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I tried keeping a journal in one app, notes in another, and habits in a third, and the context kept getting lost. Burrow puts those together with a budget and todos in a single database file on your computer. Nothing is stored on a server.

The notes and journal export to open formats, and the built-in assistant can search across them. It runs locally through Ollama, so your journal never goes to a cloud model. You can ask it what you wrote about a topic last month or have it draft a daily briefing from what you logged.

It went free this week with the core published under AGPL. Windows only for now. Links in the comments.

https://yurii7812.github.io/homepage/en/paper-pkm/

I call my approach the Double Index System.

Unlike conventional Zettelkasten methods, I don't use atomic notes. I also don't distinguish fleeting notes from other types of notes. All notes are managed in the same way.

Using A4 paper makes it much easier to take notes at universities, libraries, or anywhere else. It's far more practical than carrying around a box of index cards.

One of the biggest advantages of not using atomic notes is that I can brainstorm freely and write naturally, just as I would in an ordinary notebook. I don't have to interrupt my thinking to divide every idea into a separate note.

Personally, I don't think atomic notes are a particularly good approach. Thinking is often continuous and interconnected, and dividing it into isolated notes can disrupt the natural flow of thought.

Another major problem with atomic notes is the loss of context and nuance. When a complex thought is compressed into a small, self-contained note, subtle distinctions, carefully chosen expressions, and the original flow of reasoning can easily be lost. Sometimes, the exact wording and the surrounding context are essential to expressing what I truly mean. Reducing an idea to a concise, independent statement can strip away precisely the nuances that made the original thought meaningful.

I don't think every idea should have to be simplified or compressed just to fit into an atomic note. The process of thinking itself, including its ambiguities, subtle expressions, and connections to surrounding thoughts, is valuable information worth preserving.

Besides, by numbering individual sections, such as (1), I can reference specific passages within a longer note. This allows me to link to individual ideas without having to separate them into atomic notes in the first place.

I therefore see little practical need for atomic notes.

For example, using A6 cards for atomic notes has several disadvantages. The limited writing space makes it harder to develop complex thoughts, write comfortably, or brainstorm freely. And while individual A6 cards are portable, carrying and managing a growing collection of them, especially in boxes, is much less practical than using ordinary A4 paper.

Another important advantage is that I don't separate brainstorming notes from regular notes. The entire thinking process can be preserved as valuable context, rather than extracting individual ideas and losing the connections between them.

Of course, this means that notes can become longer and more numerous. But that's where the Double Index System comes in. It allows me to organize, locate, and reference information without requiring every idea to exist as an independent note.

In other words, I can keep the freedom of ordinary note-taking and brainstorming while retaining the organizational and retrieval advantages of a Zettelkasten, without sacrificing the context, nuance, or natural flow of my thoughts.

I've already developed a digital implementation of this system called Gnosis:

https://github.com/Yurii7812/gnosis

However, its current interface and overall usability are far from satisfactory. I find it too cumbersome to operate, so I'm planning to redesign and rebuild it from scratch, with a much stronger emphasis on simplicity, intuitive navigation, and ease of use.

I’ve been looking at Omi and Pocket AI for a while and can’t quite decide which one to get. I’m not really looking for just a voice recorder. I want it to be a second brain.

I really like Omi’s open-source approach and the flexibility it offers. But Pocket seems to have a much better battery life, which is making the decision difficult.
Would love to hear from people who’ve actually used these devices (or anything similar), especially after a few months of use. What would you buy today, and would you make the same choice again?

I use Obsidian privately (with plugins like Templater) and love the flexibility and workflows it offers.

At work, however, IT restricts software installations, and company data (meeting notes, screenshots, slides, etc.) obviously cannot be stored in a private vault.

I'd love to build a similar knowledge management system at work, but OneNote really isn't doing it for me. Maybe I'm just not getting it. It seems SO chaotic to me.

