sometimes, it's best to reference expert material (in moderation) before diving into something new.]

don't obsess over the tools G. Obsess over what it is you wanna do with yourself. Some folks do a whole lot with little to nothin'. And some folks have everythang you could ever wish and still aint doing nothin'.
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I despair seeing people on the r/zettelkasten sub who are about to waste as much time as I did pursuing the PKM fantasy and are desperately seeking advice on minutiae like whether a specific thought is fleeting or permanent...
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- [note::Same]

On PKM influencers:Do not trust anyone whose only apparent output is producing PKM-related content. They are trying to sell you the PKM fantasy.Of those who do produce something genuinely valuable with the help of PKM, do not believe that simply doing PKM will make you that kind of person. Just because an essayist uses PKM, don't think learning their PKM method will make you an essayist. Learn to write essays.Only follow the advice of people who are clearly doing something useful with their PKM and whose use-case aligns with something you are already doing (or at least starting to do yourself). E.g If you're an academic who has a lot of notes to organise, by all means check out academics using PKM methods successfully.
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As my use-case is mostly personal notes, snippets, lists, addresses, etc, I have taken a lot of useful advice from Jamie Todd Rubin's (sorry i don't remember his reddit handle) Practically Paperless series, which is mainly about organising life-admin documents but applies well to my case.
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Most systems have some sort of review or curation element to them. Along with, like you stated, expression or creativity, there needs to be an outlet or necessary action involved.Once that outlet is removed, any collection will turn into hoarding, no matter how well organized.
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The point of PKMS isn't jotting down every random thing you experience or hear, it's managing knowledge you already have so it's less overwhelming when you go to use it. An individual choosing to throw a ton of extra stuff they don't benefit from on that plate is an individual problem.
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But my experience is that, like me, a lot of people spend a lot of time and effort on PKM without getting any real value out of it. And in order to prevent this, one has to be clear about what kind of purpose you want PKM to fulfill for you. It has to be a means to an end, even if its just for fun, otherwise its a waste of time.
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