George Pór asked me stimulating questions which lead me to think and write about my Personal Knowledge Management workflow. This is a refined elaboration of that thread.

Writing is not enough

I’ve built the habit of writing for 30 minutes or 1’000 words per day. I’ve started on the 24 of September 2019. I’ve discovered that writing is immensely beneficial. But it is not enough. 

This is where the Building a Second Brain and the Zettelkasten methods came into play.

I am trying to evolve my journaling habit to a higher level of  reflection and connection. Dumping thoughts is not enough. I need to build a network of thoughts on top of which I can be creative, innovative and I can deeply strengthen my knowledge.

This requires great changes in my workflow.

Reading is not enough, note-taking is not enough, writing is not enough.

If I want to grow my knowledge ecosystem I need to understand carefully what I observe, read, listen, and watch; rephrasing in my own words, writing it down in my PKM system and searching for any connection with my existing knowledge.

This is adding a lot of work to what I was already doing. It’s harder to do. It requires more focus and concentration. It’s harder to build as a habit because within the same dedicated time I now can do less, much less reading.

So I need to develop “resonance” strategies to drive my attention. I should focus only on those learning activities bringing the highest value to my learning path.

Everything looks great, in theory, but doing it is a real challenge.

My data want to be free

In terms of tools I am really sick of losing my data to big corporations locking me down with proprietary technologies. This is happening since the day of my Commodore Vic 20 in 1982. I am done with that.

I want my data to be device-agnostic, free to be used anywhere, anytime with any tool. That is why, while I am keeping an eye on Notion (nice, free, but heavy), Evernote (prehistory, I am about to stop paying for it), Roam Research (the cutting edge frontier) and the many seeing birth as mushrooms after the rain.

I want to focus on my content, my files without worrying about the tool.

Obsidian: a new notes management system

Obsidian: “A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files.” is just one of the many Note Management Systems managing pure Markdown/text files without a centralized database or a proprietary format.

This has limitations, of course, no built-in cloud syncing (they’re working on that) and a young and not mature set of features. But I feel free! Maybe for the first time.

No Microsoft Office, no Google Docs, no proprietary tools to read my thoughts! Notepad would do or any pure text editor would allow me to access my Second Brain.

Evolving my publishing workflow

This is what pertains to personal knowledge management for the internal workflow of reading, writing, thinking.

When we talk about collaboration or publishing we need to look at different needs, constraints and tools. In my case I am looking to refine my workflow in which I exploit in the best way my private PKM system to create interesting ideas, connections and speculations.

Then I would extract those notes to create a draft and, at this stage, I am out of the PKM System, I am inside the realm of the infamous text editing tools. Again, but within a different context and with a different purpose.

What did I publish so far with this evolving workflow?

Have a look at: https://curatella.com