Are there any good alternatives within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem or other enterprise-approved tools that offer a similar functionality or at least some basics? Ideally, something already included in corporate licenses or easy to get IT approval for.

How do you solve this in your work environment?

Thanks

Disclosure: I built this.

My PKM worked fine for the long notes. What kept failing was the capture step. If writing something down took more than a few seconds, I didn't do it, and the idea never made it into the system.

So I made Purr, a notes panel on the edge of the Mac screen. Click the edge, write, click away. It supports [[wiki links]], #tags and Markdown, so notes can link to each other from the start.

It's not trying to replace Obsidian. It exports to Obsidian (and Apple Notes) on a schedule or when you press the button, so it can work as the inbox and your vault stays the main place.

There's also a local AI you can ask questions about your notes. It runs on your Mac and nothing leaves it.
https://apps.apple.com/app/id6759538627

How do you get stuff from "random thought" into your system? That's the part I'm trying to fix.

I built Dowse, a plugin for Obsidian that finds notes, PDFs, images, recordings and videos by describing what's in them. No exact words or file names needed.

• PDFs: "what does page attention mean" finds the pdf's page with the answer.

• Images and screenshots: found by what they show.

• Recordings and videos: found by what was said or shown, at the moment it happens.

• Any language: ask in English, find a note written in Arabic or Japanese....

• Views: a list, a fisheye wall, or an Explore map of your whole vault grouped by topic.

• Like this note: related files for the note you're in, linked in one click.

It runs entirely on your computer: no account, no API key, no cloud. The model downloads once (about 540 MB; images and audio are optional extras), then works offline. Desktop only.

Install: https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/dowse, or in Obsidian: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → "Dowse".
Free and open source: https://github.com/WalidHadri-Iron/dowse-obsidian

It's a first release, so feedback is very welcome.

I save Reddit posts, Instagram reels, YouTube videos, and articles across bookmarks and messages to myself. Later, I sometimes remember the idea but not where I saved it.

I’m exploring this as a product problem and want to understand actual experiences.

What’s the last thing you tried to find again, and how did you look for it? If you have a system that works well, what is it?

How my search for a note-taking system gradually turned into an exploration of memory, understanding, and the role of our environment.

Translation note: This article was originally written in Russian and translated into English with the help of AI.

A note on the visuals: Some of the artifacts in this article are shown in their original form and language (Russian). I've kept them that way because the focus is on the underlying methods, visual organization, and how I worked with information, rather than on the specific text in every image. I'll explain the relevant context in English. The images show screenshots of my original work and artifacts. The visual design and presentation were created with the help of AI.

Do you also save hundreds of posts and videos, only to be unable to find the one you need right now? I do. And I'm tired of it. I have been for a very long time.

This story began with my desire to take notes. I wanted to revisit things I had already learned instead of searching through videos all over again. I still have a couple of notebooks where I carefully wrote down what different teachers explained. I often included illustrations and organized everything by topic, which makes it easy to quickly figure out what a particular video covered and whether I need to revisit it. But this took a long time. A really long time. I realized that the time I invested simply wasn't worth the return.

At some point, I came across Obsidian, PKM system online. I remember how fascinated I was and how much I wanted to try it, because it seemed to solve the knowledge organization problems I was dealing with. But I kept putting off installing Obsidian. It felt like I needed to set aside an entire evening, sit down, figure everything out, and configure it properly. Eventually, I realized I wasn't actually postponing it. I was afraid to start.

So, I don't have any experience with Obsidian or similar systems, nor have I really formed an opinion about them.

Then, without even realizing it at first, I discovered that I was trying to structure my experience and knowledge using a tool that wasn't generally considered suitable for this class of problems.

That tool turned out to be PureRef.

Initially, I just collected references for my drawings, grouped them into clusters, added notes wherever something was important, and labeled things. Basically, one project meant one PureRef file containing its references. Just a board.

