Untangling knowledge-work questions

Choose a tool that exports to an open format such as plain text or Markdown, searches quickly and works on the devices you actually use. Obsidian, Logseq, Joplin and plain folders of text files all meet that bar; so do many others. Switching apps rarely fixes a retrieval problem on its own — habits matter more than the app.

Both, lightly. Use a few broad folders for where a note lives (for example: inbox, projects, reference, archive) and a short, controlled list of tags for how you will look for it. Write the tag list down. If you find yourself inventing a new tag for nearly every note, the tags have stopped helping.

There is no target number. One link with a written reason ("contradicts", "example of") is more useful than several without. See Knowledge Links for a small link vocabulary.

Declare a fresh start. Move everything older than a chosen date into one folder named with that date, keep it searchable, and process only new material from now on. When an old note turns up in a search, process it then.

Record stable identifiers such as DOIs or ISBNs, note the date you accessed web pages, and save an archived snapshot of anything you cite. Our References guide has a minimum-fields table.

No. Niklas Luhmann's slip-box is a well-documented and influential method, but its useful core — one idea per note, stable identifiers and explained links — can be adopted without copying the whole system.

A short weekly review of new material and a quarterly look at tags and folders suits most people. Daily tinkering usually signals that the system is being maintained instead of used.

Yes. Give each paper page or card a one-line digital index entry with a date, location and descriptive title so it can be found by search.

Be careful. Material owned by an employer or covered by confidentiality agreements belongs in the systems your employer approves. Personal learning notes can live separately, and you can cross-reference them without copying sensitive content.

Run a retrieval test: try to find a source and the point you took from it, from about three months ago. If you can do it in under two minutes, the system is doing its job, whatever it looks like.