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 work and I just couldn’t see the purpose.”
And that’s the point exactly. Your PKM system needs a purpose in order for it to function effectively. Sönke Ahrens puts it this way in his book How to Take Smart Notes:
They do not clearly decide on the format and the organization of their notes and do not have a plan for what to do with them afterwards. Without a clear purpose for the notes, taking them will feel more like a chore
What stays out of your knowledge base is just as important as what goes in. Otherwise the slip box simply becomes an indiscriminate data hoard.
Elaiza Aquino Benitez and David Pauleen came up with the term “brainfiltering” to describe how graduate students could develop skills to to be more discriminating about the types of notes they collected for their studies.
A purpose, therefore, can be a kind of “brainfilter” that you employ at the start of the research process to screen out stuff that is interesting but not essential to your work. It doesn’t have to be complicated, “write blog posts about PKM” could be a purpose. “To remember complex but seldom-used business processes” could also be a purpose. Either one would help to screen out that super-interesting note you’re just dying to keep about “do dogs think in pictures?”
SEE ALSO
Personal Knowledge Management – is it PKM or is it PIM?
Zettelkasten: It’s Like GTD for Writing and Here’s Why You Should Consider It
