I went on an automatic process: linking my daily posts everywhere. I was so proud of my consistency that I wanted to engage other people in my journey.
But after almost 80 daily blog posts and their related links in multiple forums, I don’t think I’ve produced as much added value as I wanted.
I’ve fallen into the Collector’s Fallacy, once again. Blind to making sense, looking for the next ‘like,’ salivating at the following Analytics peek.
That’s not the way to add value to a community. And it’s not even worth it in terms of reputation. I was just risking becoming another link spammer.
I’ve established the wrong feedback loops: looking for passive traffic on a blog where I have nothing to sell if not vanity. I should have instead searched for engaging thoughts, useful explorations, coherent threads.
All of this happened because I went on autopilot in writing daily. My paramount commitment was to “just write and publish it.” While this brought me plenty of good learning, I lost sight of the environment where I planted my seeds.
That’s why Critical Thinking is intimately connected to Systems Thinking: “What am I doing?” “Why am I doing that?”, “Is this the best way to do that?”, “What’s my goal?”
And, the most important question of all: “What are the unintended consequences of my actions?”
So, after having slept on it, I woke up with a new realization. Not very smart or elevated. Posting a long sequence of blog posts in a thread on several forums is not a sustainable effort and not even wise.
I feel liberated, yes, from dispersing seeds unwittingly and without too much thought. That doesn’t mean that I won’t pursue my daily writing habits. On the contrary, I will better express my ideas and packaging posts, building more ecosystemic value.
Thank you for your patience and kindness in following me. I just wanted to send a signal to you: I am a little step higher than regurgitating an interminable eruption of blog posts.
I feel like my brain woke up.
Just a little bit.
😉
Knowing when to stop is as important as knowing when to start.
Personal Knowledge Management, usually abbreviated with PKM, is collecting, organizing, developing, and optionally and selectively sharing all the information related to the personal sphere.
What’s the difference between PKM and KM?
While Knowledge Management refers to the collaborative activities performed by a group of people within an organization, Personal Knowledge Management is related to what a person does to manage the information they need to live their private and professional life.
Connecting individual PKM Systems could support a broader network to create a Knowledge Management System extending beyond the personal sphere.
Connected PKM Systems could be the foundation to facilitate and augment Collective Intelligence and effective collaboration between different people with different backgrounds and intents.
Digital or analog?
PKM is built of philosophies, approaches, attitudes, techniques, and procedures performed in real life with analog technologies like pen and paper. Being in the third millennium (did you get the memo?), we want to use digital technology to make our lives easier. While pen and paper could fully cover basic PKM needs (See the original Zettelkasten method implemented by Niklas Luhmann with a slip box and index cards), we could find many software tools to manage our information in the digital media.
We want to live in the present and search for the best tools and techniques to setup up and use a Digital Personal Knowledge Management System (do you want to invent another acronym? There you go: DPKMS!)
What is the smallest unit to manage in a PKM?
It’s common to refer to a digital document as a unit of information contained in a file. A computer file resides on your computer. It has a file name with an extension, and it encodes its content in one of the many file formats available like TXT for pure text, DOC or DOCX for Microsoft Word, RTF for Rich Text Format, PDF for Portable Digital Format, and so on.
We could create a PKM System by using a computer with no special nor additional tools. Folders and files are enough to create collections of documents. If you wrote in a pure text format (TXT), you wouldn’t even need any additional software editors. All Operating systems have, at the very minimum, a Text Editor Tool. You could have Microsoft Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac OS, or Vim Text Editor on Linux.
The Minimum Viable Personal Knowledge Management System (MVPKMS!)
Having the capability of writing text in separate documents, naming them, and organizing them into folders is the foundation of a Personal Knowledge Management System.
You would need to find a way to link to files and search them, and you would have something serving more than half of your needs in managing your knowledge digitally.
It might not be the most modern or the most feature-rich, but it would be enough to initiate your Note Archive.
What is a Note?
In a PKM, you can have different types of information. Usually, the smallest one is the “note.” With “note,” we intend a generic document containing a unit of information.
A note can include a full essay or a single concept. It’s an arbitrary container to separate your ideas and your information according to several criteria. When we think about the relationships between notes and the capability of connecting them, we should consider a note as the smallest information unit in our PKM system. Some principles allow an organic growth of a network of notes that would serve as a thinking tool in our creative process. But this is the final goal. And to get to the networked thought level, we need to establish some rules and techniques along with principles and tools.
A Note should contain only one idea. Two notes can be linked together through a reference, usually a link. Yes, precisely as a link on a web page would make you jump to another page. Here is my website, for example.
What is an atomic note?
An Atomic Note is a textual document containing an exhaustive coverage of a single concept in its briefest form. If a Note is atomic, it shouldn’t be possible to reduce it further, although it’s just a metaphor, and the boundaries are arbitrary and adjustable by your personal preference.
