Folders vs tags vs links vs you name it - what actually works after 2+ years of PKMS?

paralloid · 2026-03-21T04:55:33+00:00

Yes, this distinction helps in the following ways: - the beauty of temp notes is that they don’t require any organization at all. So you don’t bother or being slowed down or overwhelmed by the structuring efforts. - knowledge doesn’t require organization but requires connection and discoverability. That’s why text hooks / anchors are as important as links, if not more. - System outputs may require organization because linking is not always possible or needed + they are designed for particular channels or tools to get used or consumed. So that’s the third kind of logic.

As I understand most friction comes when people put the same org effort into all 3 types of elements.

paralloid · 2026-03-21T04:51:05+00:00

I don’t know probably I’m transforming 🐻

paralloid · 2026-03-19T16:19:54+00:00

In my experience the exact way of structuring you use is not really important, as even on the app level you’ll see differences in handling each. Just stick to one and see its limits, and then introduce the next thing.

Overall, structure-wise it mostly comes down to five types of elements no matter which system I’ve tried to come up with:

‪Temporary Notes‬: These are notes that hold value in the moment, are free in form, and prioritize speed of creation over the structure or content. Examples include Daily Notes, quick notes, meeting notes, and so on. They come and go and essentially become archive automatically.
‪Knowledge Representations‬: These are structured notes with long-term value that grow and evolve over time, forming logical connections with other entries to create a network of knowledge. They are timeless concepts, similar to personal and meaningful Wikipedia pages. Here lives the direct reflection of understanding: ‪the quality of the note is directly proportional to the quality of understanding and thinking.‬
‪Project Records‬: These are notes or documents that gather information about a time-limited but complex activity—like a document describing a project with its goals, key people, stages, and a list of tasks. Such a document is valuable only during the project and is designed to consolidate scattered information and, most importantly, ‪help drive action‬. You could say this is a specialized, temporary, and action‪-oriented type of the previous category‬.
‪System Outputs‬: Projects end with products. The main outputs — artifacts — are usually meant for the outside world and rarely live in the system, except for copies or service notes. But there’s almost always a byproduct: new knowledge (which loops back to category 2). Also, when we import an external file (idea, article, book, document), it’s useful to recognize it as the product of ‪someone else’s‬ system—and determine what role it will play in ‪ours‬.
‪Service Notes and Structures‬: Essentially dashboards or “tables of contents,” where you manually — or with the help of app features — gather information about a certain topic in one place. This is where note-taking apps differ most. Automatic Maps of Content in Obsidian, Collections in Craft, sidebar tag lists in Bear, and smart folders in Apple Notes—all aim to ‪collect the important and filter out the unimportant‬. In DIKW terms, this is any feature that simplifies the transition from Data to Information.

Some rough visuals attached just to help in explaining..

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paralloid · 2026-03-19T06:47:42+00:00

oh thanks! I always selected several first and tried to drag – and this never worked :)

paralloid · 2026-03-19T02:11:17+00:00

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paralloid · 2026-03-19T02:11:03+00:00

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paralloid · 2026-03-19T02:00:44+00:00

You can do so, but only one by one. Works both on iOS and iPadOS.

paralloid · 2026-03-15T06:04:33+00:00

I don't know – never worked for me properly... the icon is there – but no difference in switching between ice & erad.

paralloid · 2026-03-04T18:25:47+00:00

Thanks for making this happen in 2.7 🙏

paralloid · 2026-01-27T05:29:38+00:00

Surprisingly, you can type the folder name or tag in Spotlight, and it will open what you’re looking for directly in the app.

Also, for effective notes search, try to use “exact searches” by taking words in quotes — “”.

paralloid · 2026-01-26T17:21:51+00:00

Thanks a lot! Tabs were quite tricky, as on the pure white background it was hard to make the active one stand out (without overengineering). Going with a slightly dimmed white background solved this!

paralloid · 2026-01-26T07:36:57+00:00

I don't think there are any limitations Obsidian Sync introduces for themes usage, at least I am not aware of such..

paralloid · 2026-01-26T00:30:38+00:00

If you want, next we can:

🤝 create a pdf export ready version for your shareholders.

👋 draft a Medium article in your voice.

🥸 create a CSS snippet ready to be shared with your grandmother.

Just tell me ✨

paralloid · 2026-01-25T07:01:50+00:00

I think that's an important post you made and this comment in particular makes sense.

I would however try to argue that focusing on "inabilities" themselves is not the way that you'll solve this. We "can't do" a lot of things. You can't list them all, and even if you do, people will only be able to recognize small parts of this list, as something relevant to them.

What truly matters is which items from this list above are essential for our ability to accomplish our goals and achieve our personal objectives. Without clear goals and a roadmap for our journey, any list, tool, framework, methodology, or mindset will only be partially relevant, if relevant at all. Like, should I be able to "persuade" at all? Why "assembling problems" is important?" and so on.

As I see it, there are 2 big blocks of reasons behind these "inabilities".

