~ PKM Track

This is part 1 in a 4 Part Series

• Part 1 - What is PKM and why do we need it?
• Part 2 - Part II - Refining your capture habit
• Part 3 - [[Part III - Making sense of information]]

Part I - What is PKM and Why do we need it?

What is PKM?

We’re bombarded with more advice than ever promising to make us smarter, healthier, richer, and happier. We consume more books, articles, podcasts, videos, and social media feeds than we could ever hope to absorb.

We spend so much time reading, listening to, and watching other people’s opinions about what we should do, how we should think, and how we should live, but spend comparitively little effort applying that knowledge to further our own lives.

When you transform your relationship to information, you will see the technology in your life not just as an ends to a mean but as a tool for thinking.

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is the practice of collecting, organizing, and using information to extend your thinking, enhance your creativity, and amplify your impact.

This is where PKM comes in. It’s about building an external system that works with your mind to help you think better, not just remember more.

Why is it important?

Over the last 100 years, our entire way of being human has dramatically evolved.

The cinema and cable TV gave way to Netflix and Amazon Prime, the newspaper led to social media feeds and newsletters, the telegram and rotary phone turned into the smartphone, the typewriter evolved into the laptop.

For most of human history, information was a scarce resource. It was mostly found in people’s bodies and learned through active skills, experience, or passed down verbally through stories.

Access to things such as papyrus scrolls and clay tablets was safeguarded and protected in the hands of nobles and elites.

It wasn’t until the Gutenburg Press was invented in the mid 1450s that information could be pressed into pages and printed.

Even something as grand as the Library of Alexandria—which is estimated to have housed anywhere between 40,000 to 400,000 scrolls and other literary sources—had the equivilant of anywhere between 2.5 gigabytes and 25 gigabytes of information.¹

The entirety of the Library of Alexandria’s knowledge could fit on a smartphone with plenty of room to spare.

When the internet first emerged, finding information was a lot harder than it is now.

it was very much an intentional process of going out and searching for information. Google was still in its infancy and the world wide web was far bigger than any ocean. Bookmarks were a way to navigate it.

Just a few decades later, our lives are overflowing with information and instead of searching for it our priority has shifted to actively shielding against it.

Our job now is to control the flow of information in our lives, much like one restricts their eating to certain times of the day.

At it’s core, personal knowledge management (PKM) is about curating the flow of information in our lives.

By using tools and techniques, we can capture information in a way that is intentional, organize it based on how it can benefit us in the future, and retrieve it quickly when desired. We can then use our knowledge to express ourselves.

In so many ways, it is very similar to how our brain processes information. We experience something new and determine how it relates to what we already know.

By orchestrating your own experience, you’ll have direct control over the information that’s filtered into your life. Instead of partaking in the fear of missing out (FOMO) you can instead find joy in missing out (JOMO).

What is a PKM System?

How do you interact with ideas? With knowledge? Are these odd questions? Or are they just hard to answer?

Annie Murphy Paul’s beautiful book, “The Extended Mind” gives us a clearer picture of the answers. We don’t just interact with ideas in our minds, but in our body, our environment, and in our relationships.

To be able to make use of information we value, we must find a way to package it up and organize it in a way that makes it easy to retrieve and use when we need it again.

In this series, we’ll look at how to apply the information in your life to create a system of knowledge management. Our aim is to cultivate a networked body of knowledge that is uniquely your own.

This isn’t a new development. Throughout history, it was called a “Commonplace book”. It became a learning tool that the educated class used to understand the rapidly changing world and their place in it.

“Unline modern readers, who follow the flow of narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen/women read in fits and jumped from book to book. They broke text into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing different sections in their notebooks. Reading and writing belong to a continuous effort to make sense of things. For the world was full of signs; you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, stamped with your personality.”²

Tiago Forte calls it a “Second Brain”. Anne-Laure calls it a “Digital Garden”. Niklas Luhmann, Bob Doto, and Sonke Ahrens call it a “Zettelkasten”. Nick Milo describes it as an “Ideaverse”. For Ryder Carroll, it’s a “Bullet Journal”.

In school, most of us learned how to take notes to study for tests. Once the tests concluded the notes were discarded and never used again. This is note-taking. What we’re aiming for is note-making.

Note-Taking vs Note-Making

While these words are similar, there’s a keen difference in how they are applied:

Note-taking:

• Records what was said
• Stays in the author’s language
• Lists information linearly
• Focuses on capture

Note-making:

• Processes what it means to YOU
• Translates ideas into your context
• Creates connections and questions
• Focuses on transformation

Note-taking is passively taking information in. It’s copying down words verbatim. It’s reading a book and only learning what the author’s said. It’s capturing everyone else’s thoughts without ever making them your own.

Note-making is a different beast altogether. This is where you begin linking your thinking. It’s taking the information and making it your own. It’s where you ask, “What does this information mean for me, in my life right now?”

Notemaking is an active, creative process that involves engaging with the material on a visceral level.

Now that we’ve covered what PKM is, why it’s important, and a little on the basics of how it works, it’s time to take off the guardrails and begin making it your own.

The Next Step: Building Your Filter

Just like you wouldn’t start cooking without first choosing quality ingredients, you can’t build an effective PKM system without first curating quality information.

In the next part, we’ll focus on becoming more selective about what information gets through your personal filters. We’ll explore how to create a sustainable “information diet” that nourishes rather than overwhelms you.

But before we dive into tools and techniques, we need to address the foundation: what information are you actually letting into your life? How do you separate signal from noise?

In Part II, we’ll explore how to refine your capture habits—learning to be intentional about what deserves your attention and what doesn’t. Because as we’ve seen, the problem isn’t finding more information; it’s choosing the right information.

Ready for more? Head over to Part II - Refining your capture habit.