If pressed, I would offer the following bits of advice when deciding building a personal system — for basically anything, but especially knowledge management. - start out by doing something close to what you're already used to, because it's hard to learn a new tool _and_ new "content" at the same time. - keep abreast of as many people's methods for solving problems similar to those that you face as you can handle without getting overwhelmed. - keep an eye out for pain points in your own process and try to cultivate an awareness of what systems work well for you and which ones don't, and try to figure out why. - when your life changes, try to adapt using the system that feels most natural to you first, and periodically try out things that seem to work for other people. Don't force it, but be open to discovery. More importantly, be open to personalizing based on your unique situation. That said, I've noticed there seem to be two extremes in the notetaking and knowledge management worlds. One is that you can do everything you need with a simple text editor like Notepad or Google Docs, or a plain piece of paper. The other is that you need all kinds of fancy tools like Notion, Obsidian or Trello — or specialty planners and notebooks — in order to get the most out of note-taking or productivity system. ## There's a danger to both extremes that's worth considering. Certainly we run the danger of getting so distracted by things like learning CSS in order to beautify templates, or getting caught up in [automations and optimizations](https://xkcd.com/1319/), that we lose track of our goals and fail to achieve them. But the alternative — of failing to customize at all — can be just as dangerous. For example, you can technically take notes on plain index cards or plain white pieces of paper. But I personally have pretty crooked handwriting and using those tools unaltered is all but impossible. But the time it would take me to learn to have neat, perfect, straight, orderly handwriting is not worth it to me when I can just use index cards with lines or line papers — or, my personal preference, notebooks with a dot grid. Other people with neater or larger handwriting might prefer the blank paper, especially if they're the sort of folks who find sprawling mindmaps useful. Basically, I do think the middle ground is worth finding — and probably differs slightly for everyone. I don't go out of my way to improve my art skills enough to be able to mimic the bullet journal spreads to Instagram. But I do get some genuine value, and a sense of peace that allows me to be more productive by having all of the pages in my notebook have a similar aesthetic. I also find value in highlighting my headers, so that I can see that they are offset from the main text and easily identify them. ## There is real value in good design, after all. Collectively as a society, we spend millions (billions) of dollars and hours figuring out how to optimize user interfaces, and I don't think that time and money is wasted. I don't think we need to go back to the Windows 98 aesthetic in order to have a system that's not bogged down in a self masturbatory pursuit of prettiness. There is a middle ground, and for me me that middle ground is themes and purposeful tweaks. But purpose can be an acknowledge that aesthetics matter. Feeling a sense of comfort and familiarity from your font, or disrupting that sense of comfort deliberately to introduce a novel frame of reference, can have impacts on things like being able to catch typos or relax into [a flow state](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.645498/full). There have been lots of times where I've struggled to feel comfortable enough in my head to sit down and relax and write. One of the reasons that I like using Obsidian so much is that the aesthetic is so flexible. I've used a bunch of different themes over the last year or so (currently I use Minimal with the Dracula color scheme), and I really appreciate having been able to adjust things like header fonts and colors, the size of file names, and other UI elements to have more or less information depending on what I need. This attitude catches criticism sometimes because it's "not being productive," but sometimes I wonder how many of the people who say that also complain when an app doesn't "feel native" to their operating system. I have a hard time using apps that have an antiquated aesthetic. They feel _off_. They're distracting — not least of which because they have so many menus to sift through in order to get the command I want. My eye doctor's software is in this style and the amount of wasted clicks feels horrifyingly inefficient to me, but so too are the visual distractions inherent in the clunkiness. The philosophy seems to be some combination of "it works, so why bother improving it?" and "well, the market forces aren't able to align well enough to get properly efficient software, so this is what we're stuck with," which I suppose is true in some ways — but I've also seen colleagues refuse to check their email because they didn't need to fifteen years ago, and those people waste so much of my time (and cause so many other problems) that it's hard for me to take those arguments seriously. ## Beauty is a question of norms Yet many of the apps people on Twitter swear are "so beautiful" drive me nuts to the point of finding them unusable, because I come from a different UI paradigm background then they do. This is a polite way of saying that I don't actually like the mac aesthetic norms. I'm a fan of customizability — for example, evidence seems to suggest that [reading in a font you're more familiar with is more efficient](https://blog.readwise.io/bionic-reading-results/). Of course, too much flexibility can cause cognitive overload. It's like being thrown into teaching a class with no curriculum or standards or guides. Frustrating and time