How to Tame a Hydra

using PKM ideas for daily tasks

🎙

Xavier Roy

work 🧑🏾‍💻: #manager #writer #content-engineer

100

/now 🤩: #pkm #neuroscience #gamelit

⚠️ some caveats ⚠️

Very highly opinionated information.
Steal ideas and adapt to your context.
What works for me may or may not work for you.

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what is PKM?

Personal Knowledge Management is a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities and the way in which these processes support work activities.

Obsidian

https://obsidian.md

A note-taking tool that works with Markdown syntax

easily extensible with plugins

data stays on your computer only

How I use it for work

as a task management tool
as a note-taking tool

The Daily Note

A daily note is a central place to capture all of your thoughts, ideas, and learnings for the day.
For technical writers, this could involve meeting notes, project notes, research notes, and more.
One note per day.
I use YYYY-MM-DD for file names. (easier organisation)

Start of Day

Add Meetings

Add today’s meetings to the daily note.
- I use Today’s Meetings section.
You can be as specific or vague as needed.
- I usually add a duration for the meeting.

Timebox work

Timeboxing is an idea from the book, Deep Work by Cal Newport.

Decide what to work on and when today.
These are the items that you want to spend the day.
Add projects you want to work on to the planner.

Through the day

Interstitial Journalling

Add tasks or next actions. (via: the Tasks plugin)
- I use #task to indicate tasks.
Capture notes whenever you start something or at random intervals.
- I add a timestamp + a short note on what I was working on.
🔬 It takes 23 mins to refocus after each interruption. 🤯
- Add a note on the current task (for easier refocus) 🛟

There are a lot of applications for these interstitial logs.

Shutdown

Change task dates as needed
Review notes for tasks/ideas
Send out mails / update Jira tickets
Add notes for next day
A shutdown ritual is also from Deep Work by Cal Newport.

Alt text

Meetings

Take notes in meetings

One note per meeting
Capture notes in the meeting
Add action items as tasks
Link to other notes (meetings, projects, people…)

People

One note per person
Capture information like meetings/conversations/tasks/requests
I have a list of tickets assigned to person (pulled in from Jira via a plugin)
I also have a list of other notes that reference this person. Useful in non 1:1 meetings