Personal Knowledge Management

Basic Memory gives you a shared knowledge base with your AI that works across every conversation. For personal knowledge management, this means you can track goals, log reflections, note decisions, and build up a picture of your life over time. The AI reads everything you've written, connects the dots, and helps you see patterns you'd miss on your own.

Think of it as a personal life graph. Every note you write — about a goal, a habit, a relationship, a decision — becomes a node. The relations between notes become edges. Over time, your AI can traverse that graph and surface insights like "your energy levels correlate with exercise consistency" or "you tend to make better decisions after journaling."

Getting Started

If you haven't set up Basic Memory yet, see the quickstart guide. Once it's running, you can start building your personal knowledge base by simply talking to your AI:

"Create a note about my goal to run a half marathon by December. I've been running 3 times a week and just finished my first 5K in 28 minutes."

The AI writes a structured note with observations, tags, and relations — all in plain markdown on your machine. You can also create notes directly in your editor or Obsidian. Basic Memory syncs everything automatically.

Life Domains You Can Track

Basic Memory works well for any area of life where you want to build up knowledge over time. Here are some common domains:

Goals and milestones — Career goals, fitness targets, financial milestones, learning objectives. Track progress, record achievements, and let the AI remind you how far you've come.

"Write a note tracking my 2026 goals: lead a major project at work, run a half marathon, read 24 books, and build an emergency fund to 6 months expenses."

Health and wellness — Exercise habits, sleep patterns, stress management, energy levels. Over time, the AI can identify what actually works for you versus what doesn't.

"Log that I've been meditating 10 minutes daily for 30 days. I've noticed it helps with anxiety before presentations."

Relationships — Important conversations, shared experiences, things you want to remember about the people in your life. Thoughtful notes help you show up better.

"Note that Mom's retirement party is in June and she mentioned wanting to visit the national parks this year."

Finances — Investment decisions and rationale, spending patterns, financial goals and progress. Having a written record of why you made financial decisions is invaluable during market downturns.

"Record my investment decision: moving to 70/30 stock/bond index fund split because of my long time horizon and low-cost evidence-based approach."

Personal growth — Reflections, values clarification, lessons learned from experiences. This is where the knowledge graph really shines — connecting insights across years of reflection.

"Write a reflection on what I learned from the team conflict this week. I noticed I tend to avoid direct conversations and that makes things worse."

Each note becomes part of your personal knowledge graph, connected to every other note through relations and semantic meaning.

The Power of Connections

The real value of personal knowledge management isn't any single note — it's the connections between them. When you tell your AI about a stressful week at work and it can see your notes about exercise habits, sleep patterns, and previous stress episodes, it can offer genuinely personalized insights.

You: "I've been feeling low energy this week. Any patterns in my notes?"

AI: [Searches across your knowledge graph]
    Looking at your recent notes alongside historical patterns:
    - You skipped your morning routine 4 of 5 days this week
    - Last time this happened (October), it coincided with a project deadline
    - Your notes consistently show that exercise before 10am correlates with
      better energy for the rest of the day
    - You also noted last month that evening workouts disrupt your sleep

This kind of cross-domain insight is only possible because the AI has access to your full knowledge graph. It's not guessing — it's reading what you've actually written about yourself over time.

Finding Patterns in Your Life

Semantic Search

Basic Memory v0.19 introduces semantic vector search, which means you can search by meaning rather than exact words. This is especially powerful for personal knowledge:

"What patterns do I notice about what energizes me?"

This searches across all your notes — goals, reflections, habit logs, weekly reviews — and finds relevant content even if you used different words each time. You might have written about "feeling alive" in one note, "high energy" in another, and "in the zone" in a third. Semantic search connects them all.

"Find anything I've written about managing stress"

"What have I learned about making big decisions?"

Metadata Search

You can also filter notes by their properties — tags, types, dates:

"Show me all my goals marked in-progress"

"Find reflections from the last 3 months"

"List all notes tagged with health"

Combining semantic and metadata search gives you powerful ways to review and analyze your personal knowledge. "Show me health-related reflections where I mentioned energy" narrows down to exactly what you need.

Keeping Things Organized with Schemas

Schemas are a v0.19 feature that let you define consistent structure for different kinds of notes. For personal knowledge management, this means your goals always have the same fields, your reflections follow the same format, and your weekly reviews are easy to compare.

"Create a schema for goal tracking with fields for status, target date, progress notes, and related life domain."

Now when you create a goal note, the AI validates that it includes the right structure. This makes it much easier to search, filter, and review your goals later.

"Create a schema for reflections with fields for what happened, what I learned, what I'd do differently, and emotional state."

You can create schemas for any note type: goals, reflections, habits, decisions, relationships, weekly reviews. The consistency pays off when you want to do things like "show me all goals with status in-progress" or "compare my last four weekly reviews."

See the schema system guide for details on creating and using schemas.

Weekly and Monthly Reviews

Regular reflection turns scattered notes into genuine self-knowledge. A weekly review is one of the highest-value habits you can build with Basic Memory.

"Let's do my weekly review. Look at what I wrote this week and help me reflect."

The AI pulls together your recent notes and helps you spot patterns:

You: "Write my weekly review for this week."

AI: Based on your notes this week, here's a summary:

    ## Weekly Review - March 3, 2026

    ## What Went Well
    - [achievement] Finished conference presentation outline
    - [habit] Maintained meditation 6/7 days
    - [relationship] Meaningful conversation with Alex about future plans

    ## Challenges
    - [pattern] Procrastinated on admin tasks until deadline pressure
    - [pattern] Stayed up late on screens three nights — sleep quality dropped

    ## Insights
    - [discovery] Exercise before difficult conversations improved communication
    - [pattern] Creative energy highest on early-wake days

    ## Next Week Intentions
    - Schedule admin time proactively instead of waiting for deadlines
    - Phone on do-not-disturb after 9pm
    - Continue Spanish practice, add speaking component

    ## Relations
    - continues [[February Weekly Reviews]]
    - informs [[Q1 2026 Goals]]

Over months, these reviews create a rich record of your patterns, growth, and recurring challenges. Monthly and quarterly reviews can pull from weekly reviews to identify bigger trends.

"Look at my weekly reviews from the past month. What themes keep coming up?"

Privacy and Boundaries

Personal knowledge is, well, personal. Basic Memory is designed with this in mind.

Local-first by default — Your notes live as markdown files on your machine. Nothing leaves your computer unless you choose to sync it.

Per-project routing — With v0.19's per-project routing, you can keep personal notes in a local-only project while routing work projects to the cloud. Your journal entries and health notes stay on your laptop; your team documentation syncs to Basic Memory Cloud. Different projects, different rules.

# Personal notes stay local
basic-memory project add personal ~/notes/personal

# Work notes can sync to cloud
basic-memory project add work ~/notes/work --cloud

Choose your level of detail — You control what goes into your knowledge base. Focus on patterns and insights rather than raw personal details if that feels more comfortable. "I noticed conflict avoidance makes things worse" is more useful than a play-by-play of an argument.

Best Practices

1. Start with one domain — Don't try to document everything at once. Pick one area (goals, reflections, or health) and build the habit before expanding.
2. Use note types — Tag notes as goal, reflection, habit, decision, or relationship to make them easy to find and filter later.
3. Write regularly, review periodically — Quick daily notes plus weekly reviews is a sustainable rhythm that compounds over time.
4. Let the AI connect things — Don't worry about manually linking every note. Semantic search and the knowledge graph will surface connections naturally.
5. Iterate on your schemas — Start simple and add structure as you learn what's useful. You can always refine your schemas as your needs evolve.

Next Steps