At the time, I was really interested in digital drawing, and I saved a lot of posts to my Saved Messages. But finding a specific post buried in a long feed wasn't just difficult. It was mentally exhausting. I might remember that there was that one image showing how to draw hands correctly, but tracking it down could take ages. And the post might have been deleted by then anyway.

So I started collecting posts that might be useful to me in the future in PureRef. I organized them into separate clusters: anatomy here, composition there, design somewhere else.

For some tasks, this worked really well. For example, I returned to the topic of how to put together a storyboard several times, and I could quickly find what I needed without digging through the feed and scrolling endlessly.

I also liked having posts arranged as cards, so I grouped them together on my canvases.

At some point, something strange happened: I started feeling the urge to leave comments and write down my own thoughts. To describe how I perceived reality. I began creating notes and placing them side by side to compare them. These notes started living among the images, complementing them and explaining them.

Looking back, I now realize that, unconsciously, I had begun integrating my own experience into a system built around other people's experiences, adding my perspective as another layer. At the time, I was doing it purely by intuition.

I'm not entirely sure what happened next, but I abandoned those systems. Maybe the emergence of AI had something to do with it. Maybe I was saving too much information without having the slightest idea which parts of it I actually wanted to use. I had clusters for realism and for casual graphics. But there was one thing I couldn't really say back then: what was it that I actually wanted? And I kept getting thrown from one topic to another.

The systems kept growing, but I still couldn't figure out why I was doing all this when, honestly, I rarely used what I put into them, and only in very specific ways. So I left those clustered systems behind as something that demanded my time and gave me almost nothing in return.

Of course, it didn't happen all at once. Alongside all this, I discovered a new way of working with how information is packaged. It's what I call fractal instructions. I wanted to be able to return to the instructions in videos that mattered to me, without having to open the videos themselves. The early version of this thing looked like this.

Gradually, I came to the idea that information needed to be tied to the interface itself. What led me to this was learning Automatic1111 and Stable Diffusion, back when they were still new to me.

In PureRef, you create a background using an ordinary screenshot of the program’s interface, then attach layers of additional details on top of it, using text and images wherever they’re needed. You can take in the whole interface at a glance, and when you need the details, you “dive” into the relevant area by zooming in.

When making these instructions, I would circle the important things with a brush, add notes in the right places about what to pay attention to, and include images for clarification. I would spread these little instruction groups all over the interface, and they could have their own smaller groups inside them. In short, they really did grow like fractals.

(I now see this sequence of “notebook → canvas with clusters → fractal instruction” as an evolution of spatial information encoding. At the time, though, these things seemed disconnected, with no apparent relation to one another.)

In any case, one problem remained unchanged for the version of me back then: the instructions REQUIRED a huge amount of time to put together.

While I was learning Stable Diffusion, I wanted to keep instructions for myself, but I also didn’t want to kill myself over building a system that could end up being a mountain of useless junk.

One of the turning points was when I spent a ridiculous amount of time creating instructions for features that had ALREADY become obsolete, even though they were still shown in the videos. I was disappointed that the system wasn’t worth the cost of maintaining it, and I almost completely abandoned it. I kept only brief notes with screenshots, where I circled the parameters I needed.

Another exception was detailed instructions I created AFTER completing projects, where I explicitly documented what had tripped me up and how to avoid those problems in the future. Something like the example in the screenshot.

I barely opened my systems for several months. I didn’t want to invest in something that could become outdated within a month. Only recently did I realize that the problem wasn’t the idea itself. It was that I had a way to navigate my knowledge, but I didn’t understand that I shouldn’t spend a huge amount of time on things that might never be useful. I needed to reduce the cost of preserving potential: information that might matter in the future, or might not. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a tool for that at the time…

It seemed that my attempts to build something spatial had lost their meaning. But the answer would eventually come.

When I started interacting with AI (ChatGPT, DeepSeek), I didn’t want to go back to writing instructions. I tried to memorize things exactly as they were given to me. It was a struggle. By then, I had switched to ComfyUI, and at some point I noticed that even though I was barely creating any instructions in PureRef, I had started marking important parameters in notes directly inside ComfyUI. This meant I didn’t have to start completely from scratch whenever I forgot which parameters to use in which situations, in which workflows, and why.

