In this blog post, I want to share my experiences using AI to help me manage my Personal Knowledge Management system, especially my blogging workflow.
I think I will likely want to revisit this topic again in the future. My processes are likely to change and develop over time, and the technology around the large language model is likely to change as well.
The role of Obsidian in my Personal Knowledge Management System
I see Productivity and knowledge management as two distinct but related systems. You can get the best overview of my full system in my productivity and knowledge management system in 2024 blog post, which I will link to.
Obsidian seats at the heart of my Personal Knowledge Management System. It is the home of my Zettelkasten, a system that helps you absorb the ideas and thoughts of others by linking them with each other, helping you draw out your own thoughts and ideas. You can learn more about the Zettelkasten method in our introductory guide.
Notes containing new ideas and thoughts are brought into Obsidian from Readwise. These notes contain the highlights I made while reading the original source. I will link to related Readwise resources in the further reading section at the end of this post.
I also use Obsidian to keep a long-form journal entry every day, which I find helps me quickly capture my thoughts, ideas, and tasks. On occasions, the idea will be added as a note to my Zettelkasten, and the link with the journal can help me remember what I was doing when the idea came to me.
Last but not least, I have been using Obsidian for writing over the last year or so. I like its clear interface, and I find that it helps me remain focused on what I’m writing. It also allows me to access my notes on a subject quickly should I need to refer to them.
My website uses WordPress to manage my content, and the WordPress editor understands Markdown, making it easy to copy and paste my content from Obsidian to the WordPress editor.
Exploring the Obsidian Community Smart Connections plugin
Obsidian has a very active community that delivers a wide selection of community plugins that provide enhanced or improved functionality. One of these plugins is Smart Connections, which allows you to combine your notes with Artificial Intelligence in the form of a large language model.
As I discussed in a previous blog post, you should be careful when using an Artificial Intelligence model with your Personal Knowledge Management System. While I have some real concerns, I could also see some benefits. I recommend that you read that blog post.
I don’t use Artificial Intelligence when working on my notes, as that is part of the process, which I think I need to do for myself. The process is about getting me to think and form my own ideas within the Zettelkasten.
However, I will occasionally check the smart connection tab to see if the AI suggests any links I hadn’t thought of. It’s a nudge that might help my thinking.
For the last couple of months, I have also asked the AI assistant to suggest possible limitations in my knowledge, which has been interesting. While I haven’t always acted on it, I have bought at least one book to help me improve my knowledge in one of these suggested areas.
The Interplay between Human Creativity & AI
But where it has made a real difference is in helping me blog. In my experience, it is better than using a stand-alone large language model such as Google Gemini or Chat GPT. It uses a combination of a large language model—in my case, it’s currently GPT4o and my Personal Knowledge Management system.
If I ask it to help me generate the layout of a blog post, where I have a lot of existing ideas and thoughts contained within my Personal Knowledge Management system. It is really good at suggesting how I could layout my blog post and occasionally takes me in a different direction than I would have planned to go in as it surfaces an idea I had forgotten or sees a link I hadn’t yet made.
If it is a subject on which I don’t currently have any real notes, it is unsurprisingly not helpful, and in those cases, I will write the layout myself.
The next step in the process is the writing stage, and I write without help from the AI. During this part of the creative post, I’ll likely veer away from the original layout, whether it was layout or generated by AI or not. After all, the layout is there to give me a skeleton to help me get started and provide some structure to my initial ideas.
If I have enough time, I like to have one read-through before I move to my edit process. I write my blog post in Obsidian, which only has a spell checker and no way to check my grammar.
I have the Grammarly plugin on my browser, and it starts highlighting issues with my writing once I have copied it to a web-based editor and made my way through the suggested changes. Artificial Intelligence drives a lot of this.
https://www.ctnet.co.uk/grammarly-review-2024/As I stated in my recent Grammarly review, it is very much a double-edged sword. Some suggestions will change the meaning of what you are writing or may go against your writer’s voice.
Where the Obsidian smart connections have really come into their own and saved me time is in its ability to help me write the search engine meta description and blog post excerpt.
I make the occasional edit, but overall, it is a better summary of what my post is about than what I would ever come up with.
Conclusion
I hope you find this post insightful as we start our journey of working and living with large language models and artificial intelligence in general.
This is a relationship in which we need to maintain our cognitive and creative abilities. However, it also has a lot of potential if we can use the model’s ability to see patterns and save our time and energy while being mindful of current limitations, such as its ability to make things up.
After reading this post, I hope that you will experiment and look for ways to use Artificial Intelligence in your own processes or at least do some further reading.
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Reading list
Introductory guide to Zettelkasten
Setting up smart connections in Obsidian
Should you use Artificial Intelligence in a Personal Knowledge Management system?
Grammarly Review 2024
Introductory guide to Large Language model
The benefits of journaling in Obsidian
Unleashing Creativity: A Deep Dive into “Mind Management, Not Time Management” by David Kadavy