in search of a pkms
It turns out PKMS does not stand for Pokemons. Instead, it stands for Personal Knowledge Management System - a methodology or means of organizing personal thoughts, ideas, and information pertinent to you. It often contains information like your favorite recipes, a rolodex of contacts, todo checklists, facts you've been learning, notes from the day, thoughts about your aunt Marge, and other misc things that are important to you.
Here's a thing about electronic PKMS. There's too many. They do all the things, they do none of the things. My buddy Alex sent me a hilarious Reddit Post that summarizes the state of affairs around PKMS in the modern era. It's too much.
It's especially challenging for someone with my brain type to use PKMS - half the time, we barely remember to use them. Other times, it's a hodgepodge of bullet point notes. I actually have my notes split between five different PKMS, physical notes, and sticky notes. It's chaos.
This is partly because some systems work better than others. For example, Notion is quite clean in its UI - I like the concept of blank open spaces with clean modern aesthetic. However, mechanically, it's clunky. Notion uses databases as their primary object. Then there's Obsidian which has nice features through their community plugins. Their default feature space is also great. And then there's Capacities which sits somewhere between Obsidian and Notion. And so on and so forth ad infinitum.
You see my problem here? Folks on the /r/pkms and /r/productivity subreddits call this "gluttony". Wanting all the features in one application.
The challenge with that is the more features something has, the more unusable it becomes.
At the end of the day, the wisdom comes down to "pick something and use it for a while". I forget where this comes from (actually I looked it up, it comes from Voltaire - but a twist), but people with ADHD suffer from perfectionism and the quote is "Good is the enemy of done".
So for now I think I'll stick with Capacities and see how far I get with it in a year. I'm sure I'll use Notion for big thoughts and because I always seem to wonder if there's a better implementation on another system - but for now I'll have to force myself to use one.
Good luck to me.