Personal Knowledge Management

A few thoughts on taking notes for your work or research:

Don’t copy text written by others; instead archive it in Zotero if you really want to keep a copy. Copying text for your personal notes defeats the purpose of taking notes: understanding and summarizing ideas for yourself.

Copy well-made images for your personal archive since they are useful, but don’t ever forget to keep the attributions in your notes. Otherwise, you will forget the attribution and will risk plagiarism.

Think before you write a note—a note’s usefulness generally derives from the effort you put in. See how to take effective research notes.

Think carefully about how the newfound piece of information connects to what you already know.

Example: If you're writing a note on phase diagrams of proteins, connect it to existing notes, if any, on thermodynamic phases.

Related point: If you don’t have a note yet, it can be tempting to start one, which can be useful or a waste of time depending on your needs. Since these are your personal notes, they need not be encyclopedic. Knowledge gaps in personal notes are fine given our limited time, but if the topic you skipped repeatedly comes up in your research, consider reading about it and writing a note.

Referencing: Use some marker, like `name-year-firstWord`, in the text and include a full bibliography at the end. You can also use pandoc to generate sorted bibliographies automatically; search for how to do it.

Managing project folders is tricky. Dan Larremore suggests making these folders in your project folder: raw-inputs, cleaned-inputs, code, output, figures, and writing. I think that's very useful. Also, keeping a README file in plain text format in your project folder and actively updating it is crucial.

Weekly Review: Using Obsidian to Close Open Loops at the End of the Week.

If you're putting effort into writing notes, consider not writing them in a proprietary format (Word, Google Doc, etc.) and using plain text format, for example, markdown or LaTeX.

Software: A topic that got a lot of attention and funding in recent years. I recommend Obsidian: it's free and has a large community of users.

See The Plain Text Project and Ycombinator post on Managing my personal knowledge base.