How to manage your personal knowledge easily and practically

Notion and Obsidian

Notion is a productivity tool that defies conventional categorization. It is a digital workspace that lets you take notes, manage your tasks and projects, organize your calendar and to do lists, create documents and journals, and more. It is used as a PKM, personal knowledge management, system, i.e., a way of collecting, sharing, creating, connecting, and storing ideas, notes, information, and knowledge.

Obsidian is a powerful note-taking tool (Evernote, Bear Notes). You can use it to create and manage your knowledge base, too. It is free for personal use; available for Windows, Mac, and Linux (AppImage), and most importantly, you own and control your data, so it is future-proof because it uses Markdown and you have total control.

1. Select Create new vault, Create. A vault is a directory containing all your files (notes) and folders. Pick a name for your vault and select a folder/location where you want to store your vault. You can use a Dropbox folder to synchronize between different computer systems.

2. Create new notes. In the “folder” panel, click on the “New Note” button or use the shortcuts: Control + N (Windows), Command + N (Mac). Click Open the Graph view on the left navigation bar to visualize the relationships between the notes in your vault.

3. You can create a link by typing two open braces [[, the name of the note or link, and the two closing braces ]], e.g., [[Linux]]. A tag is a clickable search through your entire Vault for a term. Tags are meta-information about your content, and therefore by tagging your notes (e.g., #markdown, #linux, #free-software), they are easy to find. You can embed attachment files (image, audio, and video files) in your notes, e.g., ![[myImage.jpg]] and use callouts:

   > [!INFO] 
   > This is a callout block that supports **markdown** and [[Help]].
   

   It is a good idea to create a folder inside your Vault to contain your media files (e.g., assets) and change the default attachment location where new attachments will be dropped: Settings, Files & Links, Default location for new attachments.

4. Format your notes. Obsidian is a Markdown-based note-taking app.  

    

5. Settings. A. Editor: Show line numbers, Spellcheck, Spellcheck languages -English, Spanish-, Auto-pair brackets & Markdown syntax. B. Appearance: Base Theme (Light), Themes, Font, Font sizes. C. Core plugins: Tag pane, Templates (Templates are not enabled by default!). D. Community plugins, Safe Mode (it needs to be disabled -OFF- so community plugins can be enabled). Then, you can browse and enable some community plugins: Kanban (create markdown-backed Kanban boards), Calendar, Emoji Toolbar (quickly search for and insert emojis into your editor).

6. Templates let you quickly insert snippets of text into your notes. Set up a template folder: Settings, Templates: Template folder location (e.g., templates). To insert a template, open the command palette (Ctrl+P), Templates: Insert a template.

   --- 
   #{{title}}
   Created: =={{date:YYYY-MM-DD}} {{time:HH:mm}}==
   tag: #linux, #personal, #concept, #justothepoint 
   ---
   Content: 📙
   ### Links 🔖[[Book Reviews]]
   

Other options

• Simplenote is the simplest way to keep notes. It is a light, clean, and cross-platform note-taking tool. It has Markdown support and all your notes will stay updated across all your devices, automatically and in real time.
• Joplin is a free, open source note taking and to-do application. It supports synchronization of your notes across multiple devices.
• Microsoft OneNote lets you take notes on your phone and sync them across all your devices.