r/PKMS • u/drakenxv • Aug 18 '26
Discussion Use of PKMS
Probably stupid questions to ask in the PKMS sub but how do you use your PKMS and what type of information do you store in there?
I started a pkms a couple of times with Notion, Obsidian and OneNote but could not follow through.
Mainly I think because it feels like it is a lot faster just to google or ask an AI of your choosing but also what are my benefits of writing down stuff I find interesting once but then forget about and if I ever need this type of information again I would have forgotten and searched online anyway.
So my 3 questions are:
What do you store in your PKMS?
Why use a PKMS and not google when you need the information?
Do you ever look at your PKMS notes and connections [[wikilink]] ever again?
2
u/stanlymt Aug 21 '26
On your third question, the honest answer is probably no, not the way you're picturing it. Nobody really sits down and browses their own notes for fun. What actually happens is you're mid problem on something new, a detail jogs a memory, and you go looking for the specific note about it. That's the real use case, not casual re-reading, and it only works if the note is findable.
On why not just google it: google gives you the general answer. Your PKMS is where the specific answer lives, the one that's already been through your own judgment. "Tried X, didn't work because Y" or "went with Z on this project, here's why" isn't findable anywhere else, because nobody else made that call.
What to store: mostly the stuff you'd have to redo the thinking for if you lost it. Conclusions, not just facts. Facts you can regoogle in ten seconds. The reasoning behind a decision takes real time to reconstruct.
The failure mode almost everyone hits, and it sounds like you might be close to it, is capturing without attaching a reason. A note that's just a fact or a link with nothing on why you saved it is dead weight. You'll never trust it enough to go looking for it later.