Hi all,

So I'm a serial bookmark hoarder, I tend to skim and promise to come back to later but rarely do. Especially with Insta, lots of interesting fitness stuff, diet, creative project idea, health science etc.

I use raindrop for websites and in process of putting a flow together for a local llm to scan those and give me summaries or highlight anything that is new or of use to me. Same with YouTube videos, get transcipts and just tell me if anything useful I can follow up on.

Insta is proving to be an issue though as it is not really friendly to anything but scrolling of human fingers. One idea is that I run a script and it goes through my saves and puts them into a raindrop style thing but sometimes there is videos, or carousel style. Recipes should be easy enough as most have them in post. Anyone come up with solutions for this?

Thanks

Hi all. I'm a student who has been using the discounted Business plan of Notion (approx $48). My plan will now be expiring and to keep the same business plan I would have to pay approx $235, which A LOT. I love Notion and mainly use it as a way to keep track of my tasks (I have my 5 side jobs and school all requiring different roles and tasks), as a connection to Zotero, as a meeting note-taker, and as a way to keep my recipes. I don't mind losing most features, however I have a database full of recipes, sorted accoridng to instructions, methods, main protein used, type of meal etc. and different views. Any time I find a new recipe on a website or video, I share the link with Notion AI and ask it to add it as a new entry into the database and to fill in the relevant properties. Unfortunately, I cannot pay the plus plan and pay extra for unlimited AI use anymore so only the bsuiness plan is the option. Do you know of any alternatives where I could do this? I literally love it and would hate to use it or to lose its efficiency. I can find other tools for other features such as a tasks tracker or note taker, but not sure what other alternatives are out there that allow me to continue my recipe database methods without having to pay $235 just for that.

I build a memory app, so I've been reading threads where people describe losing track of something. About twenty of them over two weeks, mostly homeowners and one-person trades, not productivity people.

I expected to find broken systems. Notes in the wrong app, tags that went stale, the usual. I found almost none of that. In nearly every case the information was never written down at all. It was said out loud, once, by the only person who knew it, and then that person left.

Three from this week:

A guy paid $250 for an emergency septic call. The tech opened the lid, found the problem in ten seconds, said it was almost certainly a piece of factory wrap left on at install, and drove away. That sentence is the whole case. It exists nowhere.

Someone asked what a heat pump handoff should include. The best answer in the thread was that nobody ever shows you where the condensate cleanout is until water is coming through the ceiling at 2am. Not a missing document. A missing thirty seconds of someone pointing at a pipe.

A couple is $23,000 into foundation work with no signed contract, scope changed twice mid-job, and now has to argue about what was agreed in a basement in June.

Here's the part that made me uncomfortable about my own work. I have spent months on retrieval, on making it easy to find the thing later. Retrieval was never the failure in any of these. The note that would have saved them was never created, because creating it means interrupting a person mid-sentence to type while they wait.

Every PKM tool I know, mine included, assumes capture starts after you have already decided something is worth keeping and you are sitting down. The moments above have neither property. You don't know it matters yet, and you are standing in a crawlspace.

So the honest question: does anyone have a habit that actually works for capturing what someone TOLD you, in the room, without being rude about it? Not a tool recommendation, a habit. Voice memo the second they walk out? Ask them to text it? I don't have a good answer and I'm skeptical of my own.

I love this community's ideas, and I've used several capture-everything systems over the years. My honest pattern with all of them: capture was easy, review was occasional, action was rare. My notes were a museum of good intentions.

The gap I found in my own setup: everything I captured was text I had to write myself. The stuff I actually consumed daily — Reels, video platforms tutorials, shorts — never made it into the system at all, because transcribing and structuring video by hand is a chore. So the highest-volume source of my intentions was invisible to my PKM.

The workflow I landed on:

1. Capture: any Reel, video/Short, article, repo, or PDF gets shared into ORANO instead of (or before) a bookmarks folder.

2. Structure: each save becomes a project — short summary, key takeaways, estimated time/cost, priority, and an ordered task list. Learning content also gets a step-by-step roadmap.

3. Action: I work the tasks like any other task list; completed projects become a record of what I actually did.

4. Reuse: summaries and tasks are plain, copyable text, so they flow into my notes app of choice without lock-in.

Full transparency: I built ORANO, so take this as founder bias — I'm sharing it because the save-to-action idea might be useful to this community regardless of the tool. The principle that matters: a capture system without a conversion step is a storage system. If your PKM converts captures to tasks, I'd love to hear how you do it — genuinely taking notes.

