I'm not a fan of the term Personal Knowledge Management although it does provide an apt description of the process involved. Nor have I taken the course Link-Your-Thinking by Nick Milo, although Nick's representation is probably more accurate; however, the title doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. A Second Brain (Tiago Forte) captures the same idea, but I think "second brain" provides a false sense of capability in what the database can accomplish.
Thinking will always remain the vital component of manipulating information to knowledge. That component will always be required of you "in house," residing within your "wet" brain (or whatever pithy term applies).
I recently stumbled across a blog series by Jamie Todd Rubin entitled Practically Paperless with Obsidian which I found of great interest. I don't use Obsidian; however, I did dabble with Notion for about three months. I've used TheBrain as my principal repository of information since 2005, and as such, I’ve accumulated about 31,166 "thoughts," 46,555 links, and 8,801 internal source files. Unfortunately, the project time requirement of moving from TheBrain to another program required more cost than I felt was the expected benefit.
What I did learn from my reviews of Rome, Notion, Obsidian, and Workflowy was a new way of looking at information—creating "the possibility of nonlinear formats for idea development."[1] By connecting notes and creating a web of ideas, my thoughts interact with information and increase my existing knowledge.
This interaction is what I hope to lay out in the upcoming series. I'll start with some basics related to TheBrain; however, this will connect more to my setup and configuration than function. TheBrain website has tutorials to help the new user in Getting Started, Thoughts, and Links, all the way up to using multiple brains through Tabs and Windows. I'll leave it up to the experts in that regard.
I use Microsoft 10 and TheBrain version 12. Pro License. No Services.
We'll review daily entries or journal entries and look at UIDs (Unique identifiers) and the reason behind using these time-saving devices. Tags, categories, and silos will all come together under these sections.
We'll track the authors and metadata we often read by capturing source material. In addition, we'll discuss notes and the value of links to unique resources. I expect the series to contain about 15 such episodes; however, I don't have a fixed timetable as of this writing, so we'll begin and see how it goes.
References:
[1] “The Zettelkasten Method.” LessWrong 2.0, [The Zettelkasten Method - LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1.)