4K Notes?! How I Keep My Personal Knowledge Base at Obsidian
I have 4,000 notes in my knowledge base.
Yes, I've gone a little crazy on this topic. But the decision to create a system for taking notes three years ago is the best intellectual investment I've made so far. In this post, I want to share why I do it, in what format, and what useful practical cases I've found for myself. The topic is bottomless, really. You can take some of the ideas and develop them yourself. You can read other posts in my author's channel.
The origins of madness
About 5 years ago, I started to get annoyed that I was forgetting important information. It seems like you read so much, learn a lot, listen to podcasts, find cool ideas, but a month later you remember either nothing or some vague stump of original ideas. After that, you start to feel a little discouraged: why learn something new, read books, if you can’t remember it or apply it in your life? Just as a warm-up for neurons? Hoping that an elegant solution will pop into your memory at some point? My inner controller definitely doesn’t like that.
I wouldn't say I have serious memory problems. I'm definitely not a walking encyclopedia, like most people. And I've noticed more than once that others complain about this problem, too. The most fanatical apologists for various knowledge bases and personal note-taking systems, In facthave mental problems. Thiago Forte (one of the main popularizers of Notion and personal knowledge bases) struggled with dementia and thus created his PARA system. Brian Jenks (one of the main promoters of the knowledge base at Obsidian), struggles with ADHD. These are literally people with mental problems who need these tools.
I don't have any major mental problems, but I just love to structure everything and put it on the shelves. I'm ready to spend more than 20 minutes a day on this. For me, the benefit of processing quality insights is obvious, rather than the eternal pursuit of new ones. Therefore, I do not practice speed reading, but rather slow reading and processing already found grains of gold. In other words, I will happily think about one masterpiece book instead of rushing to read 5 new, but more mediocre ones.
Start. Zettelkasten in Obsidian
The first thing I did about three years ago was to create a personal knowledge base in a single format. I was inspired by the Zettelkasten system and the technological capabilities of Obsidian. That's what I settled on.
Zettelkasten is a personal note-taking system in which each note
Atomic. That is, independent and contains one thought.
Has context. For example, marked up by tags, topics
is linked to other knowledge in the system. You can read more in this articleFor those who work a lot with information, it is necessary to at least know about this method.
If you think this is all a super niche topic for geeks, I just want to point out that Tiago Forte sold 100,000 copies of his book on personal knowledge bases in a year.Building a Second Brain” And in Russian-speaking community Zettelkasten already 6,000 (!) people. And this is one of the best intellectual communities in the Russian Federation. Once I just wanted to figure out “Speed reading – bullshit or not?” and searched the community and read all the discussions on this topic. The level of discourse was 3-4 levels deeper than I had before. In general, the Zettel topic is really very large and quite popular, and I myself hardly use all the principles of the system.
Obsidian — is a note-taking app at its best. The main advantage over Notion is that it is very easy to add a new connection between notes and easy to scale the base (imagine a notion table with 4k notes — it will simply die). The quality of work with 10 notes and 4000 has not changed. True, Obsidian is worse at publishing notes online, but this is a personal knowledge base. So everything suits me, I save and drop pdfs or copy text if necessary.
I see that my first notes are dated February 2021. That is, I have been running my Zettelkasten in Obsidian for 3 years now. I started with Teplov settings and haven't adapted it much since then. Just adding new entities and updating templates when needed.
Use cases
I have a bucket in my phone's task list where I add tasks and ideas throughout the day. The tasks then go into planning, and the ideas gradually go into Obsidian. Each idea can be tagged by topic. For example, this post could have the topics “Notes”, “Blogging”, “Zettelkasten”. Then, each note can be given a type: is it a quote, an idea, a source, a book, a post, and so on. If there is an obvious connection, you can add a connection to another note.
The details of my specific setup aren't that important. Let's move on to the most useful cases.
