Welcome to the PKM weekly newsletter. My goal is to round up good resources in the PKM space so you don’t have to.
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Bigger Ideas
Platform agnostic ideas that may help your PKM process. They may feature a software, but I think they apply to more than a single platform.
Nadja shows off her “Vaultiverse” built-in Obsidian in this video. It’s a good look at alternative ways to organize your notes and how to change the ways you interface with your notes based on how you’re feeling.
Matt Giaro shares his book note-taking process. I always love to see process-related videos because I generally pick something up or tweak my workflow somehow.
Shortform released a guide to Learning How to Learn, which I think gives some decent tips on how to learn by interleaving study sessions and how to get more out of what you read. I’ve purchased the full book for future reading. This is my affiliate link to sign up for Shortform.
Here is the third installment in Zettelkasten for Fiction.
For Clinical Medical student who needs to take notes, here is a discussion about how to set that up.
Jamie wrote about keeping digital vs paper daily notes and how he’s waffled between the two.
Here is an interesting Twitter thread by Marie Poulin about using Notion for Daily journaling. Certainly applicable to anyone using daily notes in their application.
Start is an interesting application for macOS. It would let you group all your Zettelkasten or note apps under a tag and then open them all. Here is an interview with the developer from the DEVONthink blog.
If you’re an academic doing citations in Markdown, the Mac Power User’s forum has a question about using Markdown and citations.
Speaking of reference managers, if you’ve been looking for an alternative to Papers, here is a forum thread talking about them.
Here is a guide on links vs tags from the Obsidian forum. Yup that means it’s a bit more applicable to Obsidian, but good information for everyone.
Josh did a video on why he’s using logseq AND Obsidian to keep different parts of his notes. I actually keep reading/research in Obsidian and more visual stuff (like new office ideas) in Craft so I’m down with this idea.
Interesting discussion about how a Western learning model may mean you put more emphasis on literature notes over permanent notes because you’re learning to recall what other people said for tests.
Eleanor Konik has a Twitter thread about some note reorganization.
Software
Steve took a look at Organizedly, which is set up to match with the PARA method. If you’re not sure which tool fits you, this feels like a worthy contender.
Readwise announced progress on their Readwise Reader application. Can’t wait to give it a try. If you want to try Readwise this is my sign-up link.
Remnote
Alex has done a performance evaluation on Remnote now. It performs better than Roam and logseq, but Obsidian was still the fastest.
If you’re syncing Remnote via their “Local Storage Locations” and having issues this forum thread discusses what’s up.
Forum user brunntobi is looking for tips on cleaning up their notes as they’ve looked at some “basic” topics many times over years of school and it’s getting a bit cluttered.
Lousytrybrain is having some issues importing Roam into Remnote. If you’ve got a solution they haven’t had any response in a few days and need some help.
On their YouTube channel, Remnote talked about using templates.
logseq
If you’ve struggled with tags and tag properties then this forum thread has some tips that may help you integrate with how logseq deals with them.
If you’ve been using Obsidian as a workaround to get Readwise into logseq, try the unofficial plugin instead it seems to work fine and then you’re not in a “hacky” workaround situation. It also sounds like Readwise is close on their official plugin so maybe wait until that comes out to change your workflow.
logseq user and iPad lover? Take a look at this forum thread about best practices for using logseq via Obsidian on your iPad. This is how you do it now until logseq for mobile comes out.
Maybe we’ll get a Google Calendar integration for logseq?
May also get SmartBlocks in logseq.
Craft
This week Craft updated to version 2.0.3 which brought a bunch of improvements. You can now Star a document from inside the document. You can do more to sort your backlinks and you can set the first day of the week in the calendar view. Overall, nice feature updates and quality of life improvements. You can check out the full release notes on their site.
I looked at a Table of Contents extension for Craft this week.
Few API requests in the forum this week. One for opening a document in a new tab or window. Another for opening a document in a popover window. How fast and well the Craft team deals with these requests will likely be a defining factor of how their extension universe develops.
Nice wishlist for features in Craft. If you’re interested in Craft check out the discussion on some of the features as well
If you build Craft extensions then there is a call for a WordPress integration. Some even say they’d pay something for it.
This Slack discussion is all about using Notion and Craft together.
If you use different Workspaces in Craft check this Reddit thread out about why people are doing it.
Some people are talking about using Keyboard Maestro and Craft together to automate their experience.
Been wondering about data portability in Craft, check this Reddit discussion out. I’ve found it to be highly portable when you export to Markdown.
Obsidian
Long discussion on the Mac Power Users forum that is fairly critical of the Obsidian editor. I appreciate Ryan’s response mid-way through the stream. It’s hard to handle support requests when you build something popular. Then later Ryan talks about the volume of the forum, and it’s bigger than I expected.
Jamie has part 14 of his practically paperless series out this week. This one is about migrating from Evernote to Obsidian, and why he didn’t automate the whole process. You can find an index to all his posts here.
I put together a video on tracking writing progress with Obisidian via some plugins. I’ve specifically liked the Activity History plugin.
Last week Obsidian had its Speedtest, but this week Alex decided to crash it with 100,000 notes. That’s a lot of research.
Shimmering Obsidian is a collection of Alfred workflows for Obsidian and it received a bunch of updates recently.
And for you Raycast fans, that Obsidian extension also got an update.
If you’re developing Obsidian Plugins, make sure you’re familiar with the Hub specifically this section geared towards plugin developers.
The new LYT Mode theme looks nice. I saw it announced last week and have been checking regularly to try it out since I loved Cybertron.
Is Obsidian Sync worth it? The Reddit community spent some time discussing it’s value. I personally use it and am very happy. iCloud and other systems would have hiccups sometimes that were a pain in the ass.
Roam
The Roam CSS System has a new Craft inspired theme. You can see screenshots here. Also, sign up for Alex’s newsletter.
If you’re looking for a “reasonably” priced Roam alternative then logseq has been recommended.
If you read books in Google Play Books and want them in Roam, this is what you’re looking for.
So a user deleted a page with 40k blocks and 16k references and can’t get it back. Seems like a pretty terrible UI oversight from Roam to me.
Funny graphic and some discussion on the stages note-takers go through.
Alexander Rink has a list of things Roam needs to do if they want to stay relevant.
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