Personal Knowledge Management for the Astrologically Obsessed, or SADALKASTEN

Knowledge graphs help wrangle endless information

REDIRECT NOTICE: Hi! I’m no longer on Substack. You can read this post on my new site right here.

As an astrologer and knowledge worker, I have somewhat unique problems when it comes to managing my personal notes, ideas, and tasks. I've spent a lot of time figuring out how to do this while accounting for the fact that my astrological interests touch everything in my life and an obsessive (arguably borderline neurotic) desire to keep dates and times of everything so I can retroactively astrologize them later.

This article might be useful for you if you have no idea what a personal knowledge management (PKM) system is but know that you want to track a lot of different ideas, projects, and/or notes, or if you do have one but haven't yet figured out how to do so in way that's compatible with astrological analysis. Even if you're not an astrologer, I think my system works quite well for managing my entire life and all of my ideas in what I call my personal knowledge graph.

I'll break down the ideas behind a PKM from the ground up to still be useful for someone who has no idea where to start or why we might want it, explain what I think is the best way to go about developing a personal knowledge graph.

Why, though?

First off, why a PKM? Typically it's because you have too many things you need to know or keep track of, or your work results in the production of lots of information/notes. For me, I have a variety of interests (astrology, software development, world history, health and fitness to name a few) that require taking notes, connecting ideas together, comparing and contrasting and commenting on them, or producing content (like astrological interpretations or readings) in quantities and complexity which is untenable without a cohesive information management strategy. This might be the same case if you have a complex project to put together which requires a lot of source material (a book, software project, academically sourced article, map of reality, etc).

In most PKMs, this complexity is managed by organizing and structuring notes in many different ways. A few notable approaches are:

• PARA (Project Area Resource Archive) - a straightforward organizational approach dividing all notes into 4 categories

• MOCs (Maps of Content) - a singular idea: basically table of contents for specific groups of notes in your knowledge base

• Getting Things Done (GTD) - A task-oriented system for keeping up with life that can be fitted on top of Obsidian (some Obsidian links)

• Johnny.Decimal - a Dewey decimal/library organization-inspired system

• Daily Notes - a basic idea: have a note for every day and link everything to it (Obsidian has this as a native plugin)

• Zettelkasten, a total way-of-thinking which emphasizes encapsulating ideas as well as possible and linking them together in a graph, emphasizing the connections between

These aren't exclusive systems. You can combine the best parts of them, leave out the parts you don't need, and grow something from the ground up. That's the way I generally recommend getting a grasp of knowledge management at all: do the thing that solves the problem you actually have. I call the structure and collection of techniques I've cobbled together Sadalkasten (thanks to @doubtshrine for the clever name). (Also, thanks to Winter for nudging me to take this outside of the private Base Householders Community and post it here so it can benefit more people.)

Solving Problems

What's a problem or need you have when you think about all the stuff you have to know which brings you legitimate psychic pain every time you encounter them? These are what I'd consider problems you actually have, and are what should decide how you structure your personal knowledge base. Don't waste energy contemplating how shiny or alluringly sophisticated someone else's knowledge management system looks like: if you don't feel legitimate relief from doing things in a more complex way, you're probably fine just as you are!

For me, I experience psychic pain over a number of things. I have too many things to know which interrelate in too many different contexts and I struggle keeping track of all of them. I need the ability to utilize and harness all of these things. I have the desire to keep track of everything, both as a counter to my poor memory and in order to astrologize everything that happens over my entire life. Finally, I have a lot of projects which depend on all of this information that I work with, so I need task and project management which lives in the same place.

I spent a long time looking over different PKMs, but once I outlined my specific problems that I wanted to solve, it became easier to figure out what I want to do. Here are some brief sections on how I approached these problems as three categories.

Too many things to know across too many contexts

I have lots of different interests. Software, finance, philosophy, metaphysics, medicine, and especially astrology, which unites all of these. My work is very much about finding correlations and confluences between things, so these ideas for me bleed all over the place.

Rigid organizational systems like PARA and Johnny.Decimal don't quite work for me because they draw hard lines between things. Even the distinction of a general-information folder like "Resources" in PARA (topics or interests useful for projects or research) or "References" in Getting Things Done is fuzzy for me because I don't just store thoughts and leave them, I immediately build upon them, annotate, and synthesize concepts. I could treat that work as "project" work, but for me they're not really individual projects with any particular end deliverable, it's just something I do as a way of navigating life and understanding the world.

