Intro
History
Einstein scribbled notes and fragments of formulas into a pocket travel diary. Aboard the Beagle, Darwin filled five journals on his voyages, which shaped his theories of evolution. Da Vinci imagined the modern helicopter and submarine in notebooks he kept daily.
Pitfalls
This leaves them with many different kinds of notes in many different places and formats.
Hoarding
Nothing created
Multiple sources
I have a Calibre library for books. I have a Zotero library for papers. I sometimes think about merging the former into the latter, which is more general and has a cleaner UI, but there’s no urgent need to do so. I also have folders with music, games, interactive fiction games, RPG PDFs, board game rulebook PDFs, and art.
If you have your notes scattered over ten different apps, you’re never going to make any progress because you can’t find anything.
Having a meticulously organized set of nested tags and word-clouds and visualized graphs and a dozen different plug-in automations is not going to increase the quality of the notes that you’re writing.
Tools
Virtually everything stops working past 10k notes.
History
The term “personal knowledge management” was coined in the late 1990’s, and yet, it’s far from being a solved problem.
personal knowledge management systems are meant to be a means to an end. They’re meant to support your creativity, your thinking, your learning, your output
Technology is an essential part of modern work, but using it effectively requires a new skill – Personal Knowledge Management, known as PKM.
Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.
Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a system for retaining and managing the information most likely to be valuable to your needs and interests – now and in the future.
How do I organize this stuff, so I can get my best work done?
For PKM to be sustainable, it needs to directly enable the execution of real projects.
As Sönke Ahren puts it, “The idea is not to collect, but to develop ideas, arguments and discussions.
I think it is important to stress that personal knowledge management is about how and what information you curate and save with the intention to retrieve it later. Always ask yourself: Will this information be useful for future me? How will future me be able to find it when in need of this information?
note-taking is just the capture step; the larger process at play is note-making
Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities.
Personal knowledge management is really only about two things, how to find the correct information and how to use it.
Problem with correct information is most often too much information (finding the needle in the haystack).
Problem with how to use it is most often how organize and make sense of the information so you can present it to others in a understandable format.
Information vs Knowledge vs Wisdom
Information: You read the description of loss aversion.
Knowledge: You reflect and understand how loss aversion causes people to make certain decisions.
Wisdom: You apply your knowledge in your future decisions to improve your judgment and take reasonable risks.
“Knowledge Management has no single accepted definition.
For many organizations, Knowledge Management is about protecting and preserving vital assets.
capturing and distributing information
knowledge as an asset to be managed.
But the task of converting knowledge into real improvement is often left to the end users.
It includes sharing skills and wisdom learned from experience.
Knowledge Management is not an outcome by itself.
What is knowledge?
The gap between knowing and doing