Obsidian for PIM, not PKM
Some of us Obsidian folk, including me, have gotten wrapped around the axle of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) over the years. I remember my excitement in the early days: if I just captured all my thoughts and the world’s knowledge in my proliferating zettels, then, in time, I was sure to become Dr. Manhattan.
Well … that didn’t work. If you have any other ideas on becoming Dr. Manhattan, please shoot me an email.
Alas, I didn’t achieve Great Insights™ through Markdown munging. But there’s a big, fat baby in the Obsidian bathwater. Before PKM, there was PIM: Personal Information Management. According to Wikipedia, PIM is about managing information “for everyday use to complete tasks … and fulfill a person’s various roles.” How boring and reasonable!
I use Obsidian strictly for PIM these days, and it’s a great tool for the job. It can also be a simple tool for the job. You don’t need any plugins or advice from breathless YouTubers. Here’s how I use it.
Work notes
At work, I put almost everything in daily notes separated by H2 (##) subheadings.
I like this approach because it’s simple:
daily notes are an out-of-the-box feature in Obsidian, and
I never have to wonder where to put stuff.
I open the app, hit my keyboard shortcut for my daily note (Cmd-Shift-D), and paste.
Plus, I get automatic timestamping because the ISO date is in the filename.
I’m also starting to play with the new Bases Kanban view now that it’s a builtin.
Personal notes
For my personal notes, I use daily notes for capturing journal entries
(via my gournal),
decisions I made, how I fixed an appliance, thoughts on apps I tried, and that sort of “today I did a thing” stuff.
Those are all in my Daily/ subfolder.
Everything else gets a top-level file:
- Music albums.
- Recipes.
- My doctors and medications.
- The forty-three apps and web portals I need to deal with my kids’ schools, sports, camps, etc., and notes on which one does what.
- The names of neighbors, parents at school, and other folks I meet and may see again. Plus any interesting factoids about them (“worked on the Coraline movie!” etc.). My wife, who remembers basically everything she’s ever heard, increasingly comes to me to consult these notes.
- The type of furnace filter to order.
- Barbers I’ve tried.
- The coffee grinder settings for pourover vs. Chemex.
- CLI invocations for tar, ripgrep, git, jj, etc.
- Cool Neovim tricks.
- My opinions on things like software and devices after trying them.
- Other people’s opinions on things like software and devices, mainly to help me avoid impulsively trying them. (“Oh that’s right, so-and-so tried that app and hated it. Guess I won’t bother.”) I recently captured Baty’s thoughts on Mojopad, for example.
- For each blogger I subscribe to: how I found them, whether we’ve chatted via email, a post or two that I liked, etc.
- Lots, lots more.
Wrapping up
None of this leads to great insights, but it’s extremely handy information to have at the ready. I’m constantly putting my work notes to use, especially with LLMs, and I refer to my personal notes many times a day.
I like Obsidian specifically for a few reasons: I’m a fan of wiki-linking, search works very well, I can edit the vault with my favorite text editor, and everything is stored locally on my devices so I’m not dependent on an internet connection.
But you could get the same benefits from most other note systems. Heck, the Bullet Journal crowd does it with pen and paper.
PIM FTW.