--- title: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management | daily.dev description: A critical response to Brennan Kenneth Brown's article questioning the value of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tools. The author argues that Brown's... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/note-taking-and-personal-knowledge-management-ebmyv5sz5 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management | daily.dev og:description: A critical response to Brennan Kenneth Brown's article questioning the value of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tools. The author argues that Brown's... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/note-taking-and-personal-knowledge-management-ebmyv5sz5 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/eBMyv5SZ5.png og:image:alt: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 18 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A critical response to Brennan Kenneth Brown's article questioning the value of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tools. The author argues that Brown's central premise — asking what Obsidian has contributed to public knowledge — is fundamentally flawed, since tools enable people to contribute, not the other way around. The response systematically dissects Brown's shifting questions, mischaracterizations of Obsidian's stated philosophy, and poorly supported citations. The author ultimately traces the problems to Brown's self-documented practice of writing 750 words in 20 minutes and filling in research later, which leads to sources that don't support the claims made. The piece concludes with an ironic observation: Brown criticizes PKM output while himself prioritizing speed over research rigor. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 64 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-03). **TL;DR:** The community is broadly skeptical of elaborate PKM frameworks and note-taking systems, agreeing that the act of writing matters more than the system itself, while debating whether tools like Obsidian are genuinely useful or just productivity theater. **Sentiment:** 35% positive · 45% mixed · 20% skeptical **The case for** - Writing notes forces active thinking and self-explanation, which is where real learning happens regardless of the tool used. - Searchable, indexed digital notes (e.g., Obsidian) provide long-term accessibility that paper notebooks and tablet notes lack. - Incremental, personalized PKM systems built slowly over time can be genuinely useful without causing choice paralysis. **The pushback** - Elaborate note-taking systems often serve anxiety and the illusion of productivity rather than actual learning or output. - Most notes are 'just in case' captures that are rarely revisited, making the time investment questionable. - The PKM space is full of snake-oil salesmen and cargo-cult frameworks that distract from actually doing useful work. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Commenters are split between appreciating simple, personal note-taking habits and criticizing over-engineered PKM frameworks as anxiety-driven productivity theater. **Hottest debate:** Whether 'use whatever works for you' is pragmatic wisdom or intellectually lazy advice that lets snake-oil PKM frameworks off the hook. **Open questions** - How do you measure whether a note-taking system is actually improving your learning or output versus just providing comfort? - With LLMs able to bypass learning entirely, what knowledge is still worth deliberately acquiring and retaining? - Does the value of note-taking come from the process of writing or from the ability to retrieve notes later? **Highlights** > Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end. A few days ago, someone jokingly asked if Henry Ford had a personal knowledge base in Obsidian... Well, sort of! He had something he called "jot books", where he journaled, kept notes, grocery lists, etc. Not dissimilar to how people use Obsidian. The Henry Ford Museum has fifty of these notebooks: https://www.thehenryford.org/search?Query=%22jot+book%22 How should we quantify the impact of Henry Ford's notebooks? How should we quantify the impact of spreadsheets? Most people who accomplish anything take notes in some form, because writing is a way of thinking. We love to mythologize the tools and methods of accomplished people because we hope it will let us absorb a bit of their genius. But a good camera doesn't make a good photographer. Taking lots of photos helps. Should you take notes? Probably. Does it matter what your method is? Probably not. Whatever works for you. Obsidian (or any other form of notetaking) is successful if it disappears and lets you accomplish your work. > — [kepano on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149190) > The reason I love the Personal Library Science space is directly due to its emergence of information features in a personal library against the idiosyncratic processes of resonance and attention in their creators. The whole discourse around PKM is a problem of the pluralistic framing in modern society that we hide behind individuality while missing the basic points. "Use whatever works for you" is intellectually lazy, and the opposite isn't an authoritarian ontology that people think they are protecting against. Instead the basics are this: Whatever system you currently have to store/search/synthesize/and share information CAN and SHOULD be introspected to improve itself. Some functions are matters of time and space cost/benefits, other metric functions are qualitative, but can be experimented against and improved greatly with creativity and testing. > — [\_bramses on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49148956) > >"Use whatever works for you" is intellectually lazy it isn't in a space that's full of snake oil salesmen trying to peddle you solutions you don't need. The problem with the whole knowledge management thing is that it's full of people obsessed with appearing intellectual and productive while never actually producing anything worth mentioning despite their gazillion knowledge hacks, which was the point of the original article. Just like any other 'life optimization' cottage industry, stop over intellectualizing, stop inventing problems that don't exist and do something useful instead is perfectly valid, much needed advice > — [Barrin92 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149206) > I've realized that most of my tendencies to set up elaborate note-taking systems and frameworks have been an attempt to address my anxiety around learning and productivity. I'm constantly in the mode of "learning defensively" - questioning what I'm absorbing into my mental toolkit, how much I retain, and how much I'd be able to conjure if I needed to solve a problem in that domain. In this context, noting down whatever I come across in Obsidian canvases or webs of interlinked notes or making Anki flash cards gives me some comfort about what I'm doing, and of course satisfies the urge of organizing and categorizing things. But when I relate these activities to learning itself, it becomes difficult to gauge how much of it is necessary. If I don't constantly serialize or test what I'm learning, how do I know I'm learning anything at all? And externalizing so much starts to feel like a burden and gives me less confidence in my own intrinsic ability to just go and do things. I was going to post an "Ask HN" on this topic to see if other people related to this. If anyone has been in this mindset before and managed to break out of it, I'd be curious to know what helped! > — [udbhavs on hackernews · 8 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49147983) > I'm starting to break out of this mentality by noticing that 1. I excelled at my exams without any strange note taking systems; 2. I remember many details down the road, even things I thought I had forgotten. For example, I needed some Linear Algebra, and I was surprised by how much I recalled after 10 years, so much in fact that in 3 days I was on par with when I passed my exam. It would have been worth it to make an Anki flashcard for every theorem? 3. In the exam I used such method I just needed much more time that when I used my minimalist note taking. So much in fact that I question the efficiency of such methods. > — [mm351206 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49148076) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084324) · 49 points · 64 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [I replaced Notion and Obsidian with NotebookLM and Gemini — and it supercharged my productivity](https://daily.dev/posts/i-replaced-notion-and-obsidian-with-notebooklm-and-gemini-and-it-supercharged-my-productivity-ohwmb5cwh) · XDA Developers · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Clankers Made Me Build a Second Brain](https://daily.dev/posts/clankers-made-me-build-a-second-brain-ls6mj1ggn) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [I found a Notion, Obsidian, and Capacities killer, and I’m absolutely thrilled](https://daily.dev/posts/i-found-a-notion-obsidian-and-capacities-killer-and-i-m-absolutely-thrilled-t6kmcaxnt) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Building a UX Research Brain: Atomic Research, Zettelkasten, and Obsidian](https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-ux-research-brain-atomic-research-zettelkasten-and-obsidian-ljvzpkd91) · Simple Thread · 0 upvotes · 1 comments - [Gen Z needs a knowledge base \(and so do you\)](https://daily.dev/posts/gen-z-needs-a-knowledge-base-and-so-do-you--zfur0fz6s) · Stack Overflow Blog · 31 upvotes · 2 comments --- [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/note-taking-and-personal-knowledge-management-ebmyv5sz5) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/note-taking-and-personal-knowledge-management-ebmyv5sz5","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/note-taking-and-personal-knowledge-management-ebmyv5sz5"},"datePublished":"2026-08-02T21:18:01.179Z","dateModified":"2026-08-03T06:40:07.508Z","description":"A critical response to Brennan Kenneth Brown's article questioning the value of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tools. 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