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 get value out of this newsletter consider supporting it by becoming a member. You can either get my weekly thoughts, or all my courses and my weekly thoughts. You could also purchase a course if that fits your needs better.

You can get this in your inbox by signing up.

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.

How Charles Darwin took notes.

Here is a visual reminder for the knowledge flower.

Taking notes for IT professionals. Highlights Obsidian, but most of the ideas are transferrable.

Keep some index cards in a notebook for audiobook notes.

Is the Kindle Scribe better than an iPad? As usual with these titles, the answer is NO.

Part 2 and Part 3 of James tips on improving your academic writing.

What do you do to deal with lots of notes on a subject to turn them into something coherent.

PhD imposter syndrome.

What if you’re worried your paper notes will get lost?

This was a good interview with the head of design for Craft, Daniel Korpai.

This post has some discussion about hybrid analogue/digital systems.

Some notes on maintaining your tags. I stick with status type tags. So people get #people on them. I use TagNotes.

Here is a recommendation for fine gel pens for notetaking.

I also use Post-it flags to tag locations to revisit in books, but unlike the OP I don’t worry about the cost.

Something Interesting

Because we’re all lookin to expand our minds a bit.

This was an interesting article about working to fund your writing. I’m currently working to fund my writing via my membership/courses. At this point I have a number that needs to be coming in monthly and then I can take my 3 days a week I use for programming and use those for writing instead. I hope I can stick to that as I earn more from courses/membership.

How Japan won it’s war with traffic fatalities. I recently looked at taking the bus to the local airport and there is no public transit to the airport at all. My wife as looked at bus service in the winter to work and it would take almost an hour to travel 3km…so we can walk it faster with kids. The story was no better in Chilliwack. Transit is a joke where I’ve lived and I wish it wasn’t.

Software

How to open two NotePlan notes in Split View. NotePlan also added a better mini Calendar and week numbers. All in all, a great update for iPadOS NotePlan users.

Bookends vs Zotero.

How to take atomic notes in Scrintal.

Tana

Shu took a look at Tana this week. It’s a nice quick overview. I don’t like the outliner format that Tana uses so I’m unlikely to look at it.

This is a high level UI look at what Tana is.

Ev also did a great short overview of capturing and finding information in Tana.

Maggie did a fairly long look at how she’s using Tana.

logseq

Some good discussion and links in this forum post on Logseq vs Obsidian.

Taking notes in Loseq.

Craft

While Craft does have it’s own format, I find it quite portable. Here are 5 ways to export data from Craft.

Using Shortcuts you can get a global new note keyboard command for Craft.

Obsidian

Here is an excellent hour long stream showing you how to make a theme in Obsidian.

The Obsidian Projects plugin looks interesting.

Some plugins you probably should know about in Obsidian.

Notion like databases in Obsidian.

Quick Add is excellent, here is a short video on how to use Quick Add. Here is my video on using Quick Add as well.

For the non-coders, here is a video on using Obsidian.

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