Using Bear as a Personal Knowledge Management system

General
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I have experimented with different apps for Personal Knowledge Management for years, and finally settled on using Bear with its lovely tag system. I use nested tags, structuring them according to the PARA method. It’s pretty simple. I have done a writeup of my setup here, with a few screenshots. Comments and feedback on my system appreciated.

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Thanks James, appreciate your information as I’m struggling with Apple Notes the same way - hoped to see Markdown support in iOS18 etc., but as Bear featured in the keynote (great!!!) I don’t expected it to be “just” available without notice.

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I’ve given up on waiting for things to be added to Notes. One of the nice things about the Apple ecosystem is that powerful things are often made available to all developers, so Bear, being a native app, can get them pretty much when Notes does.

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Hi James,

It’s cool to see someone using Bear as a PKM! I also use it in this way with a PARA method quite similar to yours :slight_smile:

I hope you were able to work around the app’s limitations to make it fit with this method.

Thank you very much for sharing

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Nothing is perfect, but I think Bear does all the essential things well. I’ll write an update after using it in this way for a few months.

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@James.bcn It seems your write-up is not up on Tiny.host. I would love to read it if it is available elsewhere.

https://www.beyond2060.com/technical/24-06/My-Personal-Knowledge-Management-System.html

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Oh sorry, I changed the layout of my website recently. The article is here:

I have a few other posts on Bear which you can find here:

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Thanks for sharing, this was a lovely write up (and I didn’t know Finder supported comments :exploding_head: )

I’ve come back to Bear for similar reasons: I’ve been researching digital gardens* (and indirectly personal knowledge management systems) and was looking for a smooth workflow from Markdown to my website.

I remembered the joy I had editing notes in Bear previously - and how well it supported my postgraduate studies - so it seems perfect. I tried some of the export formats to see what would work best (the markdown one is exactly what I need, but textbundle was also interesting) and now I’m just working on my website.

My publishing workflow will be a little more manual than yours since I’m still learning how to use my static site generator of choice (Eleventy), but I know that I’ll be able to drop my Markdown files in the relevant folder, make any adjustments necessary, and upload to GitHub to trigger deployment. I’m excited that I get to write in a gorgeous editor and have full customisation over my website :blush:

I had similar friction with other note taking systems. I needed to be able to capture notes immediately. I had previously been using Simplenote, but without tagging or Markdown** it was very basic.

My note taking needs are currently a little different, given I’m going to try implementing some of the principles of digital gardening, but the PARA method looks like a very useful way to organise my private notes.

Thanks again for sharing :slightly_smiling_face:

*My ultimate goal is probably something between a blog and a digital garden. I’ve always enjoyed blogging and the community feel of this, but - as your post on information diet aludes to - my time online has been watered down to doom scrolling social media. I want to use my personal site to address the question raised at the end of your article. I think by using my site to more regularly engage with the content I do consume will help me develop and expand my knowledge and experience (the generation effect).

**It turns out Simplenote does support markdown, but you have to turn it on and the markdown preview lives in a different view. On iOS you literally have to swipe the screen to find it. It’s not indicated by the interface anywhere… and I’ve been using Simplenote for almost ten years :woman_facepalming:

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Thanks for responding. I’m loving using Bear to write and create articles for my website. I love the simplicity of it, and the thoughtful design.

I’m still developing techniques. Being able to export as HTML and Markdown is one of the most powerful features. I do a lot of presentations and I’ve actually started to create them in Bear, and I have a process that easily converts a Bear document into a presentation in just a few minutes. I’ll write up the process and post it here when I put it on my site.

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