Began my Migration over Christmas. Hit 1.700 Notes as of today. Still a lot to got, but it helps me a ton to get to stuff notion kept hidden under menus for me. Love this tool. Obsidian feels so much more intuitive after half a year for me than notion ever did after 5 years.
Thanks to everyone here I learnd a ton about setting up Obsidian! Dankeschön! :)
I hated Chrome default bookmark manager because it look so outdated and lacking features, so I uses this app in the image to manages my links (I dont like Raindrop io because its too expensive and look like a reading list and wallpaper manager than link library).
I wanna know what tools do you uses to manage your links or how do you use Chrome bookmark manager?
Something goes into my notes and I feel briefly organized. Then two days later I'm in a meeting and I vaguely remember having something relevant but I can't find it fast enough to use it.
Do I search? Keyword search is useless if I didn't tag it right. Do I scroll? That takes forever. Do I just give up and let the meeting go on without that context?
Most of the time I end up half-present in the meeting while trying to find something on my phone under the table.
What does the ""fast recall during a meeting"" step actually look like for people who have this working?
Hi everyone! Thanks to the newest Obsidian plugins update, Fast Callout is now ready for download! I'm grateful for the support and feedback I've gotten (https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1q3sjwi/made_a_plugin_for_faster_callouts/) from this community and will continue to make this plugin better while staying as lean/simple as possible.
Here's the plugin if you'd like to try it out: https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/fast-callout
It's an intentionally simple plugin that removes the friction from making callouts. If you have any suggestions or improvements, please feel free to comment below and I'll try my best to get these into the plugin.
I keep thinking about the gap between notes and files.
In most PKM systems, notes are treated as knowledge.
They can be linked, tagged, resurfaced, connected to projects, connected to people, connected to ideas. A note does not have to mean only one thing.
But files don’t behave like knowledge.
They behave like storage.
A file can be the result of thinking, but it often gets treated like something to be stored.
A PDF, a screenshot, a spreadsheet, a design export, a draft, a recording, or a small piece of code can contain just as much personal knowledge as a note. Sometimes it is the actual artifact that came out of the thinking.
But once it becomes a file, the system around it becomes much more rigid.
It needs a location.
It needs a folder.
It needs a name good enough to be found later.
That feels very different from how knowledge actually works.
The same file might matter because of a project today, a topic next month, and a completely different decision six months later.
In a note-taking system, that kind of overlap feels normal.
In a file system, it feels awkward.
I’ve seen people solve this in different ways: links from notes, PARA, tags, aliases, DEVONthink, Hookmark, project dashboards, or just very disciplined folder structures.
But I’m still wondering whether files are treated too much like static objects, when they are often part of a living knowledge system.
Maybe the question is not “where should this file go?”
Maybe it is:
“How should this file stay connected to the contexts where it becomes useful again?”
Curious how people here think about this.
Do files belong inside your PKM system, or do they stay as a separate layer that your notes point to?
Although Obsidian is primarily a local-first system, I still wanted a way to share parts of my notes and workflows online.
So I started exploring how to publish an Obsidian vault using Quartz + GitHub Pages.
After a lot of trial and error, I finally got everything working last week. Surprisingly, the publishing workflow turned out to be pretty smooth and much simpler than I expected.
Here’s the current result:
The site is still a work in progress, but it already supports things like:
I’ve also been gradually organizing my own productivity & life management system built in Obsidian over the past few years.
Curious to hear how others are publishing or sharing their Obsidian setups online.
Why capture friction matters more than organization
I’ve started noticing that most information isn’t lost because people don’t care.
It’s lost during interruptions, context switching, quick requests, or conversations that feel “too small” to open a full system for.
By the time something is properly organized, attention has already moved somewhere else.
That’s made me think that the real bottleneck in many PKMS workflows isn’t organization.
It’s capture friction.
The easier it is to quickly capture a thought in the middle of real life, the more likely the system survives actual daily use.
Curious how other people here think about that tradeoff.
Every productivity setup I tried had the same problem: the tools were somewhere else. Another app, another tab, another login.
