Every attempt at PKM has landed me in the same place: a huge mess
Hello All,
As someone with ADHD, the idea of a system that can organize a maelstrom of ideas into something retrievable is irresistible. (I imagine many can relate.) But every attempt, over decades, from pen and paper to Obsidian to Notion, has ended in a mess that becomes unusable. Once the system gets bloated, I start over with the best intentions, trying to keep things simple. I've lost countless hours in this cycle and hope to figure out where I'm going wrong before I start again.
I have thousands of ideas, thoughts, journal entries, research, etc.
I have various ways to jot things down quickly, but if I don't categorize them, I know I’ll never look at them again, especially long journal entries. I used to record notes, which are automatically transcribed, but now I have hundreds or even thousands of transcriptions that are effectively meaningless. I don’t know what I’ll do with them, so they just pile up, collecting, not connecting.
If I try to organize them, that creates friction, and after a valiant effort, things get out of hand. There are too many notes and too many ways to link them, and many are just the same idea phrased differently.
Even with proper linkages, at some point, 200 notes on a topic become clutter, and there’s no way to distill it when I need it.
Sometimes I feel like all this effort to manually do what my brain cannot is futile. If I’m writing something and want to reference a topic, I get overwhelmed by too much information.
Should I stop trying, or is there a method that can help someone like me?
I was excited about AI in Obsidian or Notion, but the results were inaccurate or incomplete (e.g., “show me all my notes on a topic” or “how many notes do I have?” give partial results). Maybe I didn’t set it up correctly, but figuring it out was too overwhelming.
Best,
R
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
The short answer is to do the inverse of what you wrote: connect, not collect. You may get away with dumping collected material in a folder and try to make sense of things """later""".
But time and attention is precious.
Only add stuff to your Zettelkasten after you processed it. That's the ideal, and that's our actual recommendation everywhere. A good system may survive skipping a thorough processing here and there. But while the system survives, you won't get anything out of that kind of input.
In theory, a resilient Zettelkasten can handle garbage, even inordinate amounts, because you don't rely on retrieval methods that surface the garbage in the long term. (Read: you rely on links and manual structures more than e.g. full-text search.) But if you do need to use sub-par methods of retrieval to find something you 'lost', if you do need to search, in practice all that garbage can get in your way.
There's hardly anything I can recommend other than start fresh and import what you miss as you notice you miss it.
Now if you have the compulsion to record and transcribe and save and store, and if that doesn't go away, by all means do scratch that itch. But dump it in another place to keep your actual thinking space clean, because no system thrives from garbage input. At best, it ignores it.
Maybe it helps to have a large "inbox" folder somewhere. Maybe an "inbox2024" folder, and next year, dump it into "inbox2025", and after a couple of years, maybe consider deleting the folder that are older than say 3 years or so, unreviewed. Similar to declaring inbox/email bancruptcy, it's important to realize that you can't work your way out of a mess that large. Deleting so many things is scary, but otherwise, you're not doing anything with it, either; so why bother keeping it around? (And if you really, really can't bring yourself to delete the unprocessed stuff -- storage is cheap; keep it somewhere out of sight, in the digital basement.)
The depth of processing material is an important factor to think to some purpose. If the depth is literal zero, it's not worth continuing that practice. It's fooling oneself with the Collector's Fallacy.
(N.B. I still collect ideas and tasks in an inbox file and need to delete things from years ago because I never get around to properly emptying it every now and then; it doesn't feel good to delete, because I assume that I'll lose potentially valuable things. But the potential is never realized. Still feels tough.)
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
I feel you
AI in notion is not that sophisticated to give accurate answers about anything, still requires proper pages maintenance;
Smart connections in obsidian may work better, but there are also nuances in settings and prompts you need to learn.
You can try saner.ai
Another local solution - reor
Clutter:
You may create 3 layers of hierarchy simultaneously:
You can view them as 3 hierarchies plopped ontop of each other.
Tree is used for search and your sanity. You want to be able to add and change branches easily. move it around. For this you can just specify children/parents as links inside notes or use namespaces (like [[grandparent]] -> [[grandparent.parent]] -> [[grandparent.parent.child]], here changing branches could be done through batch renaming and merging).
Overcollecting: from my experience, problem stems from overestimating importance of things and from inabiliy to estimate actual usefulness at the moment without studying things deeper.
Currently i overcome this by incremental approach - using incremental reading and spaced repetition system, spaced inbox.
The idea is to offload the need to decide and look through all those items manually. Also you prevent yourself from famous ADHD jumping around 1000 of items by focusing yourself on one-at-atime.
You just get scheduled items and decide what to do with them: delay again, throw away, relate them to smth if you remembered anything related, do smth with them. Items you don't actually need automatically gets thrown far away.
Incremental Reading:
Incremental reading
Explanation #2 of IR
Explanation #3 of IR
Some explanation of incremental approach to writing
You can use IR in apps such as logseq, remnote with special plugins. Doing IR in Anki is not frictionless.
Spaced inbox:
Spaced repetition can lower the stakes around destructive inbox-maintenance operations
Spaced repetition systems can be used to program attention
Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to incrementally develop inklings
I use Anki for my SRS.
In anki i have special deck named "inbox" where i put every idea i can't relate to anything.
You NEED to create guardrails for yourself. Spaced inbox and incremental reading will serve as one of such guardrails.
