Personal knowledge management (PKM) is the system or process for managing knowledge for personal, individual uses — students in academic settings, researchers, knowledge or data workers, etc.
Components
- the collection of knowledge from various sources (books, articles, essays, videos, even face-to-face conversations) and physically or digitally storing these as notes.
- storing and organizing them in a way that makes sense to you. This is where complex knowledge management systems come into play, because your ocean of options is wide. You can have hierarchical folder systems or relatively flat, networked systems of storing instead.
- retrieval of the notes/knowledge as needed and ideally developing them towards an output or final stage. (See: why I use Obsidian)
- In my case, I try to develop ideas by way of creating pillar-level notes that are functionally sort of wikipedia pages for myself. Sometimes I manage to come up with more of an essay-like structure that makes it shareable, and sometimes the individual ideas are shared as-is in my newsletter’s Commonplace Pages column.
- maintaining the notes by way of relating them to one another, developing them as above, and/or archiving or deleting notes that are no longer relevant.
Applications
Manifestations of PKM would be one of the following or any combination thereof (although in my humble opinion, they are all functionally synonymous anyway):
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nonlinear / networked knowledge
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hierarchical knowledge
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disorganized / commonplacing
Related ideas
- DIKW pyramid shows one approach in disambiguating information and knowledge
- Bloom’s taxonomy describes a framework I’ve liked for a few years to map the learning route from knowledge to synthesis/creativity
- A bit poorly-maintained glossary for personal knowledge and productivity
- Dewey, Johnny, Konik decimal systems
- Nick Ang’s gardening analogy
- PKM note types
- Zettelkasten
- 4 documentation quadrants
Adjacent systems
- personal information management (PIM) which organizes personal information, not knowledge;
- organizational information management, which organizes information for organizations, not individuals;
- organizational knowledge management (OKM), which organizes knowledge for organizations (like businesses), not individuals.
tag: subject/knowledge OR tag: subject/PKM