Personal knowledge management, a brief history

Evernote was my first personal knowledge management (PKM) system. 

It was my commonplace notebook; I added quotes, reading notes, articles from the web, and emails. There were bits of knowledge scattered across multiple notebooks, and I tagged these notes with many tags. 

Eventually, it became my document management system. Instead of filing away PDFs of bank statements and bills into a folder on my computer, I uploaded them to Evernote. After years and years of constantly adding to Evernote, I had a lot of notes, and it was a depository of transactional records.

The knowledge (quotes, ideas, reading notes) that I collected was buried by the transaction record notes. The ratio of records to *knowledge notes* must have been 5-to-1. Ultimately, it was challenging to extract knowledge from Evernote.

Looking for a fresh start, I moved to Notion. I vowed that Notion would be my PKM, so it was never allowed to moonlight as a document management system. I used Notion for about a year and built out pages and databases. The PKM looked good, but I had a nagging feeling about using Notion.

I was spending a lot of time building my PKM on a proprietary system that I would have to pay to retain access. If I wanted to move my notes to another app, extracting them to import them into another app. This was the problem, and I didn't want to be locked into Notion or Evernote.

One day I stumbled across Obsidian, a text-based note app. The solution to my problem was promised on their website:

"In our age when cloud services can shut down, get bought, or change privacy policy any day, the last thing you want is proprietary format and data lock-in.

With Obsidian, your data sits in a local folder. Never leave your life's work held hostage in the cloud again."

I'm still delighted with my switch to Obsidian a little over a year in. I came for the text files, but I'm staying for the Markdown, backlinks, and plugins.