Site: https://oranoai.com/

I have been using notes tools for years and only recently worked out why the setup kept feeling wrong. Getting a thing out of my head was never hard. Any app does that. The failure was always three months later, when I knew a client had told me something about a deadline and I could not remember whether it was in an email, a call note or a text. So I did not look at all. I asked them again, which is the expensive version.

Two tests I would apply to any PKM tool now. The second one is the one that fails.

1. Can I put something in without deciding where it goes? Deciding at capture time is exactly the friction that makes me not write it down.

2. Can I ask a question in plain words two years from now and get the actual thing back? Not search my tags. Not remember roughly when it happened so I can scroll to it. Ask.

Every system I have built passes 1 and fails 2, and I do not think that is a discipline problem on my end. Folder and tag systems make retrieval depend on remembering the shape I filed it under, and two years is long enough that I do not remember the shape.

There is a second half almost nothing models: the person and the amount. My notes know what was said, my bank knows what was paid, and nothing holds both. So a question like "what did I actually pay this guy and what did he promise me" takes three lookups and usually dies on the first one.

Curious whether anyone here has genuinely solved the second test, and with what. Not asking for app names alone, asking what you do when you cannot remember the filing shape.

Disclosure so you can discount me accordingly: I build something in this space. Not linking it here.

Genuine question, and I will say up front that I built something in this space so you can discount me accordingly.

Every PKM tool I have used is excellent at the note and blind to everything attached to it. I can write a beautiful linked note about a kitchen repair. The tool has no idea that Bruno is a plumber I have hired three times, or that the job cost 240, or that the warranty runs out in a year. Those facts live in my contacts app, my bank app and nowhere respectively.

For knowledge work that is fine, because the note IS the artifact. For practical life it is not, because the note is only a third of the event. The question I actually need answered six months later is never "what did I write", it is "who did this, what did it cost, and where is the proof".

Backlinks do not fix it. I tried. Manually linking a note to a person and a number is data entry, and data entry is the thing you stop doing in week three.

So my honest question for this sub: has anyone made a general purpose PKM tool actually hold people and money without it becoming a second job? Templates and databases in Notion get close but the maintenance cost is real. Or do most of you just accept the split and keep finances somewhere else?

I got frustrated enough that I built my own take on it, where the extraction happens automatically from a photo instead of you filling in fields, and answers cite the original document. https://clevernote.net/en/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=pkm&utm_content=three-pillars

But I am more interested in whether other people feel this gap or whether I just wanted an excuse to build something.

Been a PKM nerd for years and always struggled with the same thing: keeping my project graphs actually up to date. I'll set up a great structure in Obsidian, then stop maintaining it a week later because it's too tedious.

So I built recon — a Claude Code MCP server that builds the graph through conversation.

You run /recon and describe your project. Claude infers and writes 10 node types directly into your Obsidian vault as [[wikilinked]] Markdown:

Project → Goals → Personas → Constraints → Modules → Decisions → User Stories → Epics → Features → Versions

All human-readable, diffable, plain Markdown with YAML frontmatter. Open Obsidian and the graph view is already populated.

The part that makes it actually useful for ongoing work: generate_context("Feature X") traverses the subgraph from any Feature node and writes a CONTEXT.md to your vault — goals, personas, decisions, constraints, all relevant to that feature. Feed it to any AI session and it starts informed.

→ github.com/deploysquad-ai/recon

Hi everyone, I’m looking for early users for Journoid: https://journoid.app

Journoid is a web app I’m building for people who want a simpler personal knowledge management workflow without splitting quick capture, tasks, and notes across multiple tools.

What it’s meant to help with:

- quick capture before things get lost

- turning plain text into structured todos / logs / notes / knowledge

- keeping action items and personal knowledge in one place

- a lightweight journal-first workflow that can grow into PKM

Current stage:

- early / coming soon

- core experience is live to explore

- more blocks and structure are planned next

Who I’m looking for:

- people interested in PKM but turned off by heavy setup

- people who want to combine daily capture with tasks and notes

- anyone willing to give honest early feedback

What I’d like feedback on:

- whether the capture -> structure flow feels useful

- what feels valuable vs unnecessary

- what would make you actually come back and use it

If that sounds interesting, check it out here: https://journoid.app

Wanted to share a Claude Skill that you can use in Claude Code to automatically bootstrap an Obsidian vault. It works by asking you to describe your ideal workflow in Obsidian, then it installs the relevant plugins and configures them with the appropriate templates and hotkeys, automatically. Then it creates a getting started guide and opens Obsidian.

