Knowledge management takeaways from my PhD
Musings on note-taking
Do you need a knowledge management system?
You don't—but you would make your life harder not to use one1.
The fancy productivity systems, tools, and apps don't make you productive; consistency does. It's necessary to experiment, but you should stick to something.
Beware of the overhead
AI-assisted, color-coded apps with elaborate folder systems sound fancy. But never mistake the feeling of pseudo-productivity of mastering an app with actually accomplishing something important. Mastering the new shiny system might make you feel accomplished, but as novelty ebbs, you might start looking into a shiny new thing.
Keep it as simple as possible, and introduce complexity as you need it
Notecard systems
The value of your notes comes from connecting them to each other. For this purpose, using (physical or digital) notecards is a handy solution.
Types of information
Papers: use a paper management system like Zotero (it's free and integrates with note-taking apps like Obsidian and Notion)
Experimental results: for computational experiments, use an experiment management system (e.g., Weights and Biases, Neptune.ai)
Code: use version control (e.g., git)
Random stuff: use a (paper or digital) notebook2
Time-sensitive: put it on your calendar
The information allocation principle
Information should have its place, especially for projects. Dedicate a place for each, and move all relevant information there. If you find an interesting article, it's OK to save it as a notecard. For collaborative projects, centralized places such as overleaf.com or Google Docs are much better3.
A personal example: I store my notes about papers I read in Obsidian (the papers are in Zotero, and I export from there), but for every project, I move the relevant information to Overleaf.
Beware of information-hoarding
Information is only useful if you act on it. Having a bunch of notes and never revisiting them is a waste of your time. Yes, serendipity can strike and you might find it useful years later (if you can find it among 1000s of notecards), but you need to reflect on whether information hoarding is your way of procrastination.
Revisit your notes
Revisiting old notes seems less alluring than exploring shiny new things4, but the treasure is there. Look for excitement when revisiting your forgotten ideas.
I know world-class researchers who do not even use anything to organize papers... So you can be successful despite not using anything
Cal Newport calls this Working memory, which, just as for computers, is a temporary place
Yes, this will lead to duplication, but avoids information asymmetry arising from your collaborators not having access to your personal notes
This is my nemesis