every PKM framework is wrong

Table of content

by Ray Svitla

I’ve spent years inside these systems. not reviewing them from the outside — living in them. building Zettelkastens that grew to thousands of cards. PARA folders that reorganized quarterly. GTD inboxes that processed daily. bullet journals that filled shelf after shelf.

every single one taught me something real. and every single one was wrong about the thing that matters most.

PARA: organizing by actionability

Tiago Forte’s PARA — Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives — is probably the most influential organizational framework of the 2020s. and the core insight is genuinely brilliant: organize by actionability, not by topic.

a note about “leadership” doesn’t go in a “leadership” folder. it goes in the project where leadership is relevant right now. when the project ends, the note flows to Areas (ongoing responsibility), then Resources (reference), then Archives (done). information flows toward action.

what’s right: this is better than topic-based filing. it solves the “where do I put this?” anxiety by giving a clear decision tree. and the emphasis on actionability over taxonomy is genuinely useful.

where it breaks: PARA has no model of the person using it. two people with identical PARA setups will have identical organizational structures — but wildly different needs. the framework optimizes for where to store things. it says nothing about which things matter to you right now or how to access them given your current state.

AI makes PARA’s strength irrelevant. if semantic search can find anything regardless of folder structure, the carefully maintained flow from Projects to Areas to Resources to Archives is overhead, not infrastructure. what remains valuable is the actionability insight — but that’s a principle, not a folder system.

Zettelkasten: the connection machine

Niklas Luhmann wrote 70 books and 400+ articles using 90,000 index cards. his Zettelkasten — literally “slip box” — was a network of atomic ideas connected by a unique numbering system. each card held one thought. each thought linked to related thoughts. the system became a “conversation partner” — Luhmann’s own description.

the modern Zettelkasten movement (Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes, the Obsidian community, zettelkasten.de) translated this to digital: atomic notes, dense linking, emergent structure.

what’s right: the insight that knowledge is networked, not hierarchical. that the connection between two ideas is often more valuable than either idea alone. that writing forces clarity in a way that highlighting never will. Luhmann was right about all of this.

where it breaks: Luhmann was a sociological theorist producing academic work. his system was designed for one purpose: generating publishable ideas through networked connections. most people building Zettelkastens are not sociological theorists. they’re knowledge workers trying to make better decisions, be more creative, or just feel less overwhelmed.

the Zettelkasten fetish — the obsessive atomization, the linking for linking’s sake, the graph views that look impressive but reveal nothing — misses Luhmann’s actual point. he wasn’t optimizing for connections. he was optimizing for surprise — the moment when two cards next to each other produced an insight neither contained alone.

AI can generate those surprises without 90,000 cards. semantic similarity, conceptual bridging, cross-domain analogies — LLMs do this natively. the Zettelkasten was a pre-computational solution to a problem that computation dissolves.

what survives: the discipline of writing atomically and thinking about connections. that’s a cognitive practice, not a tool. and it doesn’t need a slip box. it needs a brain. your first one.

GTD: the inbox zero of life

David Allen’s Getting Things Done is the oldest framework in this list and probably the most practical. capture everything. clarify: is it actionable? organize by context. review weekly. do.

what’s right: the capture habit. the weekly review. the recognition that open loops — things you’ve committed to but haven’t tracked — drain cognitive energy. “your mind is for having ideas, not holding them” is one of the most useful sentences ever written about productivity.

where it breaks: GTD is a task management system wearing philosophical clothing. it clears your head but doesn’t grow it. it says nothing about identity, about values, about which projects to take on in the first place. it optimizes throughput, not direction.

you can GTD your way through a decade of work that doesn’t matter to you. every week, perfectly organized, every context tagged, every next action clear — and none of it aligned with who you actually are or what you actually value.

GTD’s missing piece is the filter at the top of the funnel. not “what’s the next action?” but “should I be doing this at all, given who I am and what I care about?”

Bullet Journal: analog as philosophy

Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal method is the romantic outlier. deliberately analog. deliberately slow. the act of writing by hand forces reflection. monthly migration — physically rewriting tasks — forces you to ask “do I still care about this?”

what’s right: the friction is the feature. migrating tasks by hand is the GTD weekly review, but with a physical cost that makes you honest about what matters. the analog constraint forces presence.

where it breaks: it doesn’t scale. it doesn’t search. it doesn’t connect. and it can’t interact with AI. the Bullet Journal is a beautiful cognitive tool that exists in a walled garden of paper, unable to participate in the digital ecosystem where most knowledge work happens.

also: the Bullet Journal community evolved into an aesthetic hobby. elaborate layouts, custom spreads, dedicated Instagram accounts. the method that was supposed to be minimal became maximally decorative. the medium ate the message.

the shared blind spot

here’s what PARA, Zettelkasten, GTD, and Bullet Journal all share: none of them model you.

PARA models your projects. Zettelkasten models your ideas. GTD models your commitments. Bullet Journal models your intentions. and all four assume a fixed, stable user who doesn’t change in ways that matter for the system.

but you do change. your values shift. your tensions oscillate. your energy fluctuates. the approach that served you in January fails you in March, not because the approach is worse but because you’re different.

this is the routing problem . and none of these frameworks even know it exists. they’re all answers to “how do I organize X?” when the real question is “which X matters for the version of me that exists right now?”

what AI preserves and what it dissolves

here’s my honest assessment of what survives the AI transition:

dissolved by AI:

preserved by AI:

what’s preserved isn’t the system. it’s the cognitive practice embedded in the system. and cognitive practices don’t need elaborate frameworks. they need intention and habit.

what’s missing from all of them — and what AI makes possible — is the identity layer . a model of who you are that routes everything else. not a better filing system. a routing system that knows the filer.

the generous conclusion

every PKM framework is wrong. but each one is wrong in an interesting, instructive way. and each one is right about something important.

the future isn’t choosing the right framework. it’s extracting the cognitive practices from each — writing atomically, capturing open loops, migrating with friction, organizing by actionability — and adding the layer none of them had: a model of yourself that changes the routing based on who you are today.

the second brain is dead . long live the practices it taught us. they just need a different home — one that knows who lives there.

→ what Tiago Forte got right — deeper analysis of PARA and CODE → the routing layer — what sits on top of these frameworks → why your second brain is dead — the storage paradigm’s eulogy → digital gardens are graveyards — the related problem of abandoned knowledge

Ray Svitla stay evolving