A PKM is only as good as what you can find in it

A lot of PhD students experience this as a shift in how they work with their sources — and it’s even more urgent for solo practitioners in and outside of academia. The problem is you start with OneNote, physical notebooks, or scattered text files on your PC, and at some point you’re sitting on a mountain of data you can barely access. Access is the real measure of any PKM. You can say any knowledge system is only as good as how easy it is to find what it has.

• How well this works really depends on the research style you develop. Especially in the first few years, you’ll be on shifting ground — the work changes, your methods change, and you’ll keep adjusting and tweaking your system and inventing new ways of using it. That’s an exciting process (at least it was for me), not a warning sign. Obsidian handles it well precisely because it doesn’t lock you into a structure upfront.
• Obsidian works best when you treat it as a thinking tool rather than a filing cabinet. The best approach is to keep it all simple and focus on the subject matter of your research and methodology, rather than on the tool itself.
• When it comes to data storage, Obsidian probably won’t replace it. Keep raw data in its own folder structure, version-controlled if you can. What Obsidian earns its place for is the layer above that — experimental logs, literature notes, the running thread of “why did I try this, what did I learn, what connects to what.”

That separation is what keeps a PKM from becoming a graveyard.

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Zhenia