Massimo Curatella

Category: Posts

Where do you need a PKM system?
Is it a physical place or a virtual place?
If “Where” is a context, it will be in those places where the capturing, the organization, the development, and the sharing of knowledge is happening. I see a connection with “when.” When I am in any place in the world, and I noticed something interesting and relevant and resonating to my interest, that is the place where I want to capture it.
If I am on the go, I need a piece of paper or my smartphone. If I am navigating the Internet on my desktop, the place would be the website I am navigating or the conference call where I am talking. That place is virtual, and it would be easy to plug in a capturing tool.
The organization might be different because if I am on the go with my mobile phone, I might organize the knowledge that I’ve captured or that I’m about to capture or the idea that I am to develop. It’s not as easy as having a laptop or a desktop, or a notebook. But again, the portability of these kinds of analog or digital technologies will allow me to be anywhere and everywhere.
If I am in a real-life meeting, it might be difficult to use my mobile phone. So it might make sense to write notes on paper. That means that I will need to revise and review my notes at the end of the meeting and enter them into my digital PKM.
The same happens when I’m reading a physical text like a book, an article, a newspaper, or a magazine. The context needs me to digitize the text or the images, and I can use my smartphone again. For instance, using some OCR applications, I could extract the text from any piece of paper and store them in my inbox to be reviewed and organized.
Where does it happen to me to need to search for information? Again, I could be anywhere globally, and I could use my smartphone, which means that I need to have my personal knowledge base online. If I had lost my smartphone, I should still access my PKB at any internet access point or borrow a laptop or a smartphone.
It makes sense to compare the different physical and virtual places against the various stages of my PKM because I might need to use different tools and approaches—the “where” can make a difference in how I do PKM.
The “where” should be everywhere, where you add and retrieve information out of your PKB to write, think and create.
Quo Vadis?
6 May 2021
PKM, When? Always.
When do you need a PKM system?
You might need it on several occasions.
When I encounter something resonating with me, which interests me, I need to capture it. I want to keep the memory of it. I want to know more. I’m curious about it because I like it, it makes me feel good. Or because it reminds me of something else that I want to make connections with. I don’t always have my phone or my notebook available. So, at that moment, I need to capture effectively that piece of information that I want to store in my note archive.
If I go into the detail, I would say, when I’m reading something, and I discover a sentence or a concept, or a word, that is interesting to me, I want to capture it. The same happens with all the other media, when I’m watching a TV show or watching a video on the internet. Or I’m listening to a podcast or on radio, or to a song, and I want to extract a soundbite, a fragment that I want to study or store or connect. And of course, this also happens when I am listening to somebody talking, either a public talk or a conversation with somebody on the phone or the internet or real life. There are moments when I feel the need to capture a sentence, of capturing your thought.
Speaking of thoughts, I frequently have ideas while I am walking or while I am sleeping with dreams or while I’m having a shower or reading a boring book. Something happens in my mind. And I have ideas, connections. I have insights and intuition. I have questions, and I want to capture those. I don’t want to forget them. So I need my PKM, especially the capture approach and tools, the capturing system when I want to store something, and I want to forget it.
I need a PKM system when I need to organize information. I have too much knowledge sparse around: clips, fragments, video segments, quotes, thoughts, ideas. So I make an effort to have a unique inbox to collect all of it. And it’s complicated, but then I need to organize things with criteria that would allow me to find back what I need when I need it.
And this ties to searching for something. When I need a piece of information, and I go to Google it. Sometimes it is something I already searched for, or I have written about. So I need to search for it in my notes archive. That is when the power of the searching system and the organization system is beneficial to provide back what I need when I need it.
And I need my PKM system to be efficient and effective when I want to share when I need to perform a presentation, sometimes improvised, sometimes I need to prepare the material for a presentation or a design project or write an article. That is when I need to have ideas or find references and to support my creativity. My PKM system has to be efficient, effective, and powerful.
