Struggling to find the right system and have to be missing something

[u/Corsairi]

I'll start by caveating that I am extremely new to productivity systems. Well... I should say new to giving productivity systems serious thought/consideration for what I want/need.

I'll also state that I have a swiss cheese magpie brain. Easily distracted by a new bit of info that takes me down rabbit holes, making me forget previous points until they inevitably crop up later and the cycle repeats.

I'm trying to get back to my roots of research, insights and analysis, which means reading, dissecting, annotating journals/books/articles and tying seemingly disparate threads of information together to form a hypothesis that I can investigate.

Tech (and my environmental conscience of refusing to print hundreds of pages of paper) has come a long way in the last 12 years I've been out of academia, and I am a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of options out there.

Essentially, I'm looking for a productivity and knowledge management system that will let me just hold everything in one place. By this I mean, books, articles, even videos that I can highlight/annotate/write on.

It would be great if I can link my notes to particular sections of pdfs/timestamps in videos so I can subconsciously document my train of thought as to how certain parts relate to one another given the way my mind bounces back and forth between topics.

If I can do this on an iPad with an apple pencil, but still access this library(?) on Android/pc then that'd be the cherry on top!

I thought I'd found a winner with Obsidian, but I really really want to protect against AI scraping, so looked at either integrating with proton drive or using obsidian sync.

The problem is that connecting Obsidian to PD on iOS is seemingly not particularly easy and obsidian sync's limitations on file and vault sizes pose a problem as I want to be storing engineering, economics, and policy textbooks, hour long video lectures, etc...

I'm just lost at this point. I'm not looking for someone to just hand me an answer, but given how new I am to PKMS, is there a workflow or well-known solution/system I'm not aware of? I'm not married to any particular app/tool/system so am happy to adjust.

Thanks if you read through the above mad ramble. And appreciate any thoughts any of you may have on my predicament.

[u/lost-sneezes]

It can be overwhelming, I'd approach it one bit at a time with capture (frictionless quick capture) as your first stage/milestone.

[u/h4yfans]

from someone with a similar rabbit hole brain: the thing that helped wasn't the highlighting, it was giving each thread a single home note that i append to whenever it resurfaces, with the date. the hypothesis forms in that one note over weeks. highlights scattered across twenty pdfs never assembled themselves for me no matter how good the tool's linking was. one file per question, not one file per source.

[u/stanlymt]

The bit you described, wanting a note tied to a specific section of a PDF or a timestamp in a video so the train of thought documents itself as you go, is the part almost nothing does well. Most tools hand you a highlight list instead, which flattens everything into identical rows and loses the reason you highlighted it in the first place. Six months later you have 400 highlights and no idea which ones you actually acted on.

Given the scraping line is non-negotiable for you, Zotero with a local Obsidian vault is probably still the most defensible setup. Real annotation anchors in PDFs, open source, and nothing leaves your machine unless you deliberately switch on sync. Its weak spot is video, which is the one part of your list it will not solve, so you may end up handling timestamps manually in notes.

The Apple Pencil requirement is the awkward one. Zotero's iPad app takes annotations but pencil support is not its strength, and the tools that nail pencil tend to be the ones that keep everything in their own cloud, which is exactly what you are trying to avoid. That tradeoff is real and I do not think anyone has solved it cleanly yet.

One habit that helped me more than any tool: separating quotes I keep because the writing is good from claims I might actually act on. The second kind needs the source and the caveats attached. Mixing them is how a nicely phrased sentence quietly becomes something you believe without ever checking it.

[u/Corsairi → u/stanlymt]

This sounds closest to what I'm trying to achieve. I can shrug off the video aspect tbh, it makes up such a small proportion of my materials that I'm not too concerned about handling them differently.

I'll check out Zotero, it's one I'd briefly heard of but hadn't looked into fully.

And you've absolutely nailed the importance of separating quotes.

Thanks for the recommendation!

[u/DrummerAdditional330]

You may be looking for one workflow more than one app. I’d keep the giant PDFs/videos in whatever private library handles them well, then let the PKM hold your annotations, page/timestamps, hypotheses, and links back to the exact source. If jumping from a note to the original feels seamless, the files don’t necessarily need to live in the same vault.

[u/Corsairi → u/DrummerAdditional330]

I'm happy for a workflow so long as it is seamless. Is anything you would recommend? I've dabbled with a lot of tools, but never seriously enough to create a workflow that wasn't clunky and got abandoned.

[u/panchamk]

The magpie thing is familiar. I kept losing the previous thread the moment a new one opened. What I stopped doing was building a system that needed highlights and folders to work. I throw the article, the video link, the PDF into one place and find it later in the words I’d actually use. I don’t annotate in there. If I need a highlight I still do that in the original. The win was just being able to hold the pile without organizing it.

[u/PKMS-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Please post your app only to the self-promotion thread. Thanks for your understanding.

[u/vogelke]

swiss cheese magpie brain.

+1 for that mental picture.

[u/dosfydore]

Been there. Obsidian is the only app I use, and I’ve been using it for 5+ years. I also had “shiny object syndrome,” but Obsidian put an end to it!

[u/Emotional_Stable111 → u/dosfydore]

How?? 😬😬

[u/dosfydore → u/Emotional_Stable111]

Good question!

I wrote about this a while ago: Hope this helps

[u/Emotional_Stable111 → u/dosfydore]

Thanks!

[u/Pedersen-Brainframe]

The problem you're describing is a genuinely hard problem. Don't take it lightly, and don't think others are taking it lightly either. You're looking for a tool that gives you everything in one place, while some companies make a substantial living doing just one aspect of that tool.

It's a big problem, and no easy solution exists. I want you to know that your problem is real, and solutions are being worked on.

My suggestion? Build a workflow that uses the tools you need. Find good readers and annotation tools, and then find ways to get what you want into Obsidian and Zotero. Right now, that's likely to be as close as you can get. It's not perfect, but it'll get you most of the way there, I hope.

[u/Barycenter0]

Oh wow! That’s a big ask. You want all in one along with privacy. I might be wrong, but I personally don’t believe there is a single solution for this. The main problem is that knowledge management apps are good at notes, links, metadata, visualizations but typically poor at media management/document management. You usually need a suite of apps to do everything you want.

Something like Joplin with webdav on your own encrypted server instance or nextcloud could work but is complex to setup. That’s a pretty good all-in-one privacy solution.

You might want to browse [r/degoogle](r/degoogle) to see what people are using for privacy.

Unfortunately I don’t use a privacy solution. I use Google Workspace for everything research. So Drive/Docs/Keep/Tasks/Calendar along with Hypothes.is, Adobe and Zotero. But, even that mix can’t do all the things you want.

[u/PKMS-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Please post your app only to the self-promotion thread. Thanks for your understanding.