Today I gave a talk at my friend Zsolt Viczián’s Sketch Your Mind Conference about how I use visuals in my PKM, a follow-up to my video about Obsidian Excalidraw last year where I shared that I’d changed all my Obsidian templates to hybrid Obsidian Excalidraw notes:

In the talk, I shared how I’ve evolved my use of visuals in my PKM over the last year, including:

• Referring to icon and logo libraries that dynamically compile all the atomic visuals I use in my notes
• Adopting a visual Zettelkasten-like approach
• Creating notes at conferences to track people I’ve met and talks I’ve attended
• Using Obsidian Excalidraw to create compelling presentations in lieu of slides
• Combining visuals with audio recordings to create literature notes of books I’m reading
• Using a full observability pipeline to monitor and analyze the notes in my Obsidian vault

I was particularly excited about the last point. I work at Grafana Labs and help people monitor their computer systems using opensource software. I realized that I could use the same tools to monitor my PKM system, so I set up a pipeline where a Python script scrapes note metadata, and sends information to Loki and Prometheus via Alloy, and then I visualize it all in Grafana. It’s a pretty nerdy and totally unnecessary setup, but here’s the repo for anyone interested in replicating it.