On my quest to conquer personal knowledge management through these five apps
by Gyöngyvér Szabó I plantconfident.com
My journey to find a knowledge management system that works for me took a lot of effort over the years. I experienced five apps - Evernote, Feedly, Pocket, Todoist and Notion - in-depth for at least a year each.
Since I bought my first smartphone in 2013, I have been capturing and storing small pieces of information - articles, quotes, URLs, images and PDFs - through apps I can access on all my devices. Due to the great variety of projects I work on, I need a solid knowledge base to quickly pull together an overview for a topic, conduct product research or digest topics for home and life.
Typical issues:
Reading list accumulated until it became tough to handle
Captured information remained passive; I didn’t touch it later
Information became difficult to surface
Couldn’t combine formats (like adding an image or notes to a URL, etc.)
Until I recently landed on Notion, these were my phases through the quest:
→ Evernote
I loved it until it became too complex. It was the first app to capture multi-media. It was a pain to migrate off of it; weeded out a lot during the process.
→ Feedly
It was excellent in building thematic RSS feeds for projects. I have never researched and created scans or reports so efficiently before. But, it required an ongoing effort.
It worked great for capturing, but then I never surfaced the information again. Using tags became chaotic; I felt that I lost a lot of info by not finding it.
→ Todoist
It works surprisingly decent for capturing links. Because it’s a to-do app, I could somewhat active the resources I saved by assigning them to dates.
2021 and beyond: Notion
I migrated over to Notion in the promise of its embedded database functionality. I built a Resource Hub for myself and another business by directing each resource to its page, while the pages are the records in a master database. I can easily save new items in the database and have unlimited possibilities to enrich the resources with additional data. I can assign resources to projects and even set reminders to read them, so I don’t just sit on my gold like Dagobert Duck.
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snippets. short essays about the ins and outs of creating and delivering value digitally.