PKM
Over the past few weeks, I’ve repeatedly grappled with a problem that increasingly angers me. It concerns precisely those tools for thought that are supposed to help me organize knowledge, make connections visible, and keep information available in the long term.
For years, I have been collecting notes, literature references, quotes, ideas, and observations in digital knowledge systems. Like many other users of Tana, Roam Research, Obsidian, or similar tools for thought, I conscientiously follow the conviction that well-networked knowledge is easier to retrieve later. So I’ve linked notes, assigned tags, created references, and tried to establish connections between atomic notes in the form of relationships.
Yet I increasingly catch myself having this frustrating thought:
I know that I noted something important about this at some point. But I have no idea anymore how I thought about it back then, under what term, with which tags, and especially in which vault I stored it. Where should I even start to search?
The problem is not that the information or idea has been lost. It’s already located somewhere in my tool for thought. The problem is rather that I can’t search precisely because I can no longer remember the note—because it’s somehow slumbering in the sea of my second brains.
The larger my knowledge archive grows, the more frequently this uncomfortable feeling arises. And therein lies the paradox: While the volume of my stored knowledge grows, my confidence in accessing it at the right moment decreases. Often, for quickly retrievable knowledge, I unconsciously resort to other storage methods, such as browser bookmarks.
Many personal knowledge management systems and tools for thought are based on the assumption that good links and metadata should make later retrieval easier. The underlying assumptions initially seem plausible:
In practice, however, this only works under one important condition: I must know what I’m searching for.
This is exactly where the problem begins.
Most notes are created in a specific situational context. I read an article, listen to a podcast, work on a publication, or engage with a concrete question. The terms I use to tag the note reflect this context.
Months later, I encounter a similar problem, but from a completely different perspective. The search terms that come to mind now are different from those I used back then.
The result is a gap between storage and retrievability. And that increasingly frustrates me.
Interestingly, this is not merely a personal or even purely technical problem, but rather a well-documented phenomenon in memory research.
Tulving and Thomson (1973) described with their Encoding Specificity Principle that memories are always stored together with their original context. The successful retrieval of a memory depends substantially on whether the cues available during retrieval resemble those present during reading, note-taking, or storage.
Put more simply:
We don’t remember information in isolation. We remember information via contexts, situations, and moods.
For digital knowledge systems and tools for thought, which are used as a kind of second brain, this has far-reaching consequences. Because tags, links, and categories primarily reflect the context of the past. But the later search proceeds from the context of the present.
This is precisely where the retrieval paradox arises.
Many modern knowledge systems rely on bidirectional linking. These are undoubtedly helpful for making connections visible.
But they solve a different problem:
Links help me get from one known note to another. But: they don’t help me remember that the other note exists in the first place.
This sounds like a minor point, but it may be the decisive one.
A link is a good navigation tool. But retrieval begins before navigation—namely, in the moment when I must recognize that something relevant might exist.
Perhaps many PKM systems and tools for thought rest on an implicit assumption:
If I collect enough information and interlink it sufficiently, eventually a reliable external memory will emerge.
I’m no longer sure whether this assumption holds. The larger my archive grows, the more frequently I feel that important ideas disappear into a kind of “digital fog” or “beneath the surface” of my cognitive iceberg. They’re not deleted. They’re not unreachable. They’re simply outside my current attention span.
This recalls an observation by Tulving and Pearlstone (1966):
Information can be available in memory without being accessible.
Perhaps the same is also true for digital knowledge archives.
Another aspect increasingly occupies my mind. With each new note comes the hope that it might be useful again someday. At the same time, with each piece of stored information, uncertainty grows about whether it will ever resurface.
The form of FOMO that results differs from the classical fear of missing something new. It is rather the fear of no longer being able to use knowledge that is already available. I call this observation MEFOMO—Memory Fear of Missing Out—and it contains, briefly summarized:
What if the answer to my current problem is already somewhere in my notes—but I no longer know that it’s there?
Perhaps the future of digital knowledge systems and tools for thought does not lie in ever-better databases, ever more metadata, or ever more complex linking.
Perhaps we need systems that focus less on storage and more on recollection. Systems that not only answer:
What are you searching for?
but also ask upon input:
What should you perhaps remember later?
In this sense, the real problem in knowledge work with tools for thought may not be information loss, but rather a loss of certainty that relevant knowledge will resurface at the crucial moment. It’s worth continuing to work on this “retrieval paradox.” That’s already noted down.
Godden, D. R., & Baddeley, A. D. (1975). Context-dependent memory in two natural environments: On land and underwater. British Journal of Psychology, 66(3), 325–331. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1975.tb01468.x
Tulving, E., & Pearlstone, Z. (1966). Availability versus accessibility of information in memory for words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5(4), 381–391. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(66)80048-8
Tulving, E., & Thomson, D. M. (1973). Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory. Psychological Review, 80(5), 352–373. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071
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