The solution I've found is in conceptualizing my knowledge base as a flexible and dynamic graph of interconnected information rather than folders. For this you need a tool that can do linked notetaking like Obsidian, Roam, or Notion. I personally use Obsidian, which is free and all of the files live on my devices as opposed to in the cloud, wherever that is. You can set up your own syncing with Google Drive or other services, but Obsidian also provides an inexpensive monthly sync service which I pay for because it's easy and unobtrusive.

I have over 9,000 notes in my graph, so using folders to structure and navigate them is next to impossible. However, it is feasible to use a combination of tags, links, MOCs, and graph-oriented tools which help me slowly cultivate meaning out of a mess of disparate ideas. For instance, here's the graph view of the core parts of my notes:

This is pretty, but it's a picture of (almost) the entire thing, which is not really useful or usable. Instead, most of the time I have a filter set in this view which shows the graph of the current project I'm working on, or I'll use the local graph, which is a graph of the notes immediately connected to the actively selected Note:

You can get to this view by right-clicking on a note tab and going to Open linked view > Open local graph. The depth of connections to pull (notes connected to the notes connected to the current notes or deeper) can also be increased or decreased.

Through these graph views in Obsidian I can hover over nodes, find connections, and traverse visually rather than a sequential list of files. When that fails, I have full-text search, and I keep the Outgoing and Incoming Links tabs open at all times for my active tab:

Learning to think in graph-oriented terms is a skill that I learned from zettelkasten (an introduction is available here). Zettelkasten (ZK) was originally a paper system written on notecards across many file cabinets. ZK is fundamentally an approach for gradually building a traversable second mind with your notes that works both on tangible paper but also is a perfect fit for the information age and how we digitally store and connect ideas online. Done correctly, ZK can naturally and organically turn your knowledge graph into a full mind map that becomes a sophisticated tool for thinking--and it can be shared with others.

I'll summarize some key ZK principles quickly here, with some modern enhancements:

1. A "zettel" (note) is a singular idea. "Obsidian" is one idea. "Zettelkasten" is another. "Using Obsidian to do Zettelkasten" is a third, which can unite the first two.

2. Connect ideas together with links in order to lead you to new concepts or rediscover old ones.

3. Use tags instead of categories. Categories (usually implemented as folders) are arbitrarily limiting. Does a "Latin" note belong under Languages, or Classics? With tags, it's both #latin #classics.

4. Timestamp most things. This allows you to easily see where your thoughts were at a given time, and helps distinguish different documents which may have very similar titles but are distinct thoughts that could be harvested later. ZK suggests a YYYYMMDDHHMM timestamp which I agree with as they're compatible with file names.

There's a whole process part of how you're supposed to do zettelkasten, but I only use as much helps me or as much as I have time for. ZK is taught as high-effort, high-reward. You're supposed to take time to review and revise and keep it up to date. I do only as much as I have time for.

For instance, for one-off thoughts I create timestamp-prefixed thoughts into a "Knowledge" folder with a timestamp prefix such as what I'm writing now, 202408081306 Sadalkasten Substack Post. I try to use a descriptive name that I'll remember if I'm looking up documents like a title. If it's important and I want to come back to it later but I don't have time, I add a note with the "meta/todo" tag (nested tags with / in them in Obsidian are awesome and extremely useful).

If I have a throughline I'm trying to keep track of, I create a note I call a "Spine" which to me means something like "central note that is an aggregation note for lots of different notes and key ideas" which can grow and spread out like a skeletal or root system. But really, it's literally just a MOC/Map of Content with a bunch of links. I give them the tag "meta/spine". This lets me track all of the top-level, most important notes I've had with a simple tag search. I usually skip the timestamp because they're living notes which I revisit over and over and try to keep very clean. Sometimes I prefix them with Spine - but I'm not particularly consistent.

If you've never done something like ZK before this can seem like a lot. But it starts with just a few nodes. Here are some factors which, if they apply to you, I would recommend trying out thinking of your notes as more of a graph.

1. You have an interdisciplinary practice with lots of different subject areas that overlap

2. You produce thoughts which live close to your source or reference ideas

3. Your folders have so many notes you never actually scroll through the folder UI

4. You frequently find yourself struggling with which folder or what organizational structure an idea or note should fit under due to its fuzziness or role in multiple parts of your knowledge base

Learning zettelkasten really unleashed the intellectual age-of-air-y beast within me and has enabled me to feel confident that I can capture and interrelate almost any piece of information I learn and make it useful in the larger context of the things I know. My eventual goal with my graph is to expose it to the internet as a public good, especially my writings and thoughts on astrology and metaphysics.

But the system also has to have room for me, the person actually making this graph, so let's talk about that next.