wasting, also, when we could crowdsource best practices pretty easily. Obsidian supports those crowdsourced best practices with aesthetics pretty well — popular color schemes like Dracula, Gruvbox, Solarized, and Nord are well-represented among the themes, particularly now that plugins like Style Settings allow individual themes to support multiple color schemes. ## It's not just about appreciating beauty, though. It's _genuinely hard_ for me to concentrate using apps that don't visually "look" right, in the same way that it's hard for me to type productively on an unfamiliar keyboard. With keyboards, I can often adapt — but the farther from my norms the keyboard is, the harder it is for me to use it, even before we get into stuff like whether [dvorak layouts are more efficient](https://www.daskeyboard.com/blog/qwerty-vs-dvorak-vs-colemak-keyboard-layouts/) in the long run. It's hard for me to take notes that are long-term usable in marble composition notebooks and cheap spirals. Maybe I "shouldn't" need the [leuchtturm1917 notebooks](https://www.leuchtturm1917.us/) I use, or the [fancy tombow pens](https://www.tombowusa.com/markers/fudenosuke.html), but after nearly twenty years of trial and error, I've discovered that they work great for me. I've been using a system resembling bullet journals with "fancy notebooks" since (I just checked) 2016. I've tried fountain pens and high-end paper and while they _don't_ work well for me, if they did, I'd happily use them whether people thought they were excessive or not. I feel roughly the same way about note-taking software. I don't feel like I get enough value out of the really expensive stuff to justify it, but neither do I feel like I can get by with just notepad or email drafts and browser histories the way some people I know do. The thing is, though, that this spectrum doesn't just apply to _software_ or _tools_. It also applies to the systems itself. The range here is something like "I have a completely custom system that I developed entirely on my own with no influence from anyone else" and "I have implemented a carbon copy of someone else's system with the complexity of a paint-by-numbers project." ## There should be no shame in either preference, really. Some people like the customizability of coding their own notetaking program from scratch on an operating system they have total control over. Others prefer to use highly opinionated software that enforces a workflow that is "good enough." My brother used to build houses for a living. Even now, it's kind of a hobby for him. Buy some property, spend a few years making the house beautiful by working on it over the weekends, and maybe occasionally contract out for a big part like a roof. In a similar vein, my dad and my uncle built my uncle's house themselves. Friends of the family built my childhood home. It would never occur to someone in my family to _pay_ someone to do home maintenance projects. Some families feel this way about oil changes, or what have you. Those skills take time to develop, though, and I personally never developed them. I never really got good at using Linux, either, and I'm a neophyte coder at best. Take this as permission to not have to learn _all_ the cool nerdy things. Just learn as much as you need. It will be okay. A really nice man emailed me once and said that he enjoyed the Obsidian Roundup, but hadn't found a reason to switch over from using Dynalist. And I think that's wonderful — having the intestinal fortitude to look at cool things people are excited about and go _nah, I don't need that._ Rolling your own personal knowledge management system can feel a bit like rolling your own operating system. I admire people who write custom plugins and bash scripts and programs to do exactly what they want. I also acknowledge that those people usually spend more time fixing their system, and fiddling with broken things and learning how to program than I do — something I think can actually be beneficial in a variety of ways. But we all have limited time, and we have to optimize for the things we care about, for the things we get a lot out of. ## You _can_ do everything yourself. You can sit down with a circuit board and learn engineering from the ground up and build your own computer from scratch. I know people who have done it. I know people who have built their own _operating systems_ from scratch, their own coding languages from first principles, and there is value in that. It is arguably the only way to get the most perfectly custom system of notetaking in the world. But I wouldn't recommend it for anyone other than a professional computer engineer. It takes a really long time. There are only so many hours in the day. Think there is a middle ground between paying somebody for everything, and not learning how to use your tools. There's a path between doing everything yourself and lacking all knowledge of fundamentals. Me personally, I probably lean more towards the do it yourself side than average. I built my own computer. I know how to use Linux. But I didn't do it from "scratch" and I had a lot of help. I developed a mis-mashed system of productivity that melds principles from different sources. If you find somebody doing an exact system that is basically what you're doing and you want to adopt their system? Go for it, with as much comfort and joy as you'd feel if you found an awesome off-the-rack pair of pants. Why learn to sew if you can easily buy clothes that fit? In my case, it turns out that my son is very tall and skinny, and buying clothes that fit _him_ is tricky enough that I'd rather mend the good ones than recycle them, and tighten the ones that are long enough to fit. I have some spare time, and I like hands on projects. Most importantly, I had friends and family who could help teach me. ## So don't feel like you have to go it alone. And most importantly, go easy on yourself.