Knowledge consolidation

What is Knowledge Consolidation

When you create notes in Obsidian, many notes are incomplete and you need to enrich them later.

But knowledge consolidation sometimes can be dangerous. Especially when you don't know what is meant by Obsidian, you will fall into a rabbit hole and not get anything done.

What Define Good Knowledge Management

Any form of management should have a goal. We don't do management for management. A knowledge base needs to have a goal too. Ask what is the goal of the knowledge and how to quantify the progress?

In How to think clearly?, we know that the essence of thinking clearly is reusability, which aligns with the diagram below.

Another criterion is maintainability. This is a bit tricky, because for PKM people usually manage their knowledge base by themselves. The larger the vault is, the more difficult it is for a person to manage it. So no matter what method you use, once your knowledge gets larger, it will be more difficult to maintain.

The third important factor is the ease of relearn. This factor focuses on the quality of content. High-quality content should be able to be relearned very easily.

%%{init: { 'theme': 'dark' }}%%
flowchart LR
	A((new knowledge come in)) --> B[hitting old knowledge]
	C((question come in)) --> B
	B -- revalidate knowledge --> B

Basically the faster this process, the better it is.

Therefore, what are the signs of having a poor knowledge management system?

1. When you create a note and find that the notes are actually duplicated with some old notes.
2. Difficulty in locating relevant information: if you struggle to find specific notes or information when needed, it suggests a lack of proper organization or indexing. This can lead to wasted time and frustration.
3. Inconsistent or outdated information.

What Need to Be Remember? What Doesn't?

We write things down so as to forget. If the knowledge will forever be lost if we don't write it down, then we need to write it down. If we can find it somewhere on the internet with high confidence, probably we don't need to put it down.

If things update frequently and we don't have the effort to keep track of them, don't put the content down. Just keep the reference. → But external references cannot be searched on Obsidian → use Obsidian Run with auto run to refresh the knowledge. In this way, we delegate the management to the world, but not to us.

You should document things about yourself because this information is only known by you and not anyone else on the internet.

This is the reason why writing Diary is important. Among all the knowledge, making a record of yourself and doing reflection probably is one of the most valuable things to do.

How the Workflow Should Be Designed

1. Should have unique keywords in title

When you search a file, the thing that affects search result the most is the title. The title or alias should have unique keywords for you to retrieve it accurately.

2. Project management / time management > knowledge management; Action > Management

Based on what is said above, if knowledge management serves a specific goal, it would be more beneficial to prioritize project management and time management as they are more actionable. Therefore, project management and time management should be prioritized before knowledge management.

3. Knowledge management is more like documentation

Therefore, the ultimate form of knowledge management with a specific goal in mind is very much like how technical documentation is written. It has a scope and a clear purpose. It doesn't write less and extra — it should be just enough for what the reader needs to know to get things done. Because of this, we should think about what are the necessary things that we need to put in Obsidian.