So I built a Chrome extension that transforms the new tab page and puts everything I need right there:
The idea was simple: the new tab is already the most-opened page in your browser, why not make it do something useful?
All your data stays local on your device, no accounts, no sync drama, no dashboard you have to navigate to. You can also export and import everything whenever you want. Just open a tab and your stuff is there.
If you want to give it a try: Memotab
Would love to know if this scratches an itch for anyone else, or if there's something you'd want added. Always looking to improve it!
Most of my workflow already lives in Neovim — code, prose, notes, scratchpads. The piece that always lagged was querying the notes. Plenty of tools let me grep them; almost none let me ask things like "all the drafts under tasks/q2 that link to people/alice" without leaving the buffer.
Turns out you can. IWE is a Rust binary (LSP server + CLI) that treats a directory of .md files as a queryable graph. Install once, use it from the editor over LSP and from the shell over :!.
The query language is small and reads like Mongo's:
iwe find --filter 'status: draft, priority: {$gte: 8}'
iwe find --filter 'author.email: {$exists: true}'
Frontmatter is the schema. Markdown links are the relationships — and there are two kinds, which the engine actually distinguishes:
Each gets its own pair of operators:
iwe find --references people/alice # docs that link to Alice inline
iwe find --included-by tasks/alpha:0 # everything under alpha's tree (unbounded)
iwe find --included-by tasks/alpha:0 --references people/dmytro --filter 'status: draft'
That last line: drafts under the tasks/alpha subtree that also mention people/dmytro inline. Three relationships, three flags.
The same predicates drive iwe count, iwe update, iwe delete. Bulk-set frontmatter from the shell:
iwe update --filter 'status: draft, reviewed: true' \
--set status=published \
--set published_at=2026-05-02
update and delete require an explicit --filter (no accidental whole-corpus rewrites). --dry-run previews.
From inside Neovim, this composes two ways.
The same iwe binary is also a markdown LSP server, so the editing side feels like working in code:
There's a dedicated plugin — iwe.nvim — that wires the LSP up and adds Telescope integration with hierarchical path search (notes show as Journal ⇒ 2026 ⇒ Week 18 ⇒ Mon notes). Lazy / packer / vim-plug all work.
For querying, you don't need a special integration — the CLI is enough:
Same install handles both: cargo install iwe and you have the LSP server + the CLI. The LSP runs against any folder of .md files; the CLI queries the same folder.
Side note: this also turns out to be a decent shape for AI agents. They use the same CLI you do, see the same files, and git log is your audit trail for whatever they touch.
Repo: https://github.com/iwe-org/iwe · Plugin: https://github.com/iwe-org/iwe.nvim
Curious what the heavy notes-in-Neovim crowd thinks, especially on the inclusion-vs-reference link split.
Solo dev here building StashSync.app (offline-first notes/bookmarks/files).
Mistake I made:
Built features I thought were cool. Nobody used them.
What changed:
Started actually listening. User said "I lose notes when WiFi drops" → made offline-first the core feature. Another said "tired of 5 different apps" → combined everything in one.
Now I:
Result???
Users feel invested. Retention up. Scary but exciting. User feedback got me here, trusting it to take me further.
Happy building!
I’ve been trying to find a better balance between capturing notes and actually using them. I’ve noticed that as my collection of notes grows, it becomes harder and harder to keep things organised to the point where I spend more time managing my notes than actually gaining value from what's inside.
For those of you who have been building your personal knowledge bases for a long time, do you have any specific habits or mental models to keep the system usable? At what point do you decide a note is "good enough" versus needing to spend time filing or structuring it?
Curious to hear how others keep their notes useful without it turning into a full-time administrative job.
Previous Posts
Apr-26: https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/1s9n9oq/self_promotion_april_2026/
Mar-26: https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/1rixft7/self_promotion_march_2026/
Feb-26: https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/1qvaisw/self_promotion_february_2026/
Jan-26: https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/1q0xtn2/self_promotion_january_2026/
Dec-25: https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/1pcfjq3/self_promotion_december_2025/
Nov-25: https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/1omyw0q/self_promotion_november_2025/
Oct-25: https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/1nuv5u6/self_promotion_october_2025/
Something goes into my inbox and I feel briefly organized. Then I open the inbox the next morning and just stare at it. Do I summarize it? Write a note from it? Tag it and move on? Most things end up sitting there until a periodic purge. What does the day-after step actually look like for people who have this working?
