Personal knowledge management is the practice of collecting, classifying, storing, and retrieving information for personal use. It is related to the discipline of Knowledge Management (KM) which has to do with information collection and use within an organization. Skills include: Tools include: Practitioners include people ranging from Harold Jarche and his Personal Knowledge Mastery program…
Personal Knowledge Management was a term coined by Jason Frand and Carol Hixon at UCLA’s Anderson School for business. It was developed as a way for MBA students to be able to search, categorize, store, retrieve, and use knowledge using personal computers. Several things contributed to a need for this discipline at this time. For…
Mike Caulfield talks about his collection of notes in his wiki and how they work together as a rich network of ideas. Part of his method is to very carefully describe the relationship between two ideas when he builds his links. These descriptions become ideas in their own right. Caulfield’s links are by nature structure…
For some time now I’ve been trying to understand how architect Christopher Alexander’s idea of 15 structure preserving transformations might apply to systems outside of physical architecture. Alexander himself noted that his overarching theory about form and life would apply to all kinds of structures. You can strengthen the whole by systematically strengthening its component…
Niklas Luhmann talked about his box full of notes as if it was a flesh and blood research partner. He could question his notes and they would give him insightful, sometimes surprising answers. Not only did Luhmann talk about the notes as if they were a partner, sometimes he talked about them having a quality…
I wrote in my previous post that Tools for Thought Need a Purpose, otherwise you end up a slave to your note system, whether it’s a Zettelkasten or a collection of Evergreen Notes, creating an endless hoard of ideas because why else do you have a PKM system in the first place? Instead you need…
I’ve read a number of posts recently questioning the whole idea of Personal Knowledge Management. These folks have tried a number of different tools and approaches and always seem to arrive at the same result – it’s a ton of work with little or no ROI. Without exception the writers say “I did all this…
There’s a ripple going through software development right now around “second brain” type note taking apps. Wikis and other personal knowledge management apps have been around for a long time. But suddenly new apps are popping up all over the place. Here’s a round-up of PKM tools that I largely stole from Reddit and added…
It seems like you can’t go an entire week without hearing about a new PKM tool…Notion, Roam, Craft, Logseq, Obsidian…and now there is Tana on the horizon. But what exactly is PKM? Personal Knowledge Management is an offshoot of Knowledge Management, a business initiative launched in the 1990s to curate essential information and deliver it…
For about a year or so I’ve been exploring ways to restructure my life in a more natural, “living process” kind of way. Consider that nature is not in the business of suddenly creating new structures. Instead it takes existing structures and makes small tweaks that reinforce, strengthen, and elaborate the existing structure. To get…
The idea that I’m working on here is to try and use architectural principles to redesign the structure of your life to create new structures that feel “alive” and propels you forward. The first step is to capture a vision of how you’d life to be in the future. The idea isn’t to set goals…
DEVONthink is great MacOS app for warehousing massive amounts of information and yet giving you easy access when you need it. This “bestness” comes at a price however – a user interface that is a little hard to figure out at first. Groups are most obvious way to organize documents in DEVONthink. Groups appear in…
DevonThink 3.0 is available right now as a free public beta. This is a great opportunity to give this Mac-based knowledge base an extended test-drive, seeing that you won’t have to pay a penny until the beta period ends some time this summer. Here’s the use-case for DevonThink: you write, study, or otherwise manage a…
Photo by Pete Birkinshaw from Manchester, UK – Data Storage Device, CC BY 2.0, Link I stumbled across the zettelkasten note taking process while watching Beck Tench’s helpful Tinderbox series. Beck uses Tinderbox software to create a hyper-organized system of notes for her Ph.D. studies in contemplative practice and information science. Her method of managing these…