And I discovered by experimenting with a PKM system that I need a PKM system when I need to have new ideas because writing in my note archive is thinking. So, when I write, I am doing all of the stages of a PKM system because I am capturing what I am observing, I am reflecting upon it, making connections, and organizing my thoughts. I am also preparing a draft so that I can share it. So, even if it is not within the chosen tool of a PKM system, I am still working in my note archive when I am creating a draft to be revised and published. Because that same draft will be feeding my note archive, and it will become a building block, a part of it.
If you understand the power of PKM, and if you have a flexible and powerful system, you always need it. You need it in every phase of your creative process.
After is never.
5 May 2021
PKM for whom? A Short Answer.
Personal Knowledge Management can benefit everybody. If you think, you need PKM.
4 May 2021
Why PKM? To Dance with Infinity
The following are the reasons behind the creation and adoption of a personal knowledge management system.
To elevate yourself. To live instead of surviving.
To be better observers. When you track down the exciting things that happen in your life and put them in a place where you can find them back and connect them, you develop better observation skills.
To perform better. Because if you inform yourself about the things you want to do, you can achieve them better.
To think better. Writing is thinking. The more quality time you devote to writing, the better will be your thinking.
And so it’s also to learn, to understand. And if you know a lot and if you practice a lot, you become an expert.
Of course, I would do PKM to remember better. And by playing with chance or intention, you can discover expected and unexpected connections between thoughts and ideas. That makes you more creative.
PKM is a complex system of thoughts that allows you to understand better the complexity of the universe. So you face complexity with complexity.
Remembering better and storing your ideas allows you to connect and combine things to create. In the specific, you can have ideas to write, draw or teach.
To be more creative, you can use your PKM system to ideate. That means to generate ideas by finding patterns, by combining pre-existing ideas into new ones. So that that you can develop concepts: ideas for articles, videos, books, courses, movies, games.
If the knowledge is pertaining to your professional sphere, you might use your PKM system to work better, to collaborate better. You can not only manage better assets and people but also lead them better.
Generate well-balanced and sustainable ideas by applying your critical thinking skills. Using those ideas, you can make better decisions.
You can also be more artistic. You can capture emotions and find a way to evoke them so that you can amaze and amuse. By playing, by surprising.
You can be a better storyteller.
By having this powerful, creative tool, you can also imagine better futures by making a bit of order out of chaos and creating inspiring messes.
By embracing complexity and dancing with infinity, you can be more creative and augment your brain. Be more productive, effective, and efficient with a PKM system.
All of that will make you more intentional.
Use PKM to impact the World positively: observe, take notes of the many problems, and solve them. We can share solutions to create better futures for all.
3 May 2021
Your identity drives your Personal Knowledge Management
PKM stands for Personal Knowledge Management and, in its essence, covers the following stages: observe, capture, organize, develop, and share.
A PKM system could be seen as a way to nurture and cultivate your interests. It’s called a “personal” knowledge management system because you create it for your purposes. Your identity directly influences the meaning, nature, and composition of your PKB (Personal Knowledge Base).
There are, among the many, two complementary approaches to problems: bottom-up and top-down. Similarly, we can see PKM as a system where the driving forces are: intentionality and serendipity.
If your interests are the magnets, the attractor of knowledge for you to be captured, developed, and shared, then you can consider your goal and your vision as the top-down approach while the “whatever works,” the random and infinite events of your life as the bottom-up.
Grow your PKM System along with you
The best PKM System is the one that you grow on top of who you are. Identify the building blocks of your creativity, compose them in workflows and build a creative network of tools to generate ideas.
I need to eat less squares.
2 May 2021
Personal Knowledge Management, a short, structured definition
What is PKM?
Personal Knowledge Management refers to all the activities that you do to manage knowledge relative to your person. It includes any type of data, information, and knowledge related to your personal and professional sphere.