Does anyone have experience in setting up a full PMMS with just MS Word, hyperlinking everything and setting a wiki like style?
Saving something feels like engaging with it. It isn't. The information doesn't make it into your head from being bookmarked. The article is just in a slightly better-labeled graveyard than your browser history. I've been trying to figure out whether there's a save-to-read system that actually works or whether the whole category is wishful thinking. What's your honest experience with it?
been in the PKM space for about 2 years. obsidian user. I've gone through the full zettelkasten-to-simple-notes pipeline and I want to share what I actually do now vs what I thought I'd do when I started.
what I thought I'd do: read something, write a permanent note with my own thinking, link it carefully to existing notes, build a beautiful web of interconnected knowledge, stumble upon insights while browsing the graph.
what I actually do:
capture is chaotic. thoughts come at random times. walking, cooking, between meetings, in the shower (after, not during). I have two capture methods: typing into my daily note when I'm at my desk, and talking out loud when I'm not. for the voice part I use Willow Voice, an AI voice dictation tool, and just say whatever the thought is. "that article about spaced repetition had a point about retrieval practice being more effective than re-reading, look into whether this applies to how I review project notes." it goes into the daily note as a raw dump.
processing is weekly. sunday morning, coffee, 30-45 minutes. I scan the week's daily notes and pull anything worth keeping into its own page. this is where I add tags and links. I don't do this daily because I tried that and it felt like homework.
linking is minimal. I tag things by topic and add maybe 1-2 backlinks per note. the people who have dense link networks with 15 connections per note are either way more disciplined than me or doing a very different kind of knowledge work. for my use case (product management, strategy, market research) tags and search cover 90% of retrieval.
review is inconsistent. I have a weekly review template that I follow maybe 60% of the time. when I do it my notes are way more useful. when I skip it things get dusty. still working on this.
what I wish someone told me at the start:
- the perfect system is the enemy of the system you actually use
- capture speed matters more than capture quality. you can always process later. you can't capture later.
- graph view looks cool in screenshots but I've never once had an insight from looking at it
- the real value isn't in individual notes, it's in having a searchable history of your own thinking
what does your actual daily PKM workflow look like? not the ideal, the real one.
I have tried every note taking methodology you can name. Zettelkasten, PARA, GTD, Building a Second Brain. Each one worked for exactly as long as I was reading the book about it.
Here is what I eventually learned. The best system is the one you actually use. Not the one that looks best in a screenshot.
I stripped everything down to three principles. Capture fast without worrying about structure. Process weekly. Search instead of filing.
The biggest unlock was realizing that metadata is not the same as thinking. You can spend all day tagging and linking and never actually process an idea. The work is in the processing.
What is the one principle that made your system actually work?
A lot of my work comes out of calls, brainstorms, workshops, and random voice notes to myself after a client conversation.
What I still can't figure out is whether it's better to stay fully in the conversation and deal with notes later, or keep documenting as I go so I don't lose anything.
Every time I try to capture too much in the moment, I get pulled out of the actual thinking. But if I don't write enough down, I end up rebuilding the whole conversation later from memory, which is its own tax.
I’ve heard that transcription services like Otter and Plaud might help with these issues? I wonder how effective they are, still not sure if that's the better system or just the less stressful one.
If ONE more person asks "How do you surface forgotten notes/ documents/ videos"....
Search the REDDIT damnit.
And get yourself organized.
I know many of us have different online subscriptions, and I was wondering if you track and save invoices for these services, even if you may not use them in the future?
Most apps/services have a dedicated billing section where you can download your invoices.
Do you think it’s worth the time and effort to save invoices from all your subscriptions? I understand that keeping them can be useful for business or tax purposes, but apart from that, do you intentionally save your invoices or just leave them in their respective apps billing sections to rust?