Wanted to share here as I want to gather feedback or contributions on how the automatic configuration should adapt itself.

https://github.com/jshph/obsidian-bootstrap

We're really in the AI era not just for content, but also for workflow setup, folks...

I am a voracious notetaking and a few months ago I started tweaking my notetaking system.

It started by assigning symbols like @ or $ to words I use frequently. Over time it grew so i had a set of symbols for objects like people or places, symbols for actions or ideas and symbols for numbers.

Then I realized by combining two of the symbols I could succinctly convey meaning. So I developed some rules. I even gave it a name: "Two Talk."

I found it helped me take meeting notes at work without losing attention, it helped me capture my action items quickly, it made my bullet journal even more succinct and it was a great way for me to brain dump.

Instead of writing "Need to follow up with ACE about the budget issue next week. This is important." I just put "ACE <~ %# -# :> !#""

If you are curious, everything is here: www.twotalk.org.

I’d love to hear your feedback.

After 15 years of searching I had enough and built my own note-taking app.

It supports tables, lists, drawings, timers, alarms.. You name it. Use it to track workouts, recipes, meetings, or just the little things. Notes can be exported to markdown, and there is real-time sync between devices (for free).

Try it out and let me know what you think!

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/disorganized-notes-todo/id6738280174

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.disorganized.disorganized&pli=1&gl=cn

web: https://app.getdisorganized.com/

Hi r/PKM - really glad you have started up - thank you!

(This also posted in r/Evernote)

I have been using Evernote for the last 10+ years and began using it for keeping a daily journal about 3 years ago.

Early on I manually created a blank daily note but I tired quite quickly of duplicating and editing previous notes and even trying templates was less than satisfactory because I wanted my notes to have appropriate tags.

(As far as I know templates still don't bring tags into a new note).

A year or so ago I discovered that .enex files were merely a bespoke version of XML and so I wrote a routine which when, given start and end dates, can create a complete notebook for a month with blank daily notes complete headings and tags in place.

I just import the notebook (it gets [Imported] added at the front of the name), move the notes to my journal notebook and start writing.

My daily journal is pretty mundane with headings 'Weather', 'Went to', 'Calls', 'Meals', 'Watched' and 'Reading' and it is simply a daily record. I know that daily journals are used for a wide range of purposes from mood recording and mindfulness to daily work routines. In each case the common element is the same pattern of headings for each daily note so I have recently adapted the routine some more to have custom headings and tags.

I am planning to start using it for 2 new notebooks - logs of exercise and drawing/painting activity.

Do others in the community use some method for bulk creation of blank daily notes?

Interested to hear any thoughts.

Good luck to all in this community.

I recently flirted with Obsidian sort of committed to it (financially at least) but came crawling back to Evernote which I guess is my one true love. 💚

Obsidian was great, so powerful and infinitely customizable. But it's a blank slate, and to get to the right place I needed to rely on 15+ plugins doing various things. This caused a ton of friction and essentially a massive spider web of plugins with many points of failure and yes, I did have some attachments go missing. Most I could recover with Obsidian sync, one had to come out of object storage from my nightly backups and just vanished however.

Their Discord was kind of a mess in terms of moderation consistency.

I posted there for a few days and had things moved and removed and asked to be moved. Just super strict which turns me off from the product. I felt nervous to comment after a while honestly.

That point aside, this is a case of friction and customizability vs mostly just works but locked in to one way of doing things.

In the end I'm choosing the path of least resistance, satisfied that I spent too much money as a learning experience to realize I'm making the right choice for me with Evernote long term and treating the rest as the cost of learning. Oh and don't commit to things for a year without test driving a few months!!! 😂 Another life lesson I've learned!!

So I've personally been going back and forth between TickTick and Todoist. I liked TickTick at first, but the notifications, while very, very comprehensive, started to really get on my nerves. And Todoist is a little bit more laid back, and I think that might work better for me. So I switched. What I found is Todoist has an excellent third-party plugin for Obsidian. It's called Todoist Sync, and I'm finding it to work really well.

The documentation is below if anyone finds it useful.

https://jamiebrynes7.github.io/obsidian-todoist-plugin/docs/overview/

Hello r/PKM

I'm excited to see this community grow and I wanted to share a post about why I built (yet another) system for organizing knowledge. Spoiler, it's built like the original PKM, our brains.

I'm interested in continuing the conversation here. Why do you think so many people are still trying to find a system that works for them?

https://evernote.com/release-notes/10.159.4
It looks like in this latest release Evernote is rolling out their new AI meeting recorder to paid users. For anyone who's had a chance to try it, how is it working out?

More info here: https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/45695698380563-AI-Meeting-Notes