Super Notes
I solved my main problem, that the same topic has to be reinvented every time, with big notes. I just know where they are and return to them from time to time. For example, I have notes “Competitor Analysis” or “My Values” and every time I find a fresh idea or tool on this topic, I add them to these notes. Gradually, they become more and more fleshed out. All the most useful and important things are collected in one place.
Writing texts
When such super-notes grow in a personal garden of knowledge, it is very easy to write a post about them. All the information has already been collected, it remains to format it and add a storyline. If I write from a clean slate, I can refer to existing notes in the database. I can search for what I have saved on the topic of Religion, Love or Habits. I choose what I need and make a plan for the post. I never have a problem with a clean slate, because there is always something to start with. At the same time, the density of ideas in the text increases. You start working on simplifying thoughts, instead of adding unnecessary fluff.
Generation of ideas
Like a crazy hamster, I drag almost everything interesting into my database: my own ideas, quotes, advice, poems, paintings, books, films. When I need to get ideas on a specific topic, I go to the knowledge base. Now I can go to GPT for this, but for now my database contains much more interesting and deeper thoughts. If I need ideas for a podcast, I can scroll through the list of notes on the topic of “Death” and get everything interesting. Very quickly and meaningfully. I have almost any topic in my database, because all notes are marked by semantic potential. Sometimes the connection between the topic and the text of the note is less obvious, but that makes them more interesting. A third idea can be born from the connection between two ideas: a topic from physics can intersect with an idea from management. Such intersections of disciplines are the most insightful and useful for understanding the essence of things.
Analysis of the topic
Obsidian can draw graphs from the connections between notes. You can choose a specific topic, for example, “Love”, and start connecting notes on the graph. Gradually, meaningful clusters are formed. These are subtopics of a larger topic, for example, “Love for yourself”, “Love in relationships”, “Love for life”. This is how the topic acquires content and structure. The post can now be divided into chapters and several thoughts can be developed in each.
Design of books read
I add particularly successful books (1-2 out of 10) to the knowledge base as notes. I read work and non-fiction literature mostly on my laptop, so I immediately highlight interesting moments in the process and then work with them. I won’t go into detail about the book processing process now, but in short: reading in zotero → note → mind map in Miro → extracting practical ideas from the mind map. At the end, I have little left from the book itself, but a very well-thought-out note appears in the database. I return to them periodically, because the level of content there is very high.
Knowledge Base as an Exercise
The process of working with notes is a useful exercise for memorization. According to the principles of spaced repetition: if you 1) hear an idea 2) write it down 3) transfer it to the knowledge base and 4) integrate it into the current knowledge system, then the probability of remembering the information increases many times over. Regular work with the base creates a map of systemic and peripheral knowledge in your head: you are aware of what you know, but you cannot necessarily remember it at the moment. In addition, working with text and its structure improves writing, presentation, and speaking skills.
Diary
I also keep a personal diary in the knowledge base. The most useful are the weekly summaries. I write them for each of my seven values, which helps me record my progress and think once again about what is important to me. Nothing happens in a person’s life that he doesn’t think about, so such a retro is very helpful in moving in the right direction. This is not very much related to maintaining the database, but let it be as a nice bonus. I recommend it.
I don't spend too much time on all this, actually. It used to be much more. Of course, I don't take apart every book on a mind map, I don't put every topic into a column, I haven't touched most of the notes for over a year. I just use what I need at the moment and once a month I upload 20-30 new notes from the taskbook to the database. There are people who live in their digital palaces of the mind, but I have many other things to do.
In such a configuration, the knowledge base is not needed by everyone. If you are wondering whether you need it, then most likely you don’t. It will be very useful for scientists, writers, authors, but it can be absolutely useless for managers, entrepreneurs, programmers. If you were told about a hammer, you don’t need to buy it and beat everyone around like in GTA Vice City. Read this a text legendary in narrow circles before implementing Zettelkasten. In general, don't go crazy, don't cargo-cult and think about your goals and tasks instead of tools. And you will be happy.
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