It’s essential to make a difference between data, information, and knowledge. Knowledge is what you know and can retrieve from your memory to apply it to your decision-making process.
You manage your knowledge effectively when you find the information that you need when you need it, to make meaningful decisions,
Why do you need Personal Knowledge Management?
The world is complicated and complex, and there is an avalanche of information that every day is becoming bigger and bigger. It’s easy to forget things or to discover information essential to life. Thanks to technology, most of us can work remotely or online, usually in quick iterative sessions. It makes a difference to have readily available all the information and the knowledge to be effective and efficient in our job.
Creatively managing knowledge can help you in generating new ideas and being productive.
Managing your knowledge makes you more aware, present, and ready to increase your performance.
Who is affected by Personal Knowledge Management?
Any human being. If you create an efficient PKM system, you will collaborate better with others. Ideally, everybody should have one because it will make us more informed, present, and effective.
How do you manage your personal knowledge?
You need to capture and organize information that allows you to retrieve it when you need it and combine and analyze it to generate the ideas and insights from your captured data.
You could use your brain alone, If you have an excellent memory. Lucky you, if you can. Otherwise, It would be better to have external support. Pen and paper are an option. If you want to be more effective, you can create a Digital Personal Knowledge Management System that would be portable, accessible, usable, safe, distributed, remote. Much better.
When do you manage your knowledge?
Always, would be the most honest answer. The capturing phase should be happening each time you find something interesting relative to your interests. Collecting, analyzing, and combining are at the core of your thinking. While sharing your knowledge can open up worlds of possibilities for better futures.
Where do you manage your knowledge?
As a system, especially for a digital PKM, you manage your knowledge in a virtual space based on several software platforms. For an analogical PKM system, you would be working in your slip-box or notebooks.
As a location, it should be anywhere and everywhere—each time you find something to be captured, elaborated on, or shared.
Augment your brain with a Personal Knowledge Management System
Capture, organize, develop, and share knowledge to be a proper citizen of the 21st Century and maybe the 22nd.
Your glasses are on your nose. You’re welcome.
1 May 2021
Compare Intention Against Execution
When you compare the outcome of a production process with the original designs, you have a great learning chance.
You can learn how far you made it in realizing your initial intention. You can discover which area of improvement you could attack to improve the overall quality of the product. You recognize what is still missing to reach the intended objective.
Use the difference between the before and after to learn. Discover discrepancies by comparing the planned idea and its actual execution.
Did you do it on time? Is it respecting all the requirements and the constraints? Is it usable, accessible, effective, efficient?
The comparison between the original intention (the designs) and the current execution (the outcome) is a powerful method to make the system visible—the system of design and development, who imagined it and who built it, who sells it, and who uses it.
That delta generates the creative tension to fill the gaps, improve your building skills, refine the initial designs, test more and with a larger target audience, and stress the solution to make it more agile and robust.
So the habit of constantly checking how we are going compared to where we want to go is a crucial measurement of our progress. And it’s essential to identify the areas where we can improve or the aspects that we can curate better.
Learn how to improve in planning and building by comparing the intention against the execution. Compare the before and the after to see the difference. That discrepancy is your motivation to do better, and it gives you the direction to follow.
This is my DAY 30 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge. Overall, my 167th daily article.
Before and After?
30 April 2021
Build a System To Build
The habit of creating daily. It’s hard to make, but it’s not impossible. When you create every day, you will have the compounding effect, the snowball effect, at a certain time, to get in and to produce unexpected outcomes for you.
Like any habit to be built, it requires an effort. And starting it, it’s difficult.
You might feel like you will never make it, stupid, incapable, inept, and sad.
And that’s normal. Sometimes it’s even required because that’s how our brain reacts to change. Scientists have been proving that the reaction to doing something different is a feeling happening in the same part of the brain where we feel pain. So it’s not a metaphor saying that changing is painful.
