“Goodbye Evernote: How I chose Logseq over Notion and Obsidian”
Evernote is one of the most well known note taking apps, but it has changed little since I first started using it in 2009. Since then, several new players have innovated where Evernote hasn’t.
New tools have embraced ideas like Second Brain and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) — these are digital tools and techniques to organize and retrieve information to enhance productivity and knowledge retention.
I wanted see if I could benefit from a PKM system and how they differed from cloud based notebooks such as Evernote and OneNote.
The big (timeline) problem
My style of notetaking is that of “Gardener” or “Librarian” style; I tend to gather information without a pre-existing set of categories, and hope to glean insights from it later.
This post is targeted towards similar information gatherers, who are familiar with Notion, Obsidian, and Evernote and who have the challenge of understanding timelines of projects, people, and systems.
You might be familiar with these types of questions:
- how did we get here?
- why did we make this decision?
- what has this person been working on?
- what has the history of this system been?
- how did we get off schedule?
The knowledge for these types of questions is acquired over a long time (weeks or months), and is intertwined with other information. Frequently, topics do not fit into single categories.
While Evernote, Obsidian, and Notion all have their own strengths, Logseq has one feature that helps to answer these questions.
First, my answer
Logseq is the best tool for notetakers whose knowledge does not fit neatly into single categories, and seek insights drawn from notes over long time spans.
Logseq has the unique capability to reconstruct an “at a glance” timeline from your notes. It leverages date sensitive Journal entires, outline structured notes, and hashtags, to present your knowledge in chronological order, with appropriate context and detail.
A simple request: collapse bullet points
Let’s start with some basics: Evernote supports outline structured notes, but you couldn’t collapse bullet points until 2024. Logseq, and most other modern tools support this.
This feature allows you to alternate between big picture and details.
Challenge: Insights from notes, without distractions
Ideally, we’d like to be able to go to a meeting, jot down notes about several projects, people, ideas, using hashtags to track topics of interest. Then create consolidated project notes from meetings were spread across multiple dates and interwoven with other topics.
Let’s say we discuss BigProject with Tim, in our team meeting. Are these notes kept in “team meeting”, “BigProject”, or “Tim”? You do not want to have to make decision on which note to put details, and when retrieving details, you do not want to have to search multiple notes. Knowledge retrieval is difficult when a note can be written to multiple locations.
Similarly, if there are several meetings, and several projects are discussed in all of them, how do you retrieve just the knowledge of BigProject, across all meeting notes, without details the other projects?
This is the challenge of the old paradigm that notes are stored in files and folders. This isn’t how our brains work. Our knowledge and memories are dynamic, and our brain allows us to pull together ideas in multiple ways and methods. We need tools that support us in this way.
Logseq is a gamechanger
Through the use of three features: outline-structured notes, a journal, and hashtag support, structure and data are associated with each piece of information, and this allows you to slice and dice your notes in ways that no other note taking app can. Logseq shows the appropriate context and detail, and sorts it in chronological order.
All note taking systems support notes in outline format, but only Logseq uses this structure to infer knowledge relationships. Parent bullet points capture context and the child bullet points capture detail.
The daily journal is one of the primary methods of adding notes. You might put the notes from a few meetings there, some activities, and maybe some goals for the day. Now, information you’ve added to the journal has a date associated with it.
A hashtag is a way to label or categorize information. In modern apps, we use hashtags to find related information and make connections. For example, we might associate these tags with myself: #leadership, #engineer, #parent. I am not described by just one of these, but by all.
Consolidate notes for a long, complex project
Let’s walk through how we can capture and consolidate knowledge on complex projects. Imagine a project called “big-project”, led by Tim. Over time, we have discussions in multiple meetings, such as “all hands” and “project meeting”. During these discussions, another project, “little-project”, comes up.
Our challenge is to to consolidate notes for big-project without the distracting notes about little-project. We also want to see consolidated notes on Tim, from those meetings and any others.
First let’s record some meeting notes. Traditionally, we record all meeting notes in the same file, and separate the different events with a date header. Instead, with Logseq, we put all of these notes in our journal, so the updates are associated with a date. The first bullet point is our meeting, “all hands”, and in child bullet points we have the announcement of the projects and some details.
Our next meeting is noted similarly. The “project meeting” discusses both big-project and little-project. We can see that Tim is leading big-project.
Let’s retrieve “big-project” notes. Logseq retrieves all these notes and sorts by Journal date. This allows us to see the progression of the project across time. Details of “little-project” are not pulled in, because they are neither child nor parent bullet points.
This is an amazing result: for the first time ever, we have a tool that allows us to retrieve the relevant information, regardless of where we’ve written the information to, and sorts it by date, allowing us to see how our information was gathered over time. We are not limited to a file and folder structure and the nuances of classification.
We can do this roll up with any hashtag that annotates our notes. Let’s retrieve consolidated notes by person, Tim.
Again, we can see that notes about Tim are collected and shown in chronological order.
Obsidian, Apple Notes, Bear, and Notion …
I tried several other apps and found they didn’t solve my problem well. In most of the apps, there are two steps: search for the hashtag, and then click on each search result to see context and detail. These extra steps make it difficult to conveniently review all the information you have on a topic.
I had big hopes for Obsidian, which has a strong following. However, Obsidian returns details, but not the context: (#project-meeting) is not shown in the search results.
Apple Notes and Bear create a list of notes in which the tag is found, but you have to click into the note to read context and details. Additionally, with Apple Notes, when the note is edited, the date on the note is changed.
Notion has a huge following and is very popular, but inline tags are not supported at all, and can only tag the note. Similar to Apple Notes and Bear, only a list of notes is returned when searching for tags, but with Notion, no detail is shown at all.
Ending thoughts
Despite the hype of Obsidian and Notion, I found the tools unsuitable for my most important use case: write semi structured knowledge that defies file and folder paradigms, and create ordered, consolidated notes, while spending a minimal amount of time on note polishing.
Logseq has transformed how I track long running projects and track complex ideas.
In a future post, I’ll suggest my thoughts on strengths and weaknesses of each tool and the right audience for each.