Keeping records of my life for nostalgia and astrology

I have bad memory, and probably-ADHD, and the object impermanence that goes along with it. So another key requirement for me is that I can keep track of everything (*as much as is reasonable to keep track of) in my life to remind me, and also give me a place to pick up where I left off. Additionally, I need a standing record of the specific dates and times of all of these things, because I'm an astrologer and looking at the details of what has happened in my life helps me understand astrology as well as future cycles.

So here, time tracking and continuity are incredibly important. For that, I can recommend nothing better than the Daily Note. This is simply a note that you create every day and keep a record of stuff that happened. Depending on how fastidious I'm feeling, I may keep an exact record of every single thing I did or I might not. Here's an example of a day I was feeling pretty lazy:

You'll notice that I jot down personal thoughts here but also have some entries which are links to my timestamped ZK-style notes. This is super useful, because when I look back at this journal note I can now travel through this link into the rest of my graph or see at a glance the top-level versions of complex thoughts I may have had. This also has the benefit of preserving the exact time I had a specific thought, which is useful for me as an astrologer because now I have the precise conception chart for every idea.

(Astrologers' aside: Zettelkasten and its timestamps also have a great tie-in here, because any time I have a thought I can timestamp it and leave it as archival content in the original note, keeping track of when I had the thought and the specific form it's in. I hate editing the original note from a given timestamp because it means I'm altering the record of the past. Instead, with timestamps and ZK, I can simply create a new note with my current thinking and link back to the original note(s) I had before. When I want to publish writing, it's often merely the result of collecting various thoughts I had had in a part of my graph that were all linked together by this process.)

I try not to be too neurotic about my daily note-taking. Here's my general rule on when to take a note in the daily note:

• Self check-in in the morning

• Any thought I stew on for longer than 5-10 minutes

• Any thought that seems novel that I'm having for the first time, especially for projects (and now I have the very first conception chart if I decide to embark on it)

• Interactions with other people

• Reflections on the past (especially to find it and add a link!)

• Notable/unusual activities outside regular routine

• Omens

• If I realize a pattern I wasn't documenting changed (For instance, I might get lazy on my supplements but not write down that I stopped taking them.)

I usually have the Daily Note open in Obsidian on my phone or computer at all times, ready to receive thoughts.

Task and project management in one place

So now I have a system for keeping track of all of the ideas, managing and cultivating them organically, connecting them to my own life and fastidiously keeping track of when all these things happened. The last part for me was figuring out task management, and most especially, I need it all to happen in a single place.

I hate having to go to another app to define tasks. I'm trying to go fast here! You seriously want me to stop my train of thought and go find the other app, navigate to right page in it, decide what project my idea is under and if it needs a new one, and then come back while I'm in the middle of this thought?

Tasks

Luckily, Obsidian has some awesome plugins that can handle this for us while also allowing you to define tasks wherever you are. Primarily for tasks I use Tasks, which turns every checkbox (simply defined in Obsidian with - [ ] (text)) into a task which you can then filter with a dataview, which is a simple written query that can pull back notes with certain properties. With Tasks, you can set up specific criteria for how to define tasks (such as using a tag in the text) as well as easily assign priorities, due dates, and more just by typing.

Viewing the task list is very simple, just use a dataview like this one which says: get me all tasks which aren't done, which aren't in the Templates or Work folder (because this is the query for just my personal tasks--I have a separate note with this query for my work, too), group them according to priority, and within each group, sort them by the date they're due.

```tasks

not done
(path does not include Templates/) AND (path does not include Work/)
group by priority
sort by due

```

That renders into a dynamic view like this:

This view doesn't show the folders that these tasks are broken up into (you can group by that in your dataview too, though), but these tasks come from anywhere across my entire Obsidian vault, which means that I can just create a checkbox and jot down a task to do wherever I am.

This is also useful for extreme flexibility and keeping my thoughts flowing. Even if I'm in a different part of my graph (such as the Self folder) when I suddenly think of an idea of a task for a specific project, I don't need to break my flow by going to that project folder: I can just give enter a project tag such as #projects/secretproject, then later when I'm going through this top-level list, I can spot anything that needs to be moved. If I need to, I can even write fancy queries to find misplaced tasks like "find all tasks with a specific project tag which are not in that project's folder".

This is also useful for extreme flexibility and keeping my thoughts flowing. Even if I'm in a different part of my graph (such as the Self folder) when I suddenly think of an idea of a task for a specific project, I don't need to break my flow by going to that project folder: I can just add a project tag such as #projects/secretproject, then later when I'm going through this top-level list, I can spot anything that needs to be moved. If I need to, I can even write fancy queries to find misplaced tasks like "find all tasks with a specific project tag which are not in that project's folder".

