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Plain Text for Personal Knowledge Management, Part 2

AI-GENERATED published: November 1, 2025 estimate: 4 min read view-cnt: 10 views

Introduction

Once you commit to plain text for personal knowledge management, the next question emerges: how do you organize it? Unlike databases with tags and queries, plain text relies on explicit structure. Your category design becomes the backbone of your entire system.

Common Categorization Approaches

1. Chronological (Time-Based)

Organize by date: daily notes, weekly reviews, monthly summaries.

Pros: Natural for journaling, easy to maintain, captures context of when ideas emerged

Cons: Hard to find thematic information, duplication across dates, poor for reference material

Best for: Journals, logs, time-sensitive tracking

2. PARA Method (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive)

Separate actionable projects from ongoing areas of responsibility, reference resources, and completed items.

Pros: Clear action-oriented structure, separates active from inactive, widely adopted with good tooling support

Cons: Ambiguous boundaries (is “health” a project or area?), requires frequent reorganization, forces everything into four buckets

Best for: Goal-oriented professionals, people managing multiple simultaneous projects

3. Topical/Domain-Based

Categories mirror knowledge domains: technology, finance, health, hobbies.

Pros: Intuitive, mirrors how we think about subjects, easy for reference material

Cons: Cross-cutting concerns create duplication, rigid boundaries, doesn’t reflect how knowledge evolves

Best for: Reference collections, learning new domains, organizing external information

4. Zettelkasten (Atomic Notes + Links)

Each note is atomic (one idea), with unique IDs and explicit links between concepts.

Pros: Encourages deep thinking, builds knowledge networks, resistant to rigid hierarchies

Cons: Requires significant overhead for plain text, hard to browse casually, steep learning curve

Best for: Academic research, writers, knowledge workers building interconnected ideas

5. Map of Content (MOC)

Instead of rigid folders, create index notes that link to related content. An MOC is a note that serves as a hub for a topic, containing links to all relevant notes without enforcing a strict hierarchy.

Pros: Flexible—notes can appear in multiple MOCs, supports emergent organization, mirrors how ideas naturally connect, allows both bottom-up and top-down navigation

Cons: Requires manual maintenance of index notes, links can become stale in plain text, more conceptual overhead than simple folders, needs discipline to keep MOCs updated

Best for: People who think in networks rather than trees, systems that blend multiple organizational schemes, avoiding premature categorization

6. Tag-Based System

Use tags or keywords (often in YAML frontmatter) instead of folders. Files live in a flat structure while tags provide multiple dimensions of categorization.

Pros: Multi-dimensional—one note can have many tags, no forced hierarchy, extremely flexible for cross-cutting concerns, easy to add new organizational dimensions

Cons: Tag proliferation (tags/Tags/tag vs tagging), requires consistent naming conventions, needs tooling for effective tag browsing in plain text, no inherent structure can feel chaotic

Best for: Digital gardeners, people with highly interconnected knowledge, those who prefer emergent over planned organization

There Is No Perfect System

Every categorization scheme makes trade-offs. Chronological captures time but loses themes. PARA prioritizes action but forces artificial boundaries. Topical systems feel natural until your interests shift. MOCs offer flexibility but demand ongoing curation. Tags provide maximum flexibility but can become unwieldy without discipline.

The best category design is the one you’ll actually maintain. Start simple, let it evolve with your needs, and resist the temptation to reorganize endlessly. Your PKM should serve your thinking, not become a thinking substitute.

Conclusion

Category design in plain text PKM is less about finding the “right” system and more about understanding what trade-offs fit your workflow. Consider how you naturally think, how you’ll search, and how much maintenance you’ll sustain. Then build accordingly—and be ready to adjust as you learn.

These approaches aren’t mutually exclusive. Many effective PKM systems blend multiple methods—using chronological journals as entry points, organizing reference material topically, managing projects with PARA principles, and connecting ideas with MOC-style index notes. The key is understanding each approach’s strengths so you can combine them intentionally.

In Part 3, I’ll show how I’ve built a syncretic system that blends these methods, introducing concepts like prose vs. data, orthogonal categorization, and meta-categories to create a flexible yet structured approach to personal knowledge management.