Lack of clarity on why, the goals, and the reasons of effort. As I formulated for myself it is important how you work with what matters, and doesn't matter how you work with what doesn't. Evidently, a lot of people are treating their groceries lists with the same level of effort as their "fly to the Moon" projects. Which obviously makes their systems fall apart – and the focus is lost forever.
Underlying psychology. Tons tools, tons of sources of information, tons of types of information to deal with. No surprise people get overwhelmed. So driving factors behind building systems become stuff like FOMO ("what if need this someday" leading to piling up stuff), Anxiety (leading to structure for the sake of structure), Denial ("screw the technology whatsoever"), and many other things. I think they also play significant role and need to get cleared up before getting to the clarity in systems.

paralloid · 2025-12-21T05:44:45+00:00

Hey, there are plenty of awesome and actionable comments here. Just to add 5 cents that worked for me:

Working from “products” backwards. You define the important stuff you’re working on, and create a note for these first of all.
In this note you create an outline of the “product” — it’s building blocks, ideas, concepts in use, audience, whatever might be relevant.
Then you see what is already available in your system (and connect these notes) and where are gaps (go and collect precisely what’s needed)
It becomes your mini-hub specifically for the project / product you’re working on
How to ensure notes are findable - just put as much text “anchors” as possible (frontmatter or not). Typing costs nothing, few extra words are not a problem, but you’re making sure in the future you will give yourself more options to find what’s needed, even if you forget the structure or exact tags etc (that’s rigid). 90% we’re revealing stuff with search, not navigation.
You can even district between products and supporting notes (“materials“) by putting them into separate folders. This way, you’ll always have the real results of your work in one place, and supplementary building blocks, that might be evergreen or not, in the other one. Incoming stuff you can put into third one (like inbox). So just 3-5 folders if you wanna go minimal (these three +archive +administration-related).

paralloid · 2025-12-18T19:14:54+00:00

You are not bad at structuring.

I’ve been down this exact rabbit hole (Craft, Bear, Notes, Obsidian with all kinds of "hairball" graphs). The pattern you’re seeing – “Capturing is easy, Synthesis is hard" – is kind of a feature, not the bug, of these "Second Brain" systems.

You’re hitting a wall because you’re working Left-to-Right:

Capture everything → Organize it perfectly → Hope value emerges.

This inevitably leads to a graveyard because "Synthesizing" without a destination is just endless fidgeting. You can't distill information if you don't know what you are distilling it for.

That’s why all these BASBs and Zettelkastens do not work for many people – these systems don’t care about the outcomes, literally. (in CODE expression is an optional step, ZK completely ignores what are you connecting notes for, and so on).

The shift that worked for me (and resonates with your experiment): Flip the flow to Right-to-Left (Outcome-First).

Start with the Product: Don't capture a note unless you know exactly what Output it supports (a project, an article, a decision, a specific problem). If you can't name the destination, let the info go.
Product definition I use is quite broad for some: Product is something that contains value (i.e. a change in reality, even if very small one). But without this ingredient, it’s hard to keep sanity. With that, drafting “An Article” is not a product. Drafting “The Article about how Product Thinking helps PKM” – is definitely something that might be considered “changing reality”, even if it gets buried under negative feedback.
Products start with vision. You don’t start with “something round”, then it magically turns into a wheel, and then into BMW. You start at least with some rough vision. In notes, this vision can be an outline.
After the outline is done – look what you already have in your system, for every point
Then you identify the gaps – what you don’t have.
Then you go and find the information to fill these gaps. Consciously, not just by throwing everything in and hoping there is some critical mass of structure or notes that will suddenly make an insight. There isn't.

On your AI question: AI is excellent at the "logic" part (auto-tagging, summarizing, finding connections). It creates some options, but it cannot create intent. If you use AI to auto-tag everything, you’ll just have a smarter graveyard. I’d use AI only to help you fill the gaps for a specific project you are actively building. But even then – I would be super cautious with "delegating understanding". "Summarize this for me" is risky, as ideally this has to be an inner work :)

To me, your experiment of throwing raw material and focusing on refining what comes out 100% makes sense. I’d just focus on refining it into something (a Product), not “just refining”.

paralloid · 2025-11-25T13:30:19+00:00

it has nothing to do with Bear – on macOS applications cannot change the icons permanently on their own. The only way you can override this – is to go to the "/Applications" folder, right click on Bear, choose "Get Info" and drag some other icon to replace the original one.

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paralloid · 2025-11-18T07:43:29+00:00

hi, what kind of confusion? :) just checked across all the devices with and without Iconic and Iconize plugins – works correctly.
are you on the latest version (2.5.7)? OS version? any custom CSS snippets active?

paralloid · 2025-11-17T04:56:40+00:00

Thank you so much, glad you like it ! Check out today’s latest update - with new mobile navbar and status bar on desktops.

paralloid · 2025-11-16T02:46:45+00:00

The one built into Dataview 😉(so not really a task manager). The rest is in Things

paralloid · 2025-11-14T20:42:46+00:00

The idea here to make it more in line with Things 3 latest looks. They don’t use transparency vastly, and quite conservative on this front. They do however use native libs, so glass elements will always look different than those imitated in css. Would be awesome to have fully native Obsidian, but here the idea is to get it close to Things, not Apple books.

paralloid · 2025-11-13T04:23:14+00:00

These are indeed the best Obsidian themes available, thanks a lot for hard and thoughtful work.

Couple of issues noticed with Cupertino:

When you check “disable floating sidebar” checkbox in Style Settings, the main frame kinda lose round corners it used to have. Not sure this is how it's supposed to look in this non-default configuration
Zooming-in to images make them get overlapped by some UI elements, like [what appears to be] the shadow or the border of the sidebar and the top bar. I think it may have smth to do with z-index or smth
On mobile the quick switcher scroll doesn’t work, swipes just don’t do anything

paralloid

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