Finding Harmony in the Apple Ecosystem: A Personal Journey Through PKM and Task Management
For weeks, I’ve been searching for a tool that could handle both Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and task management while fitting seamlessly into my own organizational system. However, I couldn’t find a single application that could bring everything together under one roof. The problem was that a tool excelling in one area often fell short in another.
Take Obsidian, for example. It’s fantastic for note-taking, but when it comes to task management, it just doesn’t deliver. I don’t think plugins are sufficient in this regard — I even wrote my own, but it still felt inefficient. Then there’s Notion, which is great at organizing information, but it doesn’t let me see the connections between my notes from a broader perspective due to the lack of a graph view.
Just as I was about to start building my own application, I watched a video about Apple Notes that shifted my perspective. It turns out Apple has designed its ecosystem in a remarkably fluid way. In Apple Notes, I can use tagging and Smart Folders to instantly find what I’m looking for. I can send a note to Reminders as a task, add a voice note when writing feels tedious, or link to a project’s progress and effort, which opens directly in Numbers. When I add a date to a task in Reminders, it automatically appears in Calendar. And everything syncs seamlessly via iCloud.
For brainstorming or getting a high-level view of my research topics, I might still use tools like Obsidian or Logseq, which support graph views. But for my everyday workflows — capturing ideas, planning, and organizing — I’ve decided to fully commit to the Apple ecosystem.
I also think it’s possible to automate these tasks with Shortcuts, but since I don’t have the time for that right now, I’ll explore it later.
Here’s the thing, though: we need to ask ourselves how much of the notes we take actually benefit us. I work in the tech sector (for now), and information I capture today might already be obsolete tomorrow. I might take hundreds of notes like this, and over time, my knowledge network turns into a pile of irrelevant clutter. I believe we need to filter information before saving it. If I can find something faster through Google, does it really make sense to store it? Especially when I’m not even sure it’ll stay current — like an API parameter that might change overnight.
I think there’s an underlying fear of missing out driving this habit, and in the long run, it could harm both our productivity and our note-taking process. Before saving anything, I’ve started asking myself a few questions to keep this in check:
- Do I really need this information?
- Will it be useful in the long term?
- Can I easily find it elsewhere?
- Is it unique to me or rare?
The point of note-taking is to serve us, not to stress us out. If our notes become a chaotic information dump, it might be time to rethink our approach.
