My PKM - Two Notes Apps Are Better Than One
I’ve written several times here about PKM - personal knowledge management. It’s been a big focus area of mine for the last few months and I’m continually making efforts to learn more on it, and make myself more effective at it. The idea that our personal knowledge is one of our most valuable assets in life - maybe sitting just below time and health - makes a lot of sense to me.
There’s an old saying about “two heads are better than one” and there’s a much newer idea put forward by Tiago Forte (the author of ‘Building a Second Brain’) and others that notes apps are the perfect tool to build a second brain and capture our ideas and thoughts. This was not my PKM strategy or part of my game plan for it, but it turns out that at least for now two notes apps are better than one for me. I could call this the Second and Third Brain or Three Brains plan - but that might be a little over the top :)
The two apps I’m using are Notion and Obsidian - both very popular solutions in the PKM and creating a second brain space/s. I don’t know if I’ll continue using both forever, but for now I have some solid reasons for doing so. Those reasons are mostly about taking advantage of the best features of each and using them each in the parts of my PKM process where they seem to fit best. There is some overlap as well when they are both great at a particular use case and both offer strong features to support the use case.
This is my quick rundown of some of the features I love in Notion and Obsidian, how I am comparing and testing out my use cases for them, and my usage trends with each of them:
Quick Capture: Happily, both apps are great for capturing notes quickly when an idea strikes me at a random moment, during meetings, and in any other quick capture situations. In addition to this working well in general, it has also been easy to create simple templates for quick capture in both.
Longer Notes / Research Notes: Again, both apps are very capable when I’m taking notes during a long meeting, watching a webinar with lots of good things to note, making notes on a lengthy report or whitepaper, and so forth. Finding my favorite for this use case has been a back and forth battle; right now Obsidian has the edge because I prefer its collapsible and hierarchical headings to the separate blocks of text/content in Notion.
Zettelkasten Fleeting, Literature, and Permanent Notes: Zettelkasten is another compelling approach to capturing, organizing, and making the best use of our best thoughts, with a huge amount of history behind it. It’s a method I’ve been exploring quite a lot over recent weeks and seeing how it fits into my overall PKM efforts. So far it feels like a keeper to me, and again it is easy to use this method in both Notion and Obsidian. Here’s a screenshot of my Zettelkasten dashboard and a table view of my Zettelkasten research notes (I have swapped literature for research in my naming of these) in Notion - built from a template by Matthias Frank.
Graphical Elements: Each app has their strengths here as well: Notion lets you add a page icon and page cover; using these really makes notes stand out in just about any view and they’re also just fun to work with. Both offer good ways to visualize or (sort of) mindmap ideas - Notion with boards and other blocks, Obsidian via its stellar Canvas feature. Obsidian’s star feature here is powerful graph views and local (to an individual note) views that are great for seeing the connections between notes / thoughts / ideas - like so, with my “Concepts” map of content at the center of it:
Working with PDFs: Obsidian works best for me for working with PDFs. It is simple just to drag and drop them into my vault (Obsidian file storage) and then use it as a PDF reader that I like better than any of the usual options for that.
Readwise Integration: Notion is the clear winner here. Readwise is a brilliant app in the “read it later” category - meaning it’s easy to save articles to it from other apps, posts on the web, podcasts, and more places when you don’t have time to read them in the moment, but know that you want to get back to them later. It can also pull in Kindle books, and even your highlighted sections in them, and more. Both Notion and Obsidian have integrations with it, but I find that the Readwise items are much more cleanly formatted and easier to work with in Notion.
All the Cool AI Stuff: Both apps have AI integration and a solid set of features for making use of it.
Security: Obsidian wins in this area. Notion offers two-step verification with my (basic) Plus plan, but additional security features require an upgrade. Obsidian’s biggest security feature is that I can keep my vault completely local, with no cloud sync. Sync to my phone uses end-to-end encryption using the AES-256 encryption standard.
All in all, both these note taking apps are stellar, and both are very useful to me on a daily basis.
Please share a comment if you use one of these apps, have tried out or are using the Zettelkasten method, or just have thoughts on approaches to PKM.
Always a fun and insightful blog from you, Patrick!
I've tried Notion but not tried Obsidian -- not even for a "test drive." Maybe someday.
Ernie
I pretty much live in Notion these days, and despite some occasional slowness and no offline mode, I think it’s great. I’ve never really understood Obsidian, might need to have another look. Great blog post as always.