This week we have one more issue dedicated to the 6 skills of Personal Knowledge Management. If you lost the previous issues, read them here:

• ​6 PKM skills​
• ​Active note-taking​
• ​Active reading​
• ​Idea Management​

Hello Reader,

In 2020, the world was about to change.

It was the year the COVID pandemic hit us, OpenAI was brewing a new algorithm (that became chatGPT later on), and it was also the year when the Obsidian app was first released.

The Notion app had already introduced the idea of databases into note-taking. This time Obsidian was making the push for the use of links*. And today, with more than 1 million downloads in Google Play alone, we can say that links (and backlinks) are here to stay.

There is now an explosion of apps focused on linked note-taking.

But even classical note-taking apps started adopting links.

Google Docs made it even easier to create links (just type @ in a Google Docs document and see what happens), while Evernote added backlinks to their app last year.

But then we start questioning: what is all this buzz about? Do I actually need links?

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Not everyone needs links.

If you have a single document with all the knowledge you need for a project (and that you suffer moving text up and down all the time) then you don’t need links (check the Lattics app instead 😉).

If you have multiple document notes with a million ideas in them, you may find some friction when trying to use links. It is hard to decide what a link means when you are using document notes. So it is often the case you end up using links just to create indices to somewhat group your notes together (again, based on a project or output you are writing).

Links shine when you focus on using idea notes.

In previous emails (here and here) I mentioned the importance of organising ideas rather than documents.

But there are two facts about ideas that we can explore further:

1. Ideas do not exist in isolation. Instead, ideas exist in the context of each other (i.e. in relation to each other).
2. Idea notes create fragmentation. It feels good to write document notes because the whole text is coherent. When we start breaking it down into idea notes (without links) we miss the connections between ideas. We miss "the storyline".

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When taking idea notes, links represent the relationships between ideas.

Links may represent:

• an association between two ideas, when you are still not sure what their specific relationship is.
• a specific relationship between two objects of attention.
• a premise-conclusion relationship between claims (Yes, claims are ideas).
• an association between an idea and a source (so you can keep track of where ideas come from)
• an association between an idea and an output (so you can keep track of which idea notes contributed to that output)

..among other possibilities.

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Links maintain the "storyline" from your original document note, keeping coherence. But also, they allow you to create multiple storylines with the same ideas (multiple arguments with the same idea notes, multiple generalisations, multiple ways of looking at the same idea).

And because links are e-ve-ry-where, you can also use links to jump between apps and to create clever forms of navigation within your own knowledge repository.

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But there is no need to overcomplicate (or overlink)!

Links need to be meaningful to you. Creating links just for the sake of having links will dilute its purpose.

To illustrate this point, check the two images below using text from a Wikipedia page (meaning this is not one of my notes). The left one has purposefully placed links, whereas in the right one, everything is a link.

A link demonstrates that the related note is important in the context of the current note. But when everything is important (right note), we get overwhelmed and, suddenly, nothing is important anymore (and links lose their meaning). Now imagine if Wikipedia was really like that...

So links are all about pointing towards the objects of attention you care about.

They should help you make sense of your knowledge and improve the organisation of your notes. That’s where their power lies.

But for links to shine you need to manage your ideas, not your documents.

And to manage your ideas first you need to express them (rather than just highlight and quote).

So, express your thoughts, mine your writing for ideas, then link them 😊

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So, are links for you? Please let me know by answering this email. I take a bit of time to answer but I always answer.

In the next week, I will explain why I moved from Obsidian to Scrintal or “why you may want an infinite Canvas”.

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Talk to you soon.

Until then, take care.

Bianca

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*Yes, Bear, The Brain, and many other apps already had links before Obsidian appeared in the note-taking scenario, but few of these apps sell the idea of links as Obsidian does.

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