We live in an age where large quantities of information bombard us. These include emails, phone calls, text messages, news, magazines, and letters. They come from many different avenues and pass through our consciousness. Because of our brains’ nature, retaining all the information we receive is impossible. We do our best to cull and surrender the information we process to keep what we need.

Even after we cull down what we care about and surrender to the fact that there is too much information, our brains are not perfectly cataloged libraries of the information. Information becomes hard to find or is lost in the basement of our minds.

That is where PKMs shine. They provide a location for us to store the information we find valuable. It is the perfect place for us to store this information. Computers are good at searching for content, and it’s easier to see if the database it is searching is limited to the information you care about and not just cluttered with everything anyone has ever written on the subject or even the subset of extensive data used by modern-day LLM solutions.

The overarching point is that whether we have a strictly codified system for creating our knowledge or not, we all have a limited subset of the knowledge available. If we don’t use a tool to do this, our brains act as our PKMs. They retain the information we have access to and function as the database we use.

So, right now, we have two options:

• Manually write down what we need in our PKMs system, and I hope we find it later.
• Trust our brains to make the connections and keep the information relevant and together.

Neither of these solutions is excellent, but I’ve chosen the first one. If you want to give it a go and put something together, again, here is a list of options and who I recommend them for:

• Notion is an excellent option for someone who wants a lot of features, doesn’t want to learn Markdown, and wants a lot of enhanced functionality. However, it also costs money for features.
• ObsidianMD is my tool of choice. You keep your data locally in Markdown and asset files. You are responsible for managing and backing up your information.
• Evernote was once one of the most used systems for this, but it has lost market share over time. Another company bought it and is not as interconnected as some other tools. Also, it uses a priority feature to store its notes, so it isn’t as transparent as Markdown files.
• Bear App — This was the tool I used before Obsidian. It uses tags, not folders. It uses Markdown but converts it to pretty styles. It uses predefined styles and doesn’t give you the same customization as Obsidian.
• Standard Notes is another product I’m just learning about. It’s like another Bear App or Obsidian-like product.

Keeping files, screenshots, images, and other items on your computer is another example of your knowledge management. Cleaning up and managing your hard drive can be tricky, even following something like the P.A.R.A. method.

My database of information has become crowded, and information is placed in places that are either redundant or hard to find. Even when searching for phrases, it might be hard to find the exact document I’m looking for if I don’t use precise wording.

To conclude, while there are tools to help us with knowledge, they are all faulty and costly. The question is, where do they work and fail for you? Also, is what you are currently doing good enough?

These systems are a way to collect and manage the information in one’s life for reference, research, and retrieval. When discussing Taigo Forte and Second Brains, you discuss organizing and building your PKM.

There are a bunch of tools out there for doing this:

• Notion
• Obsidian
• Evernote
• BearApp

To name a couple. Each of these tools has two primary components:

• You can enter text, pictures, and thoughts into a file.
• You can link files together.

Linking files together creates what some people refer to as a knowledge graph. If you check out r/ObsidianMD, you will see countless posts about knowledge graphs. There is a whole field called graph theory that discusses vertices and edges. While these graphs are very cool, their interconnected nature provides data about how information is connected.

The problem with PKMs, or at least my PKM, is that organizing all the data is incredibly manual. The system user has to organize notes into folders and provide links from one document to another. What if you realize something is tangential later but haven’t connected it? Sometimes, finding a document you are searching for by idea instead of exact text can be complicated. This happens to me weekly, if not more frequently.

Could I be better about linking my documents? Yes, without question. That being said, I don’t always know how to use information in the future. I’m not sure about connections until an idea comes to me. Searching and analyzing information text is one thing that computers are very good at.

One of my friends who also uses a PKM system and knows what Gluino is and that I’m working on it asked:

If gluino could magically parse my obsidian docs that would be very cool Seems like a real hard ass problem though

He is right. This is a tricky problem, but it is worthwhile. It is one of the many avenues ahead of us with Gluino.

Related is the notion that the amount of data available in this information age is enormous. Knowing which data to trust is challenging, as is finding the signal among the noise. One of the reasons I created a PKM is to combine the information I trust with the information I don’t and comment on it. I’m excited about a system that even marginally better understands the information I trust.

While this post doesn’t magically reveal a feature or future, it represents how I process and think through this problem. I hope it helps some.

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