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by smeej
995 days ago
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Why is writing long-form works the only type of output that matters? I use my PKM to connect the ideas I've read about over time. When I come across a topic again, I can quickly review what I've learned about it in the past, and how it connects, sometimes in obscure ways, to other things that have crossed my radar. This helps me come up with a wider variety of ideas for how to solve problems in front of me, or new connections to draw on or people to contact for feedback. I don't care about any one topic enough to devote the necessary time to writing a book about it, but that doesn't mean the system as a whole doesn't provide me a whole lot of value. Maybe this is just a misunderstanding between the specialist mind and generalist minds. The variety of things I can speak about and connect together intelligently is the value I bring to a company or a conversation, not the extraordinary depth I can go to on any one individual topic. I suspect there are a lot more generalists like me using PKM software like Obsidian than there are specialists. |
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Here's a real example: Just this morning I was setting up my new 13th gen framework laptop (it's amazing btw, thank you to framework for making Fedora such a great experience on it!), and I hit Ctrl+r in my terminal to find a previous command. I was surprised to see the standard bash handler instead of the fancy terminal history tool that I installed on my previous laptop. Using my notes I was able to quickly find that the tool is "atuin" and I was able to see exactly what commands I ran to set it up back in the day. This is a tool that doesn't have a great installation story for Fedora. I ended up building rom source and installing, and I'm not a rust person so I would have to look that all up had it not been in my notes. I didn't have time for a long distraction, and my notes saved me on that. It probably adds a 10% to 20% overhead of effort to the original task, but then saves me time in the future.
I have also benefitted greatly from numerous notes on customers/clients that I can pull up and see quickly what the last thing I did/said to them was. After months of not talking to them, it's very easy to forget or blend their details into other customers. The notes can be life savers.
There have also been times when I needed to do some technical task and I remembered having done it years earlier. Finding those notes can be an incredible time saver, especially when it skips me past the first couple hours of research!