[[This]] is the Future of Note-taking and Personal Knowledge Management
The Emergence of a New Breed of Software Is Going to Change the Way We Work With Information
The human brain with its extraordinary capacity to store massive amounts of information still falls short in reliability when it comes to information retrieval, and for some odd reason it tends to fail us especially during crucial moments. Any person who has ever taken a test or has ever been in a serious situation which required them to remember the information they memorized, will, without a doubt, testify to this claim that our brain sometimes behaves like that one friend, who says that they’re always there for us but vanishes without a trace whenever we are in trouble. Jokes aside, fortunately for us, our ancestors did most of the work to solve this annoying problem with one of the greatest ever inventions: writing. It is fair to say that humans have been obsessed with it, and understandably so, since they established a working system of writing around or before the seventh millennium B.C.E.
The information — especially that of linguistic value — which previously could only exist within our brains, could now exist outside of it in the material world, all thanks to the invention of writing. Then the invention of paper made this technology accessible to all. If you ever wanted to remember something but didn’t trust your own brain for it, all you have to do is to write down what you want to remember and later retrieve it by simply locating the medium which contains the information and reading it. This is note-taking in a nutshell, which soon became the staple of learning in the literate world. This is highly reliable in the sense that, as long as you know where to find the information, it will be there for you. Unless, of course, it gets destroyed or corrupted in some way. Unlike our slowly decaying memories which progressively get worse with age, if preserved properly, written information can outlast not just generations but even civilizations.
People soon realized that writing isn’t merely a technology for storing information but can also be used as a tool to think and to organize personal knowledge. To lay down primitive ideas and to build on them without losing track; to write down something to make sense of it; to plan something highly complex by paying attention to every detail, it was nothing short of a superpower. It was as if writing unlocked new capabilities of the brain while improving the already existing ones, by becoming an external extension of the brain. This of course, doesn’t mean that there were no limitations to it. Making too many errors meant that you had to discard the entire page of writing. You can’t move or re-position information. The amount of information you can store depended on the amount of available writing material. The more information you have, the more difficult it becomes to organize it.
Fast forward to 19th and 20th century, and another two such significant inventions again revolutionized the world of information: computing and the internet. Later, with the innovations in word processing, this technology got rid of all the aforementioned limitations of physical writing. It enabled us to use a radically new medium to digitally store and process information at unprecedented speeds and scales, providing us with amazing new possibilities which were previously unthought of, and this power was ready to be harnessed at our fingertips. Now information wasn’t limited to text anymore; graphics, audio and video quickly became just as popular. Location wasn’t a problem either as you could easily access files that are placed in computers across the globe. But due to its nature and the extensive use of this technology at a scale that was previously unknown to humans, the cumulative knowledge and information has been increasing at such an incredible rate that now we can’t rely on the previous methods of simple writing — even if it is done digitally — to make sense of it and to meaningfully organize it for ourselves anymore.
Now, before anyone rushes to the comment section to write a comment in full-caps accusing this article of having a misleading title, let me assure you that this piece is indeed about the future of note-taking and knowledge management and not its history. But it was necessary to paint a rough picture of the history in order to provide a different perspective and also to make a point. The point I’m trying to make is that these new technologies and inventions always open up worlds full of new possibilities, enabling us to do and create things that were previously impossible. Consequently, this slowly increases the level complexity of all things around us, including our own knowledge of the world. These complexities bring with them new challenges. The inability to effectively manage and make sense of the information that we are presented with is one such challenge that we face now. Another justification would be: the knowledge of history allows us to understand and appreciate the present better and enables us to have a better foresight into the future.
Finally, let’s return to the present, where digital technology has made its way into almost everyone’s life, and most people have since migrated their physical written information to the digital medium. Digital note-taking is slowly starting to replace its physical counterpart. Books, notes, documents, research work, everything now exists in the digital world. We have so many different softwares available to edit and to store textual and graphical information. Specifically to handle text, we now have plain text editors, rich text editors and markdown editors to name a few. They store information in single files, and you can place them in folders to organize them, creating hierarchies. But one can see how this isn’t an effective way to manage your knowledge, let alone to access it when you need it. Once this cluster of disjointed information grows big enough, organization suddenly becomes a nightmare, and to meaningfully make sense of all the information you have in there becomes almost impossible, unless you remember where everything is or you decide to manually explore every single file. Also, this process and workflow simply creates too much friction, making the entire process overly-tiresome and unsatisfying.
Note-taking apps like Microsoft OneNote and Evernote solve this problem to a certain degree, by using a combination of tags, hierarchical structures and optimized search. I, personally love the idea of digital notes. I’ve been storing all my personal ideas, knowledge, writings and information in Google Keep for years, which is a minimalistic note-taking app. Yet all my big ideas and personal projects, be it research or personal development related projects, were just lying there; some forgotten, some partially worked on, but none fully realized. These note-taking apps were great for, well, note-taking, but not for storing knowledge or research or for project management. Being limited by the tools I had and being unable to do what I wanted to do was frustrating. I tried working with books, but for someone who has already seen the power of digital technology, using mere pen and paper also felt very limiting especially when working with complicated projects, which honestly felt like a downgrade. Discontented with what I had, I set out on a deliberate journey to find something better to rid myself of this frustration and misery. During this time, I discovered gems like Notion, which is an all-in-one workspace; and Typora, which is a powerful markdown editor with a minimalist design; but then, they were not quite what I was looking for. What I discovered towards the end of this journey, was exactly what I needed in my life but didn’t know it existed. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had stumbled across something truly great: the vanguard of note-taking and personal knowledge management tools.