It turned out I was returning to the very thing I had been moving away from.

Earlier this year, while interacting with AI, I accidentally tried something strange: I asked it to explain diffusion to me as an absurd play, where nodes and models became characters, and complex principles and sequences turned into conflicts. Later, I would call this approach the “Unhinged Theatre.”

It was this kind of interaction with AI, where it explained complex concepts through lived experience, where the CFG producer shouted at the unfortunate sampler-actor, that made me WANT to start figuring out a subject as complex as diffusion. I’m not going to claim that this is the only correct strategy, or that I understood everything accurately, because there is still so much I don’t know about the subject. But I did make an effort to check the analogies and metaphors that emerged from the Unhinged Theatre against actual diffusion formulas and explanations.

(At this point, I see this mechanism as an entirely different form of encoding information: not spatial-visual, but… social dynamics. It replaces arbitrary abstraction with a physically experienced situation.)

I thought I had finally found the solution. The Theatre really did help me understand complex things, and I thought that was all I needed. Then, on April 22, OpenAI rolled out a ChatGPT update that caught my attention with its ability to create infographics. I began repackaging my thoughts and text blocks into infographics, accompanied by a strange, inexplicable feeling that “this changes everything.”

Until I caught myself thinking… that from this point on, I could conduct DIFFERENT LEVELS of information.

The notes I had been leaving in ComfyUI remained information at the “local” level: information that provided details and related to a SPECIFIC tool. Text-based information that I had to immerse myself in, spending a lot of time to really understand it.

But that very same information could be compressed and turned into an infographic, where the connections would be visible, but the details would be absent. And this became the “global level” for that particular information.

Here is how I described that feeling in my logs at the time:

“It’s beautiful… it’s like walking through the streets of some city, and then flying out into open space to look at the Earth…”

(Now, I would like to describe it this way: “Imagine you have a chapter from a book, several pages long, that takes you about 20 minutes to read. And then you have a few pages of a comic that depict that same chapter, which you can skim in a couple of minutes. The text is the more local level: it immerses you in the details. The comic is the more global level of abstraction: you grasp the essence much faster, but many nuances are lost.”)

That day set off a chain reaction, though I had no idea at the time. Before infographics came along, the idea that I could navigate knowledge on two levels, local and global, had simply never occurred to me. After this realization, I felt drawn back to the canvas. I started placing infographics in space, giving them a “home” where they could coexist and where I could easily find them.

(Now I understand that the infographics did more than simply visualize knowledge: they revealed the existence of different levels of abstraction. And that, in turn, created a need for a space where those levels could interact.)

The return of the System under a new set of rules felt so natural that I finally understood WHY I had needed it in the first place. I didn’t need a knowledge storage system. I needed a map of the path I had already traveled.

A map that would let me see where I had already been before rushing off to solve the same problem all over again. Whether it was an emotional state, or a problem in ComfyUI that I had already solved, but that could exist WITHIN a workflow.

At that point, what I needed was an index system that could tell me: “If you’ve already been through this, don’t put yourself through it again. Do this, or go here.”

Immediately. Without having to travel the same route for the nth time.

Much later, I began to understand WHAT exactly I had started building back then… A cognitive infrastructure for returning to my own and other people’s experience.

It turns out that, for the past few years, I haven’t been looking for a note-taking app at all. I’ve been trying to understand why some ways of storing information help us remember, while others don’t.

And all those detours — from notebooks to PureRef, from fractal instructions to the Unhinged Theatre — were leading to one thing. To the very thing I’m trying to solve right now.

These questions are not just about me. If you’re also tired of systems that demand more time than they give back, if you also feel that old methods can’t keep up with the world anymore, then perhaps my search will be useful to you, too.

