Beyond Words: The Future of PKM - Exploring 5 Cards from The MindSET Visual Thinking Framework

Visual personal knowledge management hinges on a simple shift: knowledge becomes easier to retrieve and understand when notes stop behaving like linear text and start behaving like interconnected visual models. The core claim is that most people learn through webs of concepts and relationships, but traditional note-taking forces information into a word-by-word sequence. By drawing those relationships back onto paper—then linking, reusing, and navigating them—notes turn into a feedback loop that helps people verify understanding and integrate new ideas.

The argument starts with a childhood contrast. Early learning often begins with drawing before writing, yet schooling trains attention toward alphabet mastery, vocabulary, and increasingly complex reading. That creates a “textual bias” in adulthood: even though people can store information, they struggle to connect it. The transcript frames this as a mismatch between how knowledge forms in the mind (as linked mental models) and how many systems store it (as standalone documents). The result is common: notes pile up, but the connections that make knowledge usable don’t automatically emerge.

To address that gap, the framework moves through three levels of PKM. First is 2D PKM: notes live as separate text files or notebook entries, and retrieval typically means scanning from start to finish. Second is 3D PKM: links, tags, index pages, content maps, and ontologies add a third dimension—relationships between notes—while still keeping the underlying documents text-based. Third is “beyond text” PKM, described as nonlinear notes that merge images, links, tags, and text. This approach is positioned as a practical way to absorb information without reading line by line, with Excalidraw and Excal brain (as tools within Obsidian) presented as central examples.

From there, the transcript introduces the MindSET Visual Thinking Framework, built as a set of 32 “cards.” Five cards illustrate how visual PKM should work in practice. One card focuses on visual thinking: translating concepts and relationships from reading into drawn concept maps, then using the drawing process to create a feedback loop. Another demonstrates “link and think icons,” where icons are not decoration but a navigational system—an automatically generated icon library and an “idea mixer” that gathers related concepts around a single icon (e.g., curiosity) across an entire Obsidian vault.

A third card covers “legalized ideas,” likened to atomic notes but visual: start with a broader visual, then carve out reusable components (like a neuron illustration) and repurpose them in new contexts. A fourth card introduces a “forcing function” using a condensed visual “virtual Post-It” to navigate at a meta level—where the same central visual appears across different views. The final card, “visuals as Zettelkasten notes,” emphasizes flip-and-retrieve design: the visual front supports quick scanning, while the back side holds the full Markdown details, metadata, tags, links, and ontology.

The closing section turns the framework into action: pick a concept and draw it, build a reusable visual vocabulary with consistent icons, treat illustrations like Lego blocks for reuse, and avoid the belief that only skilled artists can participate. A six-week Visual Thinking Workshop is offered as a structured way to practice these methods through creating a visual book-on-a-page summary.