PKM in its full form is known as personal knowledge management, is a system which helps you keep a database of all the knowledge that is important to you in your life. We all have the same problem, which is remembering things that help us make sense of the world.
You can use a PKM for anything that you’re into, like when you’re working on your PhD, or just want to remember what shows you watched or want to watch, or you stumbled upon a topic and don’t want to forget everything that you’ve learned by next week, or maybe you just want to track your habits, your workouts or your dreams and goals over time, or maybe you want to remember and cherish all the memories of your loved ones, or just and to remember how you’ve lived a good life.
If you do anything like that, then you’re managing knowledge, and that’s PKM. Knowledge management is the process of creating, sharing, using, and managing knowledge. Personal knowledge management is really about making sense of the world and once you start diving deeper into this topic you’ll start asking many interesting questions like, What should I do in this world? How should I conduct myself? Where should I spend my limited amount of attention? What really matters?
If we decide these existential questions are fundamental to a life worth living, then we better have a way to deal with all the stuff that we have going on in our lives, and PKM can help us do just that.
So How Do We Do It?
We need to create a framework to manage all the content that we have and create. Just like we humans have been doing it for years, we create simple frameworks that are easy to remember because even though the “you” of today has life figured out, how do you know you won’t forget what you’ve learnt in the decades to come.
While life is too short…
…for our memories, it’s too long.
The “you” of today isn’t the same as ten years ago, and surely the “you” of ten years later would’ve changed in ways, way bigger than we usually comprehend on a day-to-day basis. And in that way, we give ourselves way too much credit for what we’ll remember.
It is all too common to have an amazing breakthrough on how to live a good life, only to forget it all in the days and weeks to come by, collecting more ideas that drown out the original idea that really mattered. This is idea-noise, the habit of collecting ideas and never managing them properly, and this is where PKM frameworks come into play.
Today, with all the digital tools that we have, we can easily connect a nugget of wisdom and another in our note libraries. In this simple way, you can externalize your ideas while spending more time with them. The future “you” can connect to the older ideas as you collect more experiences over time. As your wisdom grows over time, you can connect your ideas together to make a better sense of the world.
PKM Planet
PKM planet is a framework that allows us to see where and think about how we are spending our time in the world of knowledge management
As you’d write about things, you’d see that these areas overlap quite often. As you connect ideas you’re writing about them, as you write about things, it’s often times to achieve goals or advance a project.
The beauty of the PKM planet is it forces the question, where am I spending most of my time in my management of knowledge and how? Because we only have a limited amount of time on this planet. So if we can bring more wisdom and intention to our knowledge management efforts, we can waste less time, we can bring better results and bring more joy in the process.
All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us.
- Gandalf
PKM Archetypes Overview
With the help of PKM planet you can help understand the common the archetypes, This can help you understand your use case as to where you’re spending most of your time. There are 7 PKM archetypes.
Top-down vs Bottom-up
How much time are you spending as a top-down thinker vs a bottom-up thinker?
Note-taker vs Note-maker
How does the time spent differ from the note-taker vs the note-makers?
What about note-taker that fall into the trap of always summarizing the same information and never making sense of it.
Regurgitators vs Sense-makers
How do we recognize the content regurgitators vs sense-makers?
Journaler, Writer, World-builder
Are you a writer, a journaler, or a world-builder?
PD Nerd, PM
Are you a personal development nerd? A project manager?
“Churn & Burn” Student vs “Know & Grow” Student
What kind of student are you? And how do you get the knowledge?
Relationship-builder
Maybe you also want to keep a track of some personal and professional relationships? How does those weather patterns look on the PKM planet?
Knowing these archetypes will help you avoid the most common pitfalls in knowledge management, while also confidently saving, developing, and maturing your ideas sustainably over time
So What Is PKM?
PKM as we already saw helps you make sense of the world. Because through your sense of the world, all your actions are influenced.
That means through better sense making you become better empowered to create better, to learn faster, to learn at a higher and more sustainable level and yet stay grounded and focused as the world attempts to tear your attention apart.
Through better sense making by digitally linking your thinking, you can develop your ideas over decades. You can make more valuable leaps of insights, and all the while you can’t help but train yourself into the habit of better thinking. By better thinking I mean having the ability to think critically, creatively, and consecutively all at the same time.
This type of sustainable sense making will fill your thoughts with more joy, meaning, and personal
unique perspectives. Armed with all you can’t help but be able to contribute more value, in more ways to your family, Friends, Community, and Society as a whole. And it’s all from developing a personal environment to encourage, nurture, develop, and reliably save your best thinking. That’s the promise and the premise of personal knowledge management.
This kind of system helps you is a variety of ways.
- All your important data in one place.
- Remember and link your life together.
- Streamline the process of managing all your important data.
- Create unique ideas by thinking in a creative way.
- Direct your live better with all the notes that you make.
- …and more!