I am unqualified to offer advice, because I don't have ADHD and don't know what it's like to have it, and I'm not a specialist in the condition. "I get overwhelmed by too much information" is about as far from my experience as I can imagine, unless it's the end of the day and I'm tired or sick. So, I'm not competent to say anything, and please ignore the following comment if it's not helpful:
I would suggest that you write a simple specification of the method you choose to use, in other words, a clear and simple documentation of the method that you will commit to using and will commit to updating it if it's not working. Cal Newport called this your "root document", and here's a short blog post about it that you can read. I shouldn't suggest what should go in your root document due to my lack of competence regarding ADHD, but I suggest giving Cal's blog post a read and considering it among whatever other advice that you choose to try.
It's hard to say something, not having any experience of ADHD.
Some parts of my note system are a really mess, it's not a problem in my case, I don't live this as an issue. as @ctietze says, Zettelkasten become robust over time. But this is for me, so it's a useless consideration.
Maybe ingest less content, limit to what you really need, and connect more can alleviate the problem, keeping the effort manageable.
In my experience connections, using in particular structure notes/map of content (made topo down or bottom up) and descriptive note titles, is the most effective way to maintain usable my system, today made of some thousands of notes.
I can't remember every single note I've written about a topic, but I can meet it again using another note about that topic as a gate.
I remember a video by Tony Ramella about how to structure notes in a simple and effective way, it should be this:
Take a look at this channel, maybe you could find good ideas
https://www.youtube.com/@TonyRamella/videos
It sounds to me that the assumption is that you create a system that can absorb your habits of knowledge work (e.g. your information diet, processing habits etc.).
This assumption is incorrect. It is a feedback loop which includes changes on both sides.
An example from my own journey: I saw myself as someone who has a very broad repertoire of knowledge. I identified myself strongly with my ability to get enthusiastic about almost all topics. Together with biographic idiosyncrasies and other beliefs about my identity, the result was a very disorganised reading habit, which then fed into a very disorganised processing habit.
One of my hopes for the Zettelkasten Method and one of the reasons why I developed (= built on Luhmann's article) it was that I could keep my knowledge work habits mostly intact, but the Zettelkasten would streamline my output. As a trainer, I call that change resistance.
It is true that the Zettelkasten Method has a streamlining effect, but it is by far not enough for many people. By temperament, I am an orderly, very industrious, highly entropy-resistant (~dealing with uncertainty) person with an exceptionally high interest in abstract ideas. (According to psychological testing) These are good conditions, but the Zettelkasten wasn't enough to balance my above fallacious beliefs.
I had to work a lot (still working on it) to structure how I work. My exceptionally high interest in abstract ideas, for example, makes me vulnerable to distractions. I don't change subjects on the hour, but left on my own, I'd change my focus every couple of weeks, which I did for years. My output of ideas was very high, and my Zettelkasten feasted on my input to grow nice and fat. My public output was pathetic and still is quite low.
Any system, Zettelkasten or not, will also inherit your intentions. This is why I put a high emphasis on developing intentionality when it comes to the application of the method.
So, I'd like to encourage you to work to structure the whole chain of value creation.
These is the public material on that:
https://zettelkasten.de/posts/how-to-create-value-in-zettelkasten/
https://zettelkasten.de/posts/every-step-value-creation/
Most likely, this is a problem of intention. The following is more evidence for that:
Intention structures how you'd connect the ideas (never connect notes, connect the ideas!). Lack of intention confronts you with all the possibilities, which are infinite. You being overwhelmed is a natural and perhaps even healthy emotional reaction to your situation. I'd be overwhelmed, too. And I was sometimes overwhelmed myself.
My suggestion is to start with a clear goal in mind and stick to it. An example from my own work:
The next book I will process will be Outlive by Peter Attia. My goal is not to capture all the ideas (which is a likely by-product based on my approach) or to understand Peter Attia's approach. Instead, my goal is to use the book as an orientation during an effort to build and improve my foundational knowledge on longevity and health span.
The image gives you an abstract representation of that:
I process this book because it is directly linked to a series of books that I am writing.
The structures in my Zettelkasten represent the knowledge substance.
So, everything is aligned properly. I will miss a lot of possible, nice and perhaps even interesting connections. I will, for example, don't link his current work to the development of his positions, even though it is very interesting to me. I will process the whole book, so I minimise the need to pick the book up ever again. But the processing will be strictly guided by my intention. Surely, I will capture some "interesting", yet not goal-aligned ideas and connections. But they are [happy little mistakes], nevertheless.
I think it is not about the method but the intentionality.
I am a Zettler
I woke up to so many answers! thank you all! I will take some time to go through all this and consider it carefully. Probably will have followup questions
What @Sascha said about intention is good, but I don't see intention as opposed to method, as I take to be implied in his statement "I think it is not about the method but the intentionality". I interpret what Sascha said as "Intention is the most important part of method" in your case (or at least one of the most important parts). If you can instruct people to do it, as Sascha did above, then it can be part of a method, and you could put it in a "root document" specifying your method, which I mentioned in a previous comment. Clarifying your commitments/intentions/goals would be a key purpose for such a document.
Forgot to attach to previous comment
Also some insights i got from some thread on reddit with adhd people sharing their advice with using obsidian. Pasting it here in case you will find something useful. I think you can apply it to several-apps approach too with some tweaks.
daily/weekly notes/ work
inbox and notes
Note templates
linking, navigation
[[]]brackets everywhere without worrying about filling them right nowmethodologies and adaptability
Novelty, motivation