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| title | tags | ||
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| Personal Knowledge Management |
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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. 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.
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.