Personal knowledge management, minus the productivity theatre

PKM decomposes cleanly into capture, connect and retrieve. Capture is a solved problem — every app has a new-note button, a clipper and a mobile share sheet. Retrieve is mostly solved too, because full-text search is cheap and good.

Connect is where systems die. It is the only step that requires you to do something at the moment of writing that pays off months later, and it is therefore the step that gets dropped first. Everything else in a PKM setup — methods, templates, tag taxonomies — is downstream of whether connection actually happens.

The honest advice is unglamorous. Pick a tool with cheap linking and a real export. Write notes titled as claims rather than topics. Link while writing, never in a later 'processing' session that will not happen. Review the orphans occasionally. Do not build a taxonomy before you have the notes to justify it.

Most people's PKM problem is not that they picked the wrong method. It is that they spent the first three weeks configuring the system and then never wrote in it.

Reduced to essentials: a fast capture path, wikilinks with autocomplete, automatic backlinks with context, full-text search with operators, tags that nest, daily notes, and an export that produces plain files. A graph is valuable but secondary — it is a review tool, not a daily one.

Nodum provides all of those: quick switcher on ⌘O that creates the note if nothing matches, [[ autocomplete across the vault, a backlinks pane with linked and unlinked mentions, Postgres full-text search with path:, file: and tag: operators and quoted phrases, nested tags with counts, configurable daily notes and templates, server-side version history on every save, and a folder-true markdown export.