All the previous software solutions were too hung-up on appearances and building feature-sets, and by doing so they ended up overlooking the idea that writing is a thinking tool. This is exactly what these new breed of tools excel at and because of this they work great as both, note-taking and personal knowledge management tools while also working as an extension of your brain as a thinking tool. Taking inspiration from the way the human brain manages and stores information, they are placing emphasis on organization and friction-less thought; and by doing so, they are building bigger, better, and more powerful tools that seek to solve the modern problems that come with the information overload while also pushing the boundaries of what is already possible.
The central idea is that notes or documents or the information within them will no longer remain isolated. They will be stored in a non-linear structure using bi-directional (two-way) linking and embedding options, enabling a page or a piece of information to exist or to be accessed from multiple places. This enables the user to create a network of information in a similar fashion to how the information is stored and organized in the human brain. Another analogy to explain this in a different way would be to think of the internet, where pages are inter-connected and are so easy to access just by clicking on a link instead of manually navigating to the directory of the web-page. What’s different though, is that in these tools you can even see backlinks which show all the references made to the current page in other other pages, allowing you to jump back and forth between all connected pages. The ability to do this with your own notes is a game-changer. This greatly reduces the chances of information being lost or being wasted, as the structure is built on relationships between ideas and information combined with the ability to be accessed from multiple points, as opposed to isolated information placed in linear hierarchies. For instance, you can create notes of independent ideas and bring them together in new ones by linking them, creating rich and complex ideas with references, radically increasing clarity and rendering the need to restate information unnecessary. This isn’t limited to ideas alone; the only limit is your imagination.
They not only use a non-linear structure but also incorporate tags, search, and even folders, making them far more powerful than their predecessors when it comes to organization. But perhaps it is unfair to compare them to other note-taking apps, as these are on a league of their own. And embedding isn’t limited to text or notes, other media like images, audio, video, PDF files etc can also be embedded within the notes too.
As mentioned previously, the emphasis is also on making thinking or writing as friction-less as possible. This is achieved by heavily relying on keyboard shortcuts and by incorporating variations of Markdown, which is a lightweight markup language used to format plain text, originally created for making writing easier on the web. This means that you don’t have to leave your keyboard to format your text or do most other things, making the workflow as smooth as possible, allowing you to spend more time writing than formatting.
Another common feature found in these tools is the graph, which is a visual representation of the network you have created with your notes, making it easier to see connections that have formed. This is a great way to make sense of the information that you have and to discover relationships between ideas.
Now in order to realize how powerful all of this this truly is, you will have to personally experience it, which finally brings us to the actual software. The two behemoths which (in my opinion) are leading the way, at the time of writing this article, are Roam Research and Obsidian. Other similar alternatives include Remnote, Dynalist, and Workflowy. Both Roam and Obsidian are similar in many ways but they are also very different from one another. Roam is a web-app which can be accessed through your browser, and it stores all your notes in the cloud. Obsidian is more of a traditional application that you download and install on your computer, and as of now it doesn’t have a smartphone app. The files in Obsidian are all locally stored, but it can be used alongside Dropbox or Google Drive or any other cloud services for data backup. Another significant difference between the two is that the former is more of an outliner while the latter handles files like a markdown editor.
To use Roam you have to pay for the subscription which starts from $15 per month or try the 31 day free trial. While they do offer case-by-case discounts for students and scholars, it is still quite expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. I was fortunate enough to experience it for free when it was an open-beta, and honestly, the experience was mind blowing. Obsidian, on the other hand, is and will always remain free for personal use (as it says on their website), which makes it a perfect choice for students or any individuals who are not financially independent. I must say that after migrating to Obsidian I have fallen in love with it. The interface, the workflow, and the customization is far superior to that of Roam’s. Although Roam is clearly the more advanced of the two, Obsidian feels more fluid and even more powerful because it is not restricted to being an outliner. But of course, ultimately it all comes down to personal preference.
These tools are especially great for research, and that is why you will see that so many of their users are actually academic researchers. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that these are only for researchers. They are just as amazing for students and for just about any individual who likes learning, exploring ideas, managing personal knowledge and who wants to make sense of this increasingly complex world of knowledge and information. They are also great for project management. If you are a writer or a content creator, you’re going to love this. They provide you with enough freedom and leave it up to you to to decide how to use them.
While the innovations in these note-taking and knowledge management tools are obviously not the same as the invention of writing or computing, but with an understanding of the evolution of note-taking and knowledge management, we can say that this is a huge leap in the right direction. There is a lot more to come, as these tools are going to pave the way for bigger innovations and are going to change the way we manage information, and what we do with it.
As I write this article in Obsidian, I’m still marveling at how beautiful and incredibly powerful this piece of software is. These tools are still in their infancy, as you will notice that most of them are still in the beta-testing phase, and they are only known to a very small number of people. One can easily predict that it won’t be long until they blow up in popularity, and I hope this article somehow contributes to these tools gaining a wider reach than they already have. The fact that they are already capable of doing so much while still being in the early stages of development makes me really excited to see what else they bring to the table, and what people are going to do with these tools. I can’t wait to see what holds for us in the future of note-taking and knowledge management, which I think, begins [[here]].
