---
title: Personal Knowledge Management
tags:
  - status/not-started
  - type/media-commentary
---
# Personal Knowledge Management

PKM requires taking notes,
but implies additional discipline not implied by "[[note-taking]]".

PKM allows one to forget things they _know_
to make room for ideas they're considering.
For this reason terse notes filled with acronyms and abbreviations
are as good as useless.
It is not acceptable to omit details
believed to be implied by the context.
One must write with clarity sufficient for an outsider to understand,
because the writer will eventually be the outsider.

In this note and elsewhere
I strongly associate the concept of PKM
and effective note-taking in general
with the use of [hypertext](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext).
Notes you don't reference are useless and,
short of reading your entire collection every few weeks,
liberal use of links is the best way to increase availability.

## Getting Started

Getting started with PKM will feel so intimidating that you'll want to give up,
but there's a surprisingly large amount of content on how to do it,
especially with [Obsidian](https://www.google.com/search?q=getting+started+with+obsidian).

Note that PKM gets a lot of hype from productivity influencers
so you may leave some of those videos feeling like you need to pick up bouldering.

It speaks to the highly personal nature of PKM that, of these hundreds,
there is no consensus larger than two on best practice.

### My Advice

#### Write Literally Everything

Plain text is too cheap to have high standards.
Write dumb ideas, write about trivial conversations,
write anything you can make two sentences out of.

When you don't yet know your goals for your vault
this is how you figure out how it can help you,
but you should never stop doing this.

I recommend setting up timestamped notes
to make this workflow as easy as possible.
Naming topics is one of the hardest parts of PKM
and the more it can be avoided the better
as far as I'm concerned.

#### Use Version Control

In service to my preferred method of moving fast and breaking stuff,
[[git]] allows me to make massive changes to my vault,
including deleting entire files that have gone stale,
without fear of regret,
because what's lost can always be recovered.

To get the most benefit out of git,
commit your changes at least once a day.

## See Also

* [[digital-gardens]]

## Resources

* [obsidian.md](https://obsidian.md/)
