Personal Knowledge Management
PKM seems inadequate. It's not enough. When I think about my own Personal Knowledge Management system over the past 30 years and how its evolved, I have never felt that I've arrived at a place where I feel that I'm processing, learning, and applying everything that I should.
PKM Must Address Three Areas
I spend time reading, storing, and processing the data and information that I encounter via blogs, books, social media, YouTube, television, podcasts, in-person events, family gatherings, and so on. There are three discrete activities that must be considered if you want to build a robust system:
- Collection
- Storage
- Application
There are applications now for all of these things and every year they get better. My current favorites:
Collection
- Kindle
- YouTube
- Overcast for podcast consumption
- Pocket for web reading, storage, highlighting, my general read-it-later tool
- Readwise.io for highlights from Kindle, Apple Books, and Pocket
- Bear for highlights from blogs, web magazines on all my Apple devices
- Bear (Apple watch verbal notes transcribed to text) Apple Watch
- UpNote for notes on my work Windows laptop
- Field Notes notebooks for hand-written jotting
- Signo Micro 207 my pen of choice
Storage
- Kindle, Pocket, Overcast
- Readwise.io (review via the app's automation)
- Bear (clipping & my own notes)
- Apple Notes (rarely)
Creation
- Ulysses my favorite long-form writing application
- Drafts (for social media,email composition, short-form writing)
- BearBlog (this new experiment in blogging)
I'm constantly searching for "the one" best way to do everything on Windows and the Apple ecosystem. I monitor tools like Notion and Obsidian. Obsidian interests me the most because it seems like something that could replace many of my individual tools. I have to admit that one of the most appealing things about my current system is that everything is Markdown based. I love the portability of Markdown.
Systems
I'm interested in Zettelkasten, Building a Second Brain, Habit-formation, and GTD. I was lucky to have attended a very early David Allen live seminar in St Louis during the 1990s before he wrote his first book and started to get famous in the space.
I want to create my own version of all these things that I have a fuzzy feeling about somehow mushing them all together and adding my own foo foo juice to, to make it my own.
How about you? Do you have a system for managing knowledge, learning, and creative output?