The Rise of the Personal Knowledge Management systems

The flow of data we are subjected to every day is becoming unbearable. Intellectual work can benefit by slowing down consumption and by relying on external tools that improve creativity and sense-making.

An endless exhaustion

These days, the stream of information is more suffocating than ever. I personally achieved a point of realization: no one is safe unless they know how to handle all this noise. And very few of us have the ability and knowledge of how to respond to it.

In the last 20 years, the internet has breached into our work, life, houses, and brains, leaving little room for designing survival strategies. No one is safe unless they know how to handle it.

Let’s have a look at the numbers: it is estimated that each day we consume around 113K words for 12 hours, and it is not intended to decline in the near future (nytimes.com). These numbers are astonishing when compared to what people in the past (from our grandparents backwards) were used to. With respect to 1940, today we are consuming almost 90 times more information (in terms of bits) than before (loupfunds.com). The digital transformation, led by social media, did nothing but accelerate the process.