Visual Personal Knowledge Management with Zsolt Viczián

Personal knowledge management is shifting from “frictionless capture” to deliberate thinking—using Excalidraw and ExcaliBrain to make notes searchable, relationships explicit, and gaps visible. Zsolt Viczian’s core claim is that the real value isn’t speed or automation; it’s the mental work of turning ideas into structured links and then revisiting them. That approach shows up across his tool choices and his workflow: he builds visual summaries that remain text-based, and he visualizes the structure of his vault as a graph that helps him “garden” knowledge over time.

Viczian’s path into PKM began during COVID, when extra (unpaid) leave pushed him to experiment publicly with ideas. His technical background traces back to a PhD in quality management systems and documentation—experience that later led him to The Brain, which he used for about two decades. He praises The Brain’s visualization as intuitive, but criticizes its closed ecosystem: without a robust plugin marketplace, he couldn’t solve a key need—getting visual notes into a searchable workflow. That limitation drove him to build and integrate Excalidraw into other systems.

Excalidraw itself is open source and developed by a broader team; Viczian contributed by integrating it into Roam Research and later into Obsidian. The switch reflects a practical tradeoff: The Brain’s visualization strength versus Obsidian’s extensibility. He tried Roam first, liking its simple interface, but eventually moved to Obsidian when it better fit his evolving requirements.

Methodologically, his note-taking is anchored in GTD (Getting Things Done) because his work life is dominated by meetings and action tracking. He also uses PKM practices like progressive summarization and “Book on a Page” outputs, while experimenting with Zettelkasten-style linking. Over time, he moved from a daily-note-centric approach toward more structured summaries and deeper synthesis—especially through visual aggregation.

That synthesis is where Excalidraw matters. Viczian emphasizes that typed text inside Excalidraw becomes Markdown, so it stays searchable and linkable inside Obsidian rather than becoming “just a picture.” He demonstrates a “Book on a Page” workflow for summarizing dense books, where clickable links jump from the visual summary into deeper notes. He also previews a forthcoming feature (tied to an upcoming version) that allows linking to a portion of an image—turning sections of a diagram into navigable, embedded references.

ExcaliBrain takes the opposite direction: instead of turning visuals into text, it visualizes the relationships already present in Obsidian notes. It generates a graph from links—forward links, backlinks, and mutual “handshake” relationships—displaying parents, children, and lateral connections. A distinctive feature is that it can surface “uncreated” referenced notes, effectively highlighting knowledge gaps. Viczian uses this to refine his ontology of linking: he tries to add descriptions to links so the relationship meaning is visible in the graph.

The workflow encourages ongoing revision rather than one-time capture. He frames the process as “purposeful friction”: writing down what’s fuzzy, clarifying relationships, and using the graph to challenge assumptions. For learning, he points to his YouTube channel as the most reliable source despite frequent updates, and he recommends core Obsidian plugins like Dataview and Templater as foundational tools for building a system around structured notes.