Welcome to the PKM weekly newsletter. My goal is to round up good resources in the PKM space so you don’t have to.

If you want to support the newsletter, check out my coaching before it closes. I’ll help you build a system that produces something instead of just taking notes. You can also get this in your inbox.

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.

This is a good look at LaTeX vs Word as an academic writing tool.

Yup, they are talking about Obsidian, but the workflow could certainly work for any tool. He’s specifically talking about setting up Obsidian for Academic work.

For those looking outside the most popular PKM systems right now, here is a good workflow with Bear and Apple Notes that you can use. Bear is a great application that I used for notes for years. Certainly a great option for those in the Apple ecosystem.

For those looking at capture and curation and creation workflows with Readwise, here is how one person does it with Craft.

If you’re thinking about changing PKM tools…don’t. But if you’re going to ignore me then I love these questions to ask yourself as you pick a new one.

For those of us that us DEVONthink they have a few suggestions to assess how you’re using it coming into a new year.

Jamie adds part 15 to his Practically Paperless with Obsidian series. This time he’s talking about his struggle with daily notes. Instead of a single note per day, he has a single note that has all his daily notes in it.

Scott doesn’t think Obsidian or any software tool is the best way to do Zettelkasten. In this video, he talks about writing 14k words in a few days based on notecards.

Thanks to Andy and his Letters from a Roaman I found out about TLDR Papers. It summarizes scientific papers for those of us that like reading them.

Part IV of Zettelkasten for fiction is out. This one focuses on the creation process.

Analogue may not be what most of us use, but I did love the insight into this Zettelkasten “Antinet” system on notecards. That is a lot of words written which show the power of using your research.

Here is a reading system using Notion, Readwise, and Goodnotes. I admit I’ve never thought of using Readwise to send articles to Kindle.

Good discussion about using a single tool to store everything vs specialized apps over on the Mac Power Users Forum. I keep my reading and writing in Obsidian. Visual stuff like home projects and office updates in Craft. Recipes in a dedicated application. The silos don’t confuse me at all.

I was unfamiliar with Bloom’s Taxonomy until this video. Reminds me of the higher levels of reading as discussed in How to Read a Book

This video is from a while ago, but Ali Abdaal talks about the Second Brain system. I like his 8th point, you only know what you make.

The Weekend Upgrade talked about how journaling can help your writing.

Here is a field report on 6-months spent using Zettelkasten to write a thesis. My takeaway is, good writing isn’t simply transcribing your notes. It takes more thinking and refinement at the writing stage.

Software

PanWriter is an interesting writing tool that leverages clean writing and PanDoc. I always think final writing is best moved out of your note tool.

If you’re a Matter user then MacStories released a starter pack reversing the API of the Matter app. It’s focused around Obsidian, but you’re smart and may be able to do more.

Alex Rink has been doing speed tests on note applications (see Craft’s results below). Here he summarizes the results to date.

While I don’t hear as much about Bear Notes for a research system, it has all the main features you need. If you’re curious here is a good introduction to its features.

And here is another person talking about why they prefer Bear over “more advanced” tools like Obsidian or Roam.

RemNote

Here is a RemNote plugin for studying YouTube videos.

Here is a new RemNote dark theme.

RemNote wants to improve backlinks and it asking for some community feedback.

logseq

If you have issues with logseq there are office hours run by @Ramses so bring your questions and register here.

The snipd podcast app has an integration with logseq if you check settings in the app.

If you want access to iOS logseq testflight here is the form you’re looking for.

If you want to publish your logseq notes, Prashant has a video to help you publish a static site.

You can now make your notes a bit safer with the Lock Screen plugin.

Some people think that logseq is too busy with core features that don’t need to be “core”. There is a CSS solution to hide some stuff.

Craft

Craft had its time under the microscope from Alex Rink. Two big failures, but I still love the app for research that’s not’s reading-focused. If I’m planning a new office or home stuff Craft is where I’m at.

• only imports 2000 files at a time and deletes all links to files that don’t exist yet so you loose links between batches
• he also hit the 100k block limit when he tried to import 10,000 files
  

Here is a new Craft extension to help you search stuff in your documents. I’ve got it on my list to check out at some point in the future.

Here is an extension to insert a date in your Craft note with more features than the default date command.

Reddit has a question about a Craft graph view plugin, but the API doesn’t support that yet.

Some questions about Craft moving to .md files as storage medium at some point in the future.

Obsidian

MacStories Weekly Issue 304 had a long discussion about building a YouTube watch later system with Obsidian and Shortcuts on iPad. You can find it here but you need to be a paying member to read it.

MacStories also released a new Obsidian plugin that lets you launch Shortcuts directly from Obsidian.

Jamie looked back at a year with Obsidian.

If you want to export highlighted content from the articles you read online into Obsidian then maybe Glasp is something to look at? It’s desktop and Chrome only, but Chrome is the most popular browser.

Daily Notes, Templater, Dataview, Buttons, and other plugins? That’s what puts together this daily note workflow.

Want Kindle notes in Obsidian without paying a monthly fee? Matt Giaro has a way to sync your highlights into Obsidian.

Ross Griffen shares his Obsidian workflow to write for his newsletters and blog.

Federico at MacStories just launched a very cool Obsidian plugin that lets you run shortcuts from the command palette in Obsidian. I haven’t had a chance to dig in yet, but I’ll do a video on it and I’m very excited about what it could mean for my Obsidian workflow.

Jeff is doing a series about setting up Obsidian. He’s been a Roam user, but it felt so busy that he just didn’t feel he could clean up enough to make it work.

If you’re looking for a new Obsidian theme here is a good list of themes. I just started using the new LYT theme.

TFTHacker published a post about making iOS widgets for Obsidian.

Roam

Ev Chapman shares how she organizes Roam to keep her creative work going.

RJ Nestor is starting a newsletter called “Weekend Upgrade” which is going to focus on mindset and workflow upgrades. It’s going to focus on Roam, but I’d bet that everyone gets something out of it.

There is a new Roam course out from Jason Griffing.

If you’re looking for 1-on-1 coaching sessions for Roam don’t forget that Andy offers them.

Roam is launching end-to-end encryption for graphs.

Yet another question wondering if Roam is still something that the developers are still interested in doing anything with plus where is the newsletter for Roam?.

Yup I use affiliate links sometimes to support the newsletter. If it’s on Amazon, it’s an affiliate link for sure.