How to Manage What Gets Into Your Personal Knowledge System
Exploring the Interface between Good Organisation and Creativity
Not everything you discover is worth knowing.
Right?
My previous attempts at creating a Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS) foundered because I was particularly prone to the Collector’s Fallacy.
It’s just too easy to collect information by clipping material from the many different digital streams that tickle your consciousness.
- Emails
- Web articles
- RSS feeds
- etc
The Collector’s Fallacy (check out zettlekasten.de for a good description) is when you assume that gathering interesting stuff and keeping it somewhere handy, makes you wiser.
I’ve learnt the hard way that doesn’t work.
There is no point in storing clippings, articles and so on, if you don’t then build them into information that can deepen wisdom.
This is my four-step method for managing the digital inflow to my PKMS and making sense of what I discover.
First Step: Create a Filter
Before you start hurling stuff at your PKMS, you need to install an inlet valve. Or a filter.
I use the concept of Lasting Value.
This is a value judgment that allows me to decide relatively quickly whether something I’m thinking about saving is likely to be more than just momentarily interesting. For the item to pass through the gates of my system, it must:
- make me curious, or
- spark a creative idea, thought or feeling, or
- link to other areas of interest, concepts, thoughts or feelings.
I don’t waste much time on this. I just weigh whatever it is briefly in my mind, using this value judgment. If I can, I use Instapaper. By clipping something into Instapaper, I create an interface between the outside world and my PKMS. It allows me to build in a pause, usually of a few days, between the act of clipping something and then ultimately deciding whether to allow the item to enter my PKMS.
Usually, when I review a clipping I’ve stored in Instapaper after a few days, it’s much easier to tell whether I really want to keep it. I can then use what I’ve saved to build out concepts, ideas, thoughts or feelings that I can use creatively.
Second Step: Separate What You Store From What You Write
In case you missed it, I really want to avoid the Collector’s Fallacy referred to above.
I’ve found separating what I collect or store, from the notes I write about these items a simple but powerful discipline. Every few days I review what I’ve collected in Instapaper. I run the Lasting Value test again. Anything that strikes me as having lasting value, I move into my long-term store. Anything that doesn’t, gets binned.
If I can’t think of anything useful to write about the item, that’s pretty telling and suggests I don’t need to keep it.
I use the Keep It app as my long-term repository. You could use DEVONThink or just file the items. I tag each item and move into a folder in Keep It. I have one folder for each of my areas of interest:
- Creativity
- Personal Organisation
- Poetry
- Art
- etc
I use tags sparingly, but generally follow the same designation as the folders. That way, I can search using a combination of tags and folder for an item that touches more than one area of interest.
Third Step: Write a Note About What You Store
The key in any PKMS is turning something you know into something you can use. You do this by annotating everything you collect and then linking what you discover to anything you’ve previously thought about that seems relevant.
In this way you deepen your own ideas and build new ones.
Having chosen to store an item, I copy the item’s link from Keep It and place that link in a new short note in Obsidian along with a suitable title. Doing so means I can always access the original source material from within the note I’ve made. Handy if you want to review the source again later.
Fourth Step: Choose a Title For Your Note Based on Why You’ve Kept It
When I write a note about the clipping I’ve saved, I use the criteria I’ve set for entry to my PKMS to write the note title. I’ve got three criteria:
- curiosity,
- creative stimulus and
- links to ther concepts, ideas, thoughts or feelings.
The title I choose references which of these criteria has determined why I saved it. For example, today I saved a painting that appeared in the Daily Art app. The painting was Morning Sun by Edward Hopper. I saved it because it made me think about loneliness — it’s a painting of a lone, sad looking woman looking out of a high window.
So my title is 15–05–2021-Painting-Morning Sun-Edward Hopper-Loneliness.
I can search for any notes that have painting, or Hopper, or loneliness in their title as I build out my thoughts in any one of these potential directions.
The Better Creativity Digital Garden
I’ve created a Digital Garden which goes deep on the interface between creativity and good organisation. I prefer the term Building Site to Digital Garden and you read about why that is here.
Not sure what a Digital Garden is? There’s ton of good links that will help explain what a Digital garden is, with lots of examples here. You can also visit the Better Creativity blog.
What About You?
Do you run a Personal Knowledge Management System? If so, how do you manage the inflow of information?
