Are Note-taking tools innovative enough?

PKM ONE
2 min readMay 11, 2022

Right now the note-taking developers are not innovating but just trying to capture a pie of the market.

A lot is being said about note-taking tools, they are also referred to as tools for thoughts. But do they serve the purpose of making you a better thinker? I am not so sure.

Note-taking tools are cluttered with connections. They might help discover connections. But do they don’t teach you how to think?

What frameworks or mental models to apply so you can validate or do you just keep staring at the notes you wrote a few years back and felt what a wasted effort.

Note-taking apps are all copying each other. The master format seems to be Roam Research features like wiki links and backlinks applied to a whiteboard or note-taking apps. Obsidian is not even a note-taking app but just a connector of text files. Ref — https://austingovella.medium.com/why-its-hard-to-get-started-obsidian-s-not-really-a-note-taking-app-75bafbebf6f3

All note-taking apps are trying to innovate by making rediscovery of notes organically or with AI. But the critical thinking part is left to the user.

I would like to see some frameworks to be applied to current note-taking apps.

Frameworks like Scrum, OKRs, Cynefin, theory of constraints, Northstar should be built in so the user can process their project notes with a particular framework and make progress on their projects.

I see this should be the next iteration for developers to work on once the market of connected notes gets saturated and demand stagnates, which I feel is already happening.

Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog

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