Knowledge management is hard
Every person dealing with knowledge work has pondered what the best way to organize knowledge is. You've already invested your time and skills to surface the best resources of information. The challenges are now
- How do you organize them in a way that is efficient and makes sense to you?
- What system would you use for grouping related resources?
- How do you retrieve it when needed?
In short, how do you keep track of everything important, connect it to resources that are similar, and then surface them when you need it?
1. How do you organize them in a way that is efficient and makes sense to you?
If you're a non-linear thinker, a digital garden built into a PKM of your choice would be the way to go. If you're someone who thinks in terms of ideas and the links between them, then a Zettelkasten that explicitly rejects any ordered organisation is the best bet. I am someone who thinks in terms of rigid hierarchies - a highly-ordered set of directories and sub-directories in an Obsidian vault is what I use.
2. What system would you use for grouping related resources?
Tags seem like the straightforward solution. However, tags can end up being too vague if you optimise for the breadth of topics/notes covered. Efforts to combat this vagueness by optimising for depth can result in super-specific tags which are hard to keep track of.
3. How do you retrieve it when needed?
Any PKM system that features full-text search should do the job. Tags can be utilized if you've managed to solve for 2 above. This is one side of the coin - you're explicitly searching for information.
Surfacing relevant information at a rate that augments recall is something that deserves a rethink. From what I've heard, spaced repetition systems (SRS) can help, as can homebrew over-engineered systems that convert your notes into embeddings and surface semantically similar notes.
The issue grows when you use multiple disparate systems for organizing.