Recently there is a lot of buzz around “personal knowledge management” (PKM) or even building a so-called “second brain” which among other things means to collect and process knowledge often with the promise to make it easier to produce content.

My intention for knowledge management is a bit more humble: I don’t want to spend time twice searching for and looking up topics and I want to find things fast rather than searching. Since a lot of knowledge I come across consists of websites and web articles I needed a workflow for it.

This text describes the current state of affairs first as an reflection of it and second I welcome any discussion on it.

My workflow uses several different tools which are mostly Markdown based

• Omnivore as the collection tool to stored, read and highlight Web content
• Logseq as a journaling and processing tool
• nb as a bookmark and reference tool
• Dendron as the final knowledge base

Like probably a lot of people I tend to collect way more than I can read or is useful. Hence my workflow follows the Limit your work in progress approach from Personal Kanban. The idea is to limit the hoarding to ensure I follow up and read stuff rather than mindlessly collecting stuff.

The workflow itself follows the steps of GTD:

I capture things to read in Omnivore

I add things to read to Omnivore as an Inbox until the Omnivore inbox reaches 15 items. I usually tag items with the high level category or area of interest directly when I add them.

I clarify what they mean and process them

Latest if I collected more than 15 items in Omnivore I process this inbox which leads to one of three basic outcomes

• I may decide it’s no longer interesting and delete or archive the entry
• I may decide it’s not something I want to read right now but may need in the future as reference. In this case I add it to nb and archive it.
• I read it and highlight those parts that are important for the topic at hand and those which want to find again. For these items I add a tag “imported.”

I organize them where I can find them again

Organizing starts with importing them into Logseq using the Omnivore plugin using these settings These settings add the article highlights into the page in Logseq including its tags.

Once they’re in Logseq I process the pages. One of the - at least for me - most useful features of Logseq is its query mechanism. The following quite simple query gives me all imported pages which I haven’t processed yet.

	- {{query (and (property :tags "#imported") (not (property :tags "#processed")))}}
	  query-table:: true
	  query-properties:: [:page :date-saved]
	  query-sort-by:: date-saved
	  query-sort-desc:: true

The properties of the query limit the output to the page title and the date I saved it and sort them with the newest entry first.

The processing includes these steps:

• I do some cleanup of the page in Logseq.
• For longer articles and items I want to move to my knowledge base I highlight the essentials and use the Extract plugin to create a summary. Then I export the highlights and create a new note in Dendron in the fitting hierarchy. I delete the highlights to just keep the summary.
• Finally I remove the “imported” tag both from the page and in Omnivore and archive it there.