To create a habit, you have to feel a certain amount of pain, but it’s not lethal. It’s not the end of the world. And the more you insist, the more you try, the more the pain becomes a joy.
Because the more you create it habitually, the more you feel self-aware, self-confident, the more you have ideas. When you do this kind of change, people around you will notice it. You will become more interesting. Things will happen around you. People will talk to you because they see something in you that they want. They see your effort in being creative, systematically.
Some people can do it on their own. They have strong willpower. The rest of the world needs help. Sometimes they need just a spark and a little push. Sometimes they need to be followed with a system.
That is what I’ve built with CREAZEE. It is a system to be consistently creative. To have ideas and to generate ideas about what to create. It’s also a community where you have peers, peer challengers wanting the same thing you want from which you can get inspiration and help and accountability. The group goes ahead together. Every day you are together with other people creating with you. So you feel part of a group having a common goal, and this is helping as well.
You should create every day anything that makes you feel alive. If you want to get a solid boost for your habit-making challenge, join us at CREAZEE.COM to be part of creative challenges.
I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 27 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 164th daily article in a row.
Fast is not necessarily bad.
27 April 2021
Ideate and Curate(lla)
What would I do with the time I am using to write and publish daily? It takes me about 30 minutes to write, revise, illustrate and publish an article online. It always happens during eating breaks or very early in the morning or late at night. It’s about 4 hours per week and about 15 hours per month.
As I wrote a few times, I would like to go deeper with my writing. If writing is thinking, I want to think deeper, longer.
I am frequently referring to a top-down/bottom-up approach to challenges. And also, on this occasion, I might find it helpful.
Top-down: what do I want to write about, and why? I’ve been writing a lot about writing. And, with great satisfaction and pride, it leads me to CREAZEE. I gathered 15 people and made them write for 30 days. How about that? The next big topic I want to write about is Personal Knowledge Management. You can create little gems every day, but it might be a huge waste if you don’t curate them.
Bottom-Up: If I curate my 200 online articles and my 500 journal entries, I can extract common threads and inspiration. That’s why I shall never stop writing daily. It’s the rereading and curation that requires time and, honestly, is quite dull.
Possible solution: split in half the 30 minutes of creativity in:
1. Curating what I have already written
2. Ideating and writing new content
I think I’ve already made this thought two or three times. Let’s see if this is the good one.
I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 26 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 163rd daily article in a row.
There’s no writing without thinking. There is no thinking without writing.
26 April 2021
Education vs. Learning
Do not confuse education with learning. They are two different things with two different possible outcomes. We need to understand their differences to use better our time and resources spent in teaching and learning.
Education
“Are you in the business of education or learning? I don’t do online education I do online learning.”
—Seth Godin
Why would I spend my time fruitfully listening to you while you are reading your notes to me? Where is the learning? Where is the value of that time spent together?
“Course” is a traditional concept of the education world. You put dozens of people into a room, and you feed them with the same material. How do you consider the usual (and welcome) differences in cognitive abilities, age, experience, attitudes, interests? You don’t.
Learning
“Education is what is done to you; learning is what you pursue based on your talents, passion and yearning to understand”
—David Orban
Wouldn’t it be better to have learning materials, slides, articles to be read in advance, and then meet the expert or the learning facilitator and have an engaging discussion?
This is more learning by doing, and I learn more when I am engaged, in the first person, with concepts and questions, rather than passively listening to somebody reading.
What about learning projects? Something organized with experts, doing the actual job, by creating the possibility to share, in the field, practical knowledge. Learning on the job would be more effective and efficient. Not considering the creation of a bond and the social interactions between learners. A natural community of interest could also see the light out of a learning project.
Less Teaching, More Learning, Please
The business of education is made by those people and organizations making money out of focusing themselves on teaching. The business of learning is made, instead, by whom get focused on people learning. We need more learning and less teaching.
I can read your notes, thank you.
25 April 2021