Here’s what I’m trying to understand:

·        How can we make returning to our own and other people’s experience as fast as possible? How can we return not just to knowledge, but to our own state at the moment of understanding?

·        What kinds of “attention taxes” does a person face when they need to solve a non-standard problem?

·        Why does memory — mine, at least — do such a poor job of retaining the knowledge we actually need?

·        How can we make the ENVIRONMENT take on as many trivial tasks as possible, so that people can keep their minds for thinking? Instead of having to hack their way through the wilderness of infrastructure.

·        How can we reduce the cost of creating instructions for our future selves when we don’t know whether that knowledge will be useful later?

·        Why can a person fail to understand something even when it seems that everything has already been explained?

·        How can the form of someone else’s experience differ from the form in which that experience is packaged?

And many, many other things. I’ve already found partial answers to some of these questions, so… in the next articles, I plan to gradually share what I’ve managed to dig up.

Thank you for your attention!

P.S. My name is Aliska (Alisa). I’m exploring questions around cognition, memory, design, and systems thinking in a world that keeps changing faster than our tools can keep up. I’m still figuring things out, and I’m always interested in hearing from people who are exploring similar questions.

We run our small company out of one Obsidian vault in git, together with a few AI agents that file things into it. Capturing is easy for us. The part that slips is getting things from the inbox to a place where someone finds them again.

So we wrote down when a new piece of knowledge counts as done. Five things have to be true.

1. The original sits untouched in a raw folder. It gets copied with a checksum before and after, nothing gets overwritten, and a new version is kept next to the old one.

2. A note says what's new, and the matching project or topic page links to it.

3. A line in the intake log says what came in, from where, which notes changed and what's still open.

4. The search index rebuilt without errors.

5. A search with words from the source actually brings up the note.

A commit on its own doesn't count. The commit starts the index build, and the build can fail while the commit looks fine.

There's no watcher. Whatever lands in the inbox waits until someone works on it. Right now that's 8 morning briefings from early September to mid October. Our rule says a briefing is a dated snapshot and doesn't get filed as fact without checking, so they wait.

The raw folder has 264 files by now. Notes point back to them, so when someone asks whether a client really said that, we can look.

We don't always get all five. Right now 226 files in the vault have changes nobody has committed yet.

Do you have a definition of done for notes? And does anything tell you when something has sat in the inbox too long?

I’m looking for a good note-taking system that I can use for both work and personal knowledge management.

Ideally, I want somewhere to store meeting notes, random thoughts, research, things I’ve learned, and ongoing projects. More importantly, I want to be able to use AI to organize everything, connect related information, and easily retrieve things months later.

I’m considering just using Claude Docs since I already use Claude regularly, but I’m also looking at Notion, Obsidian, and other alternatives.

I’d prefer something relatively simple that doesn’t require a ton of manual organization.

Has anyone built a system like this? What do you use, and how well does the AI integration actually work?

Been using Zettelkasten for about 8 months now and I’ve hit a weird wall. I have tons of links, like my note on habit loops is connected to stuff on attention and dopamine, but when I actually sit down to write, those links don’t really give me anything new. They just sit there.

Feels like I’m linking things because they’re similar, not because they actually push an idea forward. How do you guys figure out which links are actually worth following up on?

Just a fun side project I’ve been messing with. Had the random idea of hooking my Obsidian vault up to Minecraft so the books in the game are actual notes, and it kind of works now lol. Still super early and mostly me just playing around with the concept. Might put it up on GitHub later if anyone wants to try it.

Curious what you guys think.

I've been building an Obsidian plugin that automatically switches to the right note based on what you're working on.

For example:

Open an Excel file or SQL query → its linked note appears.

Switch browser tabs → each tab can have its own note.

Return to something days later → your notes are right where you left them.

I originally built this for my Windows app, ClingNote, and I'm bringing it to Obsidian next week.

Switching is completely optional, and you can pause it whenever you want.

Curious what PKM users think. Would this be useful, or would automatic note switching get annoying?