Tag: personal knowledge management

What are the essential steps in managing personal knowledge?

To manage information and transform it into knowledge, we can go through different steps. By going to the essence of the process, we could identify these key activities:

1. Capture.
2. Organize.
3. Develop.
4. Share.

Let’s see what each of them entails.

Capture

It’s the acquisition phase: each time you need to remember something, or you want to write it down. Any piece of information contributing to either remembering personal and professional knowledge or keeping track of important events in your life is around you, always. Not everything is interesting, and you cannot capture all, but according to your needs and interests, you could capture many different types of information. Without aiming at an exhaustive list, you might need to capture data in some of the following scenarios:

• When reading a book, you should capture the passages resonating with you and paraphrase them to interpret them.
• During and after a meeting, you might want to summarize the key concepts discussed or plan for the next actions.
• Recording contacts for new people encountered and essential information about them would improve your networking and relationship management skills.
• To keep track of important dates, due dates, delivery dates, birthdays, recurrent events, celebrations.
• Lists: bibliographies, books to read, films, articles, or online resources like website bookmarks or podcasts.

Organize

The captured information needs to be stored in a safe, portable, and accessible way. If you fall into the Collector’s Fallacy trap, you may skip this phase, but that would be sad. Why did you accumulate all of that information if you’ll never look back at it again?

Captured information needs to be organized so that you can find it again when you will need it. You could easily get lost in Information Science or Science of Organizing Information, and you would never obtain the perfect information organization system, so get over it. You need to grow your information architecture. There are design principles, tools, and methods to follow, but you are unique, and you will never find somebody else’s organizational strategies to fit your needs perfectly. While you could start with some famous (or obscure) frameworks, you’ll discover that only by continuously refining your information organization approaches you’ll be able to reach a good result.

Develop

What are you going to do with hundreds of web bookmarks? Thousand of JPEG Images? An Infinite series of PDF files? What about your scribbled paper notes sparse all over the places? And your multi-GB digital scrapbook?

IF you want to make fair use of your life, you should have your note-archive to become your most powerful creative tool.

A piece of information stored without a future intent is useless. It could be well-manifest or uncertain, explicit, or to be discovered, but anything you add to your Zettelkasten should have strong connections with your future.

The idea of your future self is crucial in the development phase of your PKM, and it will need some time to be exposed.

Share

So you have a shiny, tidy, digital wall of well-organized notes. You can find any stored ideas within milliseconds. You can associate the most disparate concepts: Rare Mushrooms and Lysergic Travels, cooking and design, that small ache you have in your arm, and ergonomics.

Great. But now, what are you going to do with the novel and useful knowledge you’ve created?

Share it! If you don’t put your bright ideas into the World, what would you need a PKM System for?

In the Share phase, we need to explore the various content publishing media: personal essays, messages, letters, emails, and article drafts, papers, book chapters, lessons, tutorials, and also social media posts or forum thread replies.

Sharing is your ultimate goal, and the sharing phase in your PKM system should lead and inspire your entire workflow.

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What is PKM?

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 Notes section 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.

Subscribe to my newsletter to know more about the following questions:

• Why a PKM makes you a more efficient thinker?
• How can you become more creative by using a PKM?
• What are the benefits and the costs of creating a PKM?
• What are the most powerful digital tools to create a PKM?

It has become a habit. Meeting Achim Rothe in his Knowledge Salon every week is a refreshing intellectual appointment to dedicate some quality time to the Knowledge Entrepreneurs concept.

“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.

We’ve mentioned some technical tools to have your Knowledge Garden online, among the many: Obsidian, Obsidian Publish, WordPress, Ghost.

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.

Thank you, Achim.

It’s such a great time to be alive!

How can my note archive be a creative tool?
That’s the most critical question to ask to a Zettelkasten, meaning “slip-box” in English. It’s your archive of notes, one concept per note, tightly interconnected.

Ideally, starting from access points, you should be able to navigate, like you would do on the Web using a Web Browser, from note to note, from concept to concept.

It works only if you always connect the new notes you create. Otherwise, you make isolated islands, or worst, dead ends.

Working with your creative mind should be something you should never force yourself to do. There should always be something interesting to be done.

That’s the purpose of a Zettelkasten, and it is a tool using which you think. It is not an archive of dead words.

You should even be able to pick one note randomly, and like Alice, in the rabbit hole, you should be able to find shiny threads of inspiration.

As Dave Gray somewhere wrote: “you cannot build your network when you need one,” I would paraphrase it by saying, “you cannot build a Zettelkasten when you need one.”

That’s why the systematic and continuous creation of well-written and well-connected notes feed the network of thoughts of your Zettelkasten.

When you have enough notes connected, you can start letting your creativity emerge out of it. That is the moment when you can begin to practice your networked thinking.

But, just by telling this story, I feel like I’ve collected some useful thoughts. It might become my revised description of what is a Zettelkasten and how to use a Zettelkasten.
It’s a good blog post working as an excellent starting draft for my notes.

Capture bits of information into well-written and well-connected notes. Add them to your Zettelkasten to make it grow and become more connected. It will become your favorite thinking tool.