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.