From here, I can get a quick overview of the most important things I should be doing in any area of my life. If I need a more specific view, I just write the query for it. I'm missing some kanban/Trello-style statuses-as-columns, but Tasks itself has statuses (including custom statuses) and I believe there are plugins that can put your tasks in a kanban view.

Of course, the second related need is a way to manage and group tags associated with different things I'm trying to accomplish, which I do with the idea of Projects.

Projects

For me, a "Project" is an area for long-term planning and task tracking for goals which require multiple steps or are recurring tasks which require their own sets of supporting ZK notes. For instance, an art project, posts for a blog, and home renovation planning could all be projects. Basically, I need a specific space I can "come back to" without having to remember it all myself.

For keeping track of my projects, I have a dedicated Projects folder with one subfolder per project. I treat project folders like mini-graphs, with a single top-level folder note as a master spine (I like the Obsidian folder notes plugin for this) and dumping timestamped thoughts into them. In each project I can keep a view of tasks that fall under either the project folder or use the project's tag. Since Obsidian supports nested tags, I can define tags such as #project/<projectname>/<project-specific-tag> which is useful for traversing complex projects. For those complex projects I also keep a "Project Tags" note which reminds me how I'm using different tags and keeps me from reinventing other similar-but-functionally-identical synonym tags.

An example from one of my project's "Project Tags" note:

I don't use Daily Notes inside my projects, but if I had any projects where I did daily work and took constant notes, I probably would. (This is what I do for my day job work, which lives in the Work folder which is basically a whole project folder unto itself but is important and separate enough from everything else to need its own folder.)

I still need to be able to keep track of what's been happening in the project so that when I return to it after an unknowable amount of days, I can pick up where I left off. So my lightweight form of recordkeeping is the Worklog, which is a section with a bulleted list of dates, what I did, and any notes that I created off of that. Each project spine note gets a worklog section, and I try to be fastidious about taking notes when I begin and end work. Everything in between can be hidden away in some timestamped note that I can review later, and sometimes I'll reuse a note and add dated sections if I've been working on the same task long-term as you can see me do in my "202403252245 Prototype Dev Notes" note repeatedly below:

Lastly: Properties and Dataviews for Overviews

Recently, Obsidian added the ability to add arbitrary properties to your notes, which is basically metadata that you can attach to it. (Technically, this was always possible with YAML frontmatter, but now it's more user-friendly.)

These properties can be used to drive dataviews. For instance, on my Projects and Tasks note, I have a breakdown of all of my projects because all of them use the "type" property “fun/low”, which is also a dataview thing. This allows me to render a table like this which reminds me of all of the active projects I have:

The query to do this is very simple:

```dataview

TABLE
	status,
	summary,
	priority,
	size
WHERE type = "project"
	AND file.folder != "Templates"
	AND status != "closed"

```

With that, I have basically all of my previously bemoaned problems solved. I can now organize, interrelate, and build upon multiple areas of study. I can find my way back to it and keep detailed timestamps of all of it and connect it to my daily notes, which preserves what I was thinking, feeling, and doing at any time and day. And I can build tasks and projects around all of it, and have it in one place with countless ways to iteratively increase my speed and productivity in navigating all of it.

There are still many things I wish I could improve about Obsidian and things that would make my life that much easier, but as it stands I can do most things to fulfill my unique (and somewhat obsessive) requirements with it.

Next, here's a boiled down, simplistic approach you could use to start down the path of growing your ZK similarly if there's anything at all here you think might be applicable to your own knowledge graph.

A bare-bones Sadalkasten with Obsidian

I'll be prescriptive here to describe how you could mimic my system with as little work as possible. But of course you should change it as much as required for your own needs!

Folder structure

I use folders sparingly, but there are some concrete places they're useful, based on how you intend to interact with them. Generally, I only use a folder when I need a space for notes which in of themselves are and should remain completely separate, though I'll still add links between them.

You'll want the following folders (name them whatever feels most fitting to you):

• Daily Notes - This folder holds all daily notes, one per day. I called mine "Journals" and it has a subfolder for each year and hypothetically 365 notes per year, so today's note lives at Journals/2024/2024-04-16.md. Daily Notes should have its own folder because it's one of the few places you actually likely will want to scroll through and browse a list of files in chronological order.

• Self - This folder holds all graph-style notes that are specific to you. For instance, thoughts about memories, your life, facts and figures and so on. Here I keep notes from past conversations, a note per digital device, about home and householder stuff, and so on.

