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
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In 1993 Mark Bernstein proposed the metaphor “information farming” as a way to cultivate and share knowledge withing organizations. The farming metaphor stood in contrast to the ideas of information mining (extraction) and information manufacturing (stockpiling) because it emphasised cooperation and community. The idea is that knowledge workers would collaborate on data, refine it, and…
Niklas Luhmann, emphasizing his notion that the Zettelkasten is a communication partner, stressed that links between notes should point to something you might not have thought of on your own. He talks about drawing on the rich network of ideas in the Zettelkasten to accomplish this. He also usese terms like accidental and serendiptiy. The…
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…
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…
