(2022-02-06) Thoresson What Is The Exit Plan For Your Notes

Andres Thoresson: What is the exit plan for your notes? Personal knowledge management (PKM) and Tools for thoughts (TfT) are relatively new buzzwords. But when features like graph visualizations, block references, and bi-directional linking (popularized by Roam, but now “everywhere”) get a lot of attention, less is talked about a more boring part. Longevity.

I'm not here to talk about applications or services. I'm here for the file formats and export features.

When I found the Zettelkasten method sometime around 2017, I straight away felt it was the workflow I had been looking for

But this isn't my first research archive. It's just the latest incarnation of one. And, I hope, the one I will continue to build upon for a long time.

Since 1999, when I started a career as a journalist covering digitalization

The ways technology has consequences both the private and the public sector, individuals, and humanity are complex and often interconnected in many ways. As a journalist, the goal is to connect the dots.

I need a note-taking system that helps me rediscover notes I did years ago. I would love to have an archive that included all my notes from 1999 and forward.

Some of the tools on the list above do offer export to markdown files

But some of the tools, like Obsidian, are natively using markdown. Which is better.

The question "How should I take better notes?" is asked over and over again right now.

But I very seldom see someone ask a question of their own before they answer: "What is it that you want to take notes on, and for what purpose?" Longevity is not always needed for a note collection

I'm willing to sacrifice both features and UX for the longevity of my Zettelkasten. And right now, I only find longevity in locally stored markdown files, text files that can be opened in any text editor on any device. (Simplest Future-Proof Note-Taking App)

thanks to being textfiles, they can also easily be modified in bulk, so that internal links and other things work if or when you decide on another tool. The folder which holds my 3129 notes has moved from Devonthink to EagleFiler to Devonthink to The Archive to Obsidian to Logseq and back to Obsidian. Without very little trouble.

This data portability is not important for all tools. For my to-do lists, I use OmniFocus. And there I'm totally fine with proprietary storage.

But putting my personal research archive in a cloud service, with a proprietary file format, and being forced to trust its export functionality? No.