• Graph - This folder folder holds all general zettelkasten-style notes that have to do with ideas that aren't personal to your life. I called mine "Knowledge".

• Projects - This folder holds project folders which will be in their own right mini graphs of interrelated concepts.

Optional folder ideas you might find useful:

• Work - If you're a knowledge worker you probably also need a separate area for work-specific notes. I keep a folder per company I've worked at, and also keep daily notes in folders for each year, as well as a mini-graph in each work folder.

• Meta - You might have some notes on your actual knowledge base itself. I found this especially useful when first learning ZK and constructing my PKM. I have notes here for summarizing my projects and tasks, statistics and info, and notes to self on how I organize my graph and what tags I use.

If you like, you can construct Task/Project overview notes which contain task queries and/or dataview queries using properties. My example task and project queries above should work pretty simply for this.

Process

1. Every morning, create a new Daily Note (or use a plugin to do it for you).

2. Take down thoughts in that Daily Note throughout the day

3. When you ponder something important (like a big idea or even a personal thought longer than a few notes), make a timestamped note and link it to the Daily Note. Link it to other things if you can. If you don't have time but care about returning to it, mark it with a tag like "meta/todo", #zk/todo, etc. to remind you to come back to it.

   • (A way to cheat to find related things to link is the obsidian-smart-connections plugin which leverages extremely powerful modern "vector embedding" techniques for searching in natural language without having to remember precise keywords you wrote in the past)

4. On some rhythm that works for you (daily, weekly, or as-you-care), return to your notes and peruse them. Think about what ideas are actually connected. Elaborate upon them and let new notes flourish.

5. Define tasks by making a checkbox and the Tasks plugin autocomplete will show up. Use your Tasks page to review outstanding tasks.

Lastly: iterate and enjoy! It should feel good. If there's anything that feels like unnecessary overhead that gives you nothing, it probably is unnecessary overhead. Don't try to adopt new patterns until you're reasonable sure you actually need them, and throw them away if they don't work. A finely tuned PKM will be as unique as its owner, and that takes some time. You can start with literally just Daily Notes and go from there.

General philosophy and tips and tricks

Here are some fundamental philosophical principles I try to embody when using my graph.

• Leave yourself red thread back into the labyrinth - A big stumbling block with knowledge graphs (and management in general) is not being able to find your way "back in", or losing track of ideas that you wrote down. The best way to do this is to leave yourself red string in some form of another: timestamps, links to the daily note, links to notes you know you'll view often, todo tags, bookmarks, MOCs, whatever you need.

• Prioritize frequently traveled paths - I think of the graph a lot like an actual structure being created from information, like a city. The densest core clusters of frequently viewed or edited notes are the ones you should spend the most time building good organizational patterns and structures into with your graph. These are your spine notes, MOCs, project folder notes, and so on. On the flipside, don't overly stress about making a random timestamped throwaway idea note extremely well-composed or properly zettelkastened. This also facilitates red thread thinking: you can be sloppy with notes if you link them to the well-traveled sections, because you know you'll find it later.

• It'll never be perfect - You will always have more information than you know what to do with. A "perfect" knowledge base is likely an inert and frozen one. That means what's most important is being able to easily navigate and extend your knowledge base with time. Don't stress about doing it right or making every single note beautifully encapsulated as you go. You can come back to do that for the most well-traveled parts of your graph.

• Link everything - Notes without connections are just information. But notes connected by links becomes meaning through its traversal. Don't be afraid to link between different folders, and link aggressively. You can always remove it later if you don't need it, and if you find yourself linking from multiple notes to the same other note, it may be a clue that the notes need to be combined or separated.

And as a reminder, again: start simple and small, add on with time. Identify what your problems actually are, and think about what sort of structure would provide a solution for it.

Other resources

Thanks for reading! Here are a few more links which might interest you:

• I have some other thoughts on my Sadalkasten approach on my Obsidian Publish website here (https://publish.obsidian.md/sadalsvvd/Meta/My+Knowledge+Management+System%2C+Process%2C+and+Strategy), but at this point this post is probably more complete than that.

• Obsidian Rocks - Exploring knowledge management with Obsidian.

  • Dataview in Obsidian: A Beginner's Guide - Obsidian Rocks

• Fork My Brain - Fork My Brain

• How do you guys organize Zettelkasten notes? > Breaking down a book with Zettelkasten : r/ObsidianMD

In general, googling “personal knowledge management” or “zettelkasten” or “personal knowledge graphs” will return a ton of results.

If this system helps you or inspires you to make your own, I’d love to hear about it!