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💡 The Big Idea: PKM is a System, Not an App

It kind of drives me nuts when people ask about “PKM apps.”

Most of the time, they are looking for a single app that will do everything for them. And while you can do a lot in an app like Obsidian, that doesn’t mean you should.

A better approach is to build a system that can handle anything you (or life) throw at it.

There are 3 things every system must have:

1. Elements (individual components that make up the system)
2. Connections (how those components fit and work together)
3. Function or purpose (why the system exists in the first place)

Systems break when they get unnecessarily complex because the function or purpose gets diluted or lost. So when you’re building your PKM system, it’s important that you know 1) what each app is for, 2) how it connects to the other apps you use, and 3) what purpose it serves.

In other words, you need the right app for the job.

Jobs to Be Done

A while back, I came across this YouTube video from Clayton Christensen (a brilliant business professor at Harvard Business School) about a concept he calls Jobs to Be Done.

The TL;DR from the video is that his firm was hired by big fast food restaurant to help them sell more milkshakes. So they started asking customers, “how do can we make better milkshakes?”

They incorporated the customer’s feedback, but it had no impact on milkshake sales.

They realized that half of the daily sales of milkshakes happened before 8 am, and the people who bought them were always alone. So they started asking a different question:

“What job did you hire that milkshake to do?”

They found that people who bought milkshakes before 8 am bought them because they had a long, boring drive to work and they didn’t want to be hungry shortly after they arrived. So they started asking, “What did you do last time when you didn’t get a milkshake?” The responses were varied, but all gave clear indications of what was really important to the customer:

• Bananas (which were gone too quickly)
• Donuts (which were messy)
• Bagels (which were dry & tasteless)

The bottom line: The job the customer was hiring the milkshake to do was quite different from the job the milkshake makers were optimizing for.

This isn’t just a business school story, though. There’s a PKM angle to all of this.

What Job Did You Hire That App to Do?

Since PKM is a system and not an app, it’s important that you know the role of each you decide to use in your workflow.

When you understand what job you are hiring each app to do, it makes you much more productive (and creative).

The problem is that a lot of apps do a lot of things. Obsidian is a great example. It’s the backbone of my task management, writing, and journaling workflows. It is involved at nearly every level of The PKM Stack for me.

It can do just about anything. But that doesn’t mean it should do everything.

But if you don’t know what job you’re hiring it to do, you might end up using it a way that’s actually detrimental to the way you work with your notes & ideas.

For example, I use Obsidian for task management. I’ve even created this Task Dashboard in Canvas that shows me all of my essential lists:

(If you're interested in this Task Dashboard, I'm actually including it pre-configured in the done-for-you vault I'm building. Check out the bottom of the email for a status update and to be notified when it's available 😉)

But when I teach about the Actions level of The PKM Stack in my Practical PKM cohort, there are always people there who rely on location-based notifications for getting things done. They need to be able to see their tasks on their phone, so trying to manage all of their tasks from Obsidian is one of the worst mistakes they can make.

It works for me because I have a very specific job I’m hiring Obsidian to do for me: show me all of the possible tasks for today so I can choose 3-5 and write them on my notecard for the day.

If you don’t know what job you’re trying to do, you’ll end up hiring the wrong app for it.

One of the things I teach in Practical PKM cohort is that you need to have a clear understanding of how all the apps you use fit together. Here’s an example from my own PKM Stack:

Once you understand what you’re optimizing for at each step, it becomes a lot easier to see which app solves that problem the best. And when you know what role each app has, it’s easy to facilitate the flow of information into (and out of) your PKM system.

Enjoy this essay? You can join the conversation here 🙂

😎 Something Cool: Page Scroll Plugin​

This lightweight plugin doesn’t have any options and does one simple thing: adds navigation buttons to the bottom-right of your Obsidian interface that lets you quick page up/down or jump to the top/bottom of the active note.

If you use Obsidian primarily on your desktop, you probably don’t need this (though you can set hotkeys for the individual commands if you want). Where this plugin really shines, though, is on an e-ink device like the Onyx Boox tablets that I use and love (I wrote up a review of the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra a while back for The Sweet Setup, and I just got a Note Air 3, which is thinner and lighter). The one downside to an e-ink version of Obsidian is that scrolling is a bit jagged, so having these buttons makes navigating longer notes a little bit nicer there.

📚 Book Notes: Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows

I’m a big fan of systems thinking, and Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows is a great primer. It’s a little academic, but it explains the different kinds of systems and how they work better than anything else I’ve come across. It goes way beyond the basics of stocks and flows to cover things like models, suboptimization, and self-regulating feedback loops.

If you’re fascinated by personal systems like me, you’ll probably like this book. And if that sounds a little bit too nerdy for your taste, you can always just download my mind map notes instead.

— Mike

P.S. Quick update on the done-for-you Pro vault... I have written all of the how-tos, and all the workflows are done! 🎉 I decided to add a whole new section that is kind of like The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy for all things PKM, so I'm working on that now. It's basically a masterclass of everything I know about productivity & creativity, and it's going to be included 🙂 I'm writing it first because I think it will be more useful to have it in text form for linking, but I do intend to add videos at some point after initial release. Of course, if you buy it when it launches, you'll get that update for free 😉 If this sounds like something you're interested in, click here and I'll let you know as soon as it's available.