YOG Blog

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:

  1. Collection
  2. Storage
  3. Application

There are applications now for all of these things and every year they get better. My current favorites:

Collection

  1. Kindle
  2. YouTube
  3. Overcast for podcast consumption
  4. Pocket for web reading, storage, highlighting, my general read-it-later tool
  5. Readwise.io for highlights from Kindle, Apple Books, and Pocket
  6. Bear for highlights from blogs, web magazines on all my Apple devices
  7. Bear (Apple watch verbal notes transcribed to text) Apple Watch
  8. UpNote for notes on my work Windows laptop
  9. Field Notes notebooks for hand-written jotting
  10. Signo Micro 207 my pen of choice

Storage

  1. Kindle, Pocket, Overcast
  2. Readwise.io (review via the app's automation)
  3. Bear (clipping & my own notes)
  4. Apple Notes (rarely)

Creation

  1. Ulysses my favorite long-form writing application
  2. Drafts (for social media,email composition, short-form writing)
  3. 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?