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The essays on this blog follow one question: why do saved notes so rarely turn into developed ideas, and what would a tool need to do about it? They were written in no particular order. This page puts them in one: first the thinking, then the choice of tool, then the practice.

1. How to think about notes

Start with the argument the rest of the blog builds on.

• Stop Managing Notes. Start Developing Concepts. Why the unit worth building around is the concept, not the note, and what the paper Zettelkasten already knew about it.
• Why Backlinks Are Not the Same as Relationships A backlink records that two notes touched. It does not say how, in which direction, how strongly, or since when.
• Personal Knowledge Management with Jotaid The five skills personal knowledge management named in 1999, and why the fifth, integrating and relating, is still mostly left to you.
• What Is a Personal Knowledge Engine? Keeping what you decided apart from what software worked out, so you and your AI agents can both pick up where you left off.
• AI Should Help You Notice Connections, Not Decide What They Mean Why the meaning of a connection should stay with you, what four studies say about it, and six tests for AI in a thinking tool.

2. How to choose a note app

Apps differ less in their feature lists than in what they think a note is.

• How to Choose a Personal Knowledge Management App Obsidian, Notion, Capacities and Jotaid organize knowledge four different ways, and a one-afternoon test to find out which suits your work.
• Folders, Tags, Files, Entities: Four Ideas of What a Note Is Apple Notes, Bear, Obsidian and Jotaid store notes in four structures, and the structure decides which questions you can ask later.
• 10 Best Obsidian Alternatives in 2026 Ten apps compared by what each one changes, with prices checked on each official site.
• Jotaid vs Obsidian What the same [[link]] becomes in each app, five questions that separate them, and how to use both without giving up your vault.

3. How to read what your notes show

Graphs and matrices are only useful if you know what to look for.

• How to Use a Knowledge Graph for Notes What a connection in a note graph can and cannot tell you, and a workflow for using one.
• When a Beautiful Knowledge Graph Becomes Useful Several apps' graphs, through their documentation and what their users report.
• What a Co-occurrence Matrix Can Reveal About Your Notes Seven shapes to look for in a grid of your own concepts, what each one means, and what the grid cannot tell you.

4. Why Jotaid exists

• Why I Built Jotaid The problem behind the app, in the words of the person who built it.

5. Putting it to work

The guides at docs.jotaid.com cover how to do things in the app. A few that pick up where the essays leave off:

• Zettelkasten: one idea per note, with concepts as the keyword index.
• PARA: where projects, areas, resources and archives each land in Jotaid.
• Design Thinking: from affinity mapping to insights and "how might we" questions.
• Connect AI Agents (MCP): let AI agents on your Mac read your notes, read-only, and choose which projects they can see.
• Import & Export: bring Markdown in, and take it out again.
• Free vs Pro: what the free tier includes, and what Pro adds.