The concept of being “atomic” should support the idea of having “one idea in one note.” You could then build chains or networks of atomic concepts leading to a more elaborate treatment of an idea or a topic.
What’s an example of an Atomic Note Archive?
The Notessection on this website is different from the articles you can find in its blog.
In Notes, you find self-containing articles trying to cover a concept (sometimes very simple, sometimes very elaborated) in a way that can be referred to by other notes or blog posts. Notes have a longer life. They should be aimed at being persistent or permanent (or “Evergreen”) like reference material to link to when in need of definitions or more in-depth treatment of a topic supporting an article.
Instead, a blog post has a more transitory character and sometimes is dedicated to a specific event. That is why the publishing date is more relevant for a blog post than a Note. In a note, it would be useful to know the last update information. A Note can be updated several times. It is supposed to be a continuously updated document offering the best and most refined details on its dedicated topic. Instead, a blog post is supposed to remain in its original publishing form because it works more as a record of thoughts or reports published at that time of that day, and it needs to remain immutable.
A PKM is easy to set up, technically.
Without touching the content writing aspect and its use and just looking at the essential functionality, we could set up a Personal Knowledge Management System with the tools we have already available on our digital devices: folders and textual files.
Creating, you become an interesting person with stimulating questions, engaging stories to tell. Even if you are not sharing your creations, your thoughts increase in clarity, structure, and solidity. Think about the possibility of sharing the best of them: can you imagine the potential.
I saw a different star once. It shines so brightly you wouldn’t believe it.
Systems thinking is a way of thinking by considering, within arbitrary boundaries, all relationships between the systems’ components at study.
A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.
There are many ways to think about reality and how to make decisions—subscribing to the next course, preparing a meal, educating our children, investing in an enterprise, and choosing a charity. We couldn’t take a step, consciously or unconsciously, if we couldn’t’ decide about our next actions.
We can make better decisions only if we know all factors affecting the systems we inhabit. Although we can construct faithful models of such systems, we will never replicate them fully.
Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Despite our effort in making our models congruent with the world, they fall short of fully representing reality.
Systems thinking makes clear even to the most committed technocrat that getting along in this world of complex systems requires more than technocracy.
Systems thinking is the most efficient and effective model we can build of reality. We can think in systems to analyzing the day-to-day problems and address global challenges as the Climate Crisis or poverty.
Systems thinking allows us to see many ways to address the complexity of our society’s challenges and give more and different perspectives on living a better life.
If you want to imagine better futures, in your life, in your community, in your professional field, in our society, you need to become a better Systems Thinker.
“Garden of Expertise” is the beautiful name of what we’ve discussed today. I was late because of work, I’ve missed a good part, but I was still able to get a lot of inspiration.
Here are some sparse notes:
In the Garden of Expertise, you focus on providing access to the best knowledge you have in your fields. It’s a welcoming virtual place where you can show yourself as an expert in virtue of what you share, of your experience, of your thoughts.
Some interesting questions were about managing the infinite flow of information on Social Networks like Twitter and recognizing and attracting an audience. Curating the knowledge you share with your posts was one of the first thoughts that I have—giving context about your communications by setting the right frame of your expertise. On the other hand, you need to create your set of continuously refined filters to capture the raw gems in the infinite flowing of information.
Two approaches are still useful: being intentional by setting the topics you are interested in upfront and by searching and filtering only those sources relevant to your goals. Bottom-up allows you to keep the right level of serendipity and chance to innovate in your education and your capability to be astonished by weirdness and randomness.
The Zettelkasten method is suitable for capturing, understanding, and connecting your ideas to be then shared in your Garden of Expertise.
I genuinely appreciate these meetings—well-prepared, informal, dense of inspiration and information, and always attended by stimulating people.
A few decades ago, a friend asked me about creating a startup in the 3D Computer Graphics field. He pitched me the idea, and for every aspect of this software, I provided an example of something already existing.
While the execution makes the difference and nobody prevents you from starting any type of venture, you are at risk even if somebody else already did it. You could waste time, money, and resources by creating something existing or that nobody would buy.
A signal that the time has come for an idea is when you receive pitches or requests for advice about that idea from different fronts. It means that many people are thinking about it, either independently or because it went mainstream. It’s in the air. You can sense it.
In addition to a thorough market and competition research, it would help to study history. What did already solve our problem? Did it work? How did they have success? Is there space for innovation?
That’s why studying and researching your field of interest could give you an advantage. Or, if you think about it, you could even package your knowledge and make a product out of it.
History could save you a lot of time or could make you earn a lot of money. How much do you know about history?
“When a problem can’t be solved, it’s not a problem. When a problem can be solved, it’s not a problem.
—Antonio Rebolini, in “Da Cosa Nasce Cosa” by Bruno Munari, 1996.
Perfect.
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