Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

Personal Knowledge Management is the practice of capturing, organising, and retrieving ideas, notes, and references over time to support thinking and writing. The goal is not storage for its own sake but a growing network of linked, revisitable ideas that compounds over years.

Modern PKM draws from several overlapping traditions:

• Zettelkasten and Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes, for atomic, linked, permanent notes written in one’s own words
• Evergreen notes (Andy Matuschak) for concept-oriented notes that grow through dense linking
• PARA (Tiago Forte) for the Areas versus Projects distinction, which Zettelkasten has no opinion about
• Linking Your Thinking (Nick Milo) for bridging these ideas into an Obsidian-native workflow

This vault combines them in Obsidian.

This vault

Numbered folders carry the note lifecycle, from capture through to publication, and sort in order in the file tree and in Obsidian Publish. Non-numbered folders are workspaces and operational areas that sit outside the lifecycle.

Folder	Purpose
Agents	Agent configuration and working files.
Archive	Retired content kept for reference.
Areas	Ongoing life domains with standards to maintain (e.g. Personal Finance).
Attachments	Images and media.
Daily Notes	Journal entries and fleeting notes.
Inbox	Quick captures. Flat, processed weekly.
Notes	The Zettelkasten. Atomic concept notes and topic hubs. Flat, heavily wikilinked.
Posts	Published writing derived from notes.
Projects	Time-bounded work with a definition of done.
Source Material	External content (Articles, Blogs, Books, Papers, Podcasts, Videos).
Templates	Templates for new notes.

Note lifecycle

Inbox ──┐
        ├──►  Notes  ──►  Posts
Daily ──┘       ▲
                │
        Source Material

1. Capture into Inbox or Daily Notes.
2. Process the inbox weekly. Promote thin notes to Notes, or delete.
3. Develop notes as you revisit them. Rewrite in your own words. Link to related notes.
4. Synthesise into Posts when a cluster of notes supports a claim worth making.

Conventions

• Atomic notes. Each note in Notes captures one concept or acts as a topic hub linking down to concepts.
• Inline contextual links. Wikilinks live inside sentences that explain why two notes are connected. Obsidian’s backlinks panel already surfaces bare connections, so “see also” lists are avoided.
• Hub notes link down. Parent notes link to children. Children don’t link back up.
• Areas vs topics. An Area is a life domain that fails in real life if ignored (taxes, health). A topic of interest is a hub note in Notes, not an Area.
• Source material stays external. Literature notes in Source Material record what the source said. Insights get rewritten in your own words as atomic notes in Notes, linking back to the source.

References