Links, backlinks, tags, atomicity…what’s the most important part of your note-taking system? People. Denham Grey believes that any knowledge system that isn’t driving toward sharing and collaboration is pointed in the wrong direction. In fact, Grey is fairly skeptical about the PKM movement in general, with its focus on information organization at the expense of…
Mike Caulfield makes a distinction between online posts that are “gardens” and posts that are “streams.” Streams are posts that you read, and then they move on, disappearing into history. They are utterances, meaning that they can only be correctly understood by what was said before. You can follow the chain of utterance back, thanks…
In a post titled The Memex Method Cory Doctorow notes that he thinks of his blog as a kind of commonplace book. It is a sort of digital journal where he collects whatever captures his attention and saves it for future use. The benefit that his blog gives him over a notebook or a PKM…
Notes should express only one concept. This makes them modular, so that you can cluster notes together like Legos to create complete thoughts. This should help make links between notes more coherent. SOURCE Andy Matuschack Evergreen notes should be atomic SEE ALSO Evergreen Notes Are Notes that Are Alive
Two ways to go about knowledge sharing in the workplace are through narrated work or through observable work. The concepts are similar but there are important differences. Observable Work = Work in Progress Keeping your work-in-progress and other files on a company shared drive is one way to make your work observable. People can not…
The process of picking a topic and finding supporting research is a trap. At the best you engage in a high degree of confirmation bias, seeing only the information that supports your premise. I remember in college many times writing a paper only to find near the end that the research was pointing in a…
Niklas Luhmann observes that in order to think in any constructive way he must write down his thoughts. This seems to be one of the main purposes of his Zettelkasten note-taking system – capturing thoughts and refine them by writing them down, reflecting on them, changing them. In addition to capturing thoughts in his notes,…
When you first start on a writing project you don’t know what the structure of your project will be. As you do research, collect ideas, and clarify your thoughts, the structure will emerge. Using a tool like Tinderbox lets you test your ideas and see what kind of structure provides the best fit for your…
The gardening analogy to hypertext and online writing has been around for a long time. Hypertext pioneers such as Cathy Marshall and Mark Bernstein saw that the new medium demanded a different set of skills and process than from traditional publishing. These skills were much more like gardening than production work. But the text that…
The Cornell notetaking system uses a college-ruled notebook with each page divided into thirds. These sections are for points that the lecturer makes, questions about these points, and a final summary of everything on the page. Ideas are captured in the largest section of the page, each idea getting a couple of lines with ample…
Frand and Lippincott suggested eight tactics for processing information whether it was digital, analog or based on experience. The tactics are based on the “knowledge spiral” proposed by Nonaka and Takeuch. Note that items 1 and 7 are similar in that they establish a set of criteria for the type of information that goes into…
PKM skills can be boiled down to Or as Harold Jarche puts it, “Seek – Sense – Share” Particular skills include: The essential abilities are how to collect meaningful information from reliable sources and process it in a way that makes it useful to others, when it is needed. One of the essential skills that…
The disciplines of Personal Information Management (PIM) and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) both have to do with the capture, collection, and curation of information. The main difference between the two disciplines seems to be in the output. For a graduate research paper where source material is captured and used as a factual basis to support…
Tom Critchlow contrasts a “digital garden” against other online information sources such as Twitter. The garden is a public collection of notes, ideas, and musings. You can come back to it time and time again and each time learn something new. Twitter is more like a stream, always moving. And, as the old proverb goes,…
In 1995 Japanese professors Nonaka and Takeuchi delivered a paper that looked at some of the problems with acting on explicit knowledge and transmitting tacit knowledge. The problem with explicit knowledge, encoded in manuals and help files, is that there are often gaps between what the technical writers included and the processes that actual users…
