PKM

Personal Knowledge Management

A Personal Knowledge Management (or PKM for short) system is a way to capture, store and retrieve information in a consistent way in order to make retrieval and research more effective. Taking control of the endless flood of information and general things we are required to do is (for me at least) entirely unmanageable. Add to that the multitude of places that information can live, it can be overwhelming. I come to stand ups and can’t remember what I did yesterday!

A PKM resonated for me as it has similarities to GTD which is a process for capturing tasks. Whilst GTD has a concept for tracking reference material, I always found this to be lacking to fully cover my needs.

Key elements

The fundamental elements that make a PKM system effective are:

• Centralise storage: no searching through apps, systems, folders on this computer, or that mobile - everything in one place and (preferably) available everywhere.
• Organised structure: complimented by categories, tags, internal & external links - to classify and link information.
• Easy retrieval: it should be easy, and fast to retrieve what you need.

What PKM system

There are a lot of systems and tools out there, and they are probably all equally as good at what they do. What I have found is that experimenting with a few different options helps so that you can find the process that suits your needs and the way that you process information. For me, the system that resonated the most was the PARA method, a method made popular by Thiago Forte in the book Building a Second Brain.

What Note Taking tool

To manage my Second Brain I use Obsidian. I had a play with a few tools, notably Notion and Logseq but I have found Obsidian to be the simplest most elegant approach for me. It sits atop a set of markdown files which was an important factor - all of my information is mine. I’m not relying on some random company in the cloud. That does make sharing information with other devices more of a challenge, but the built in sync system is brilliant and I’m in a position where I am happy to pay the subscription to have native syncing availiable.