What Defines A PKM?
It’s time to widen the definition!
In an essay I wrote for Ship30for30 recently, I started a discussion on what defines a PKM (Personal Knowledge Management System).
In Wikipedia the definition is the following:
Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities.
So reading this again, I think that my conclusions in that essay weren’t as far out as you might think. But my own backstory here is that I have questioned my own methodology and philosophy in notetaking and PKM lately, and have been looking for something less complex and more clear.
For creatives like myself, when the system overtakes the creative process, it kills the artistic and creative act. And to maintain a complex system, like, for instance, a zettlekasten, it demands a lot of, what I call, heavy lifting. I want to cut that away and simplify workflows. More in the line of a creative mind works. Come to think of a coming ebook title here; “The way of the creative mind”. That could be a way to move forward.
But back to the question at play; “What defines a PKM?”
My girlfriend uses her Facebook memories (and her journals since her early teens) as her Personal Knowledge Management System, and when I realized that my brain made a lot of new connections with what I already knew about PKMs. The realization that we shouldn’t lock in ourselves to a specific systematology by defining it in a too limited way.
My suggestion is the following; we widen the scope of what a PKM is, to be a more open description; A Personal Knowledge Management System is a way to gather information in a way that makes it easy for the user to retrieve it and use it.
Content Consuming
In this age of information overload, we have been taught to consume information and then forget it. The next wave of people is what is known as knowledge workers. They will be able to take the time to invest time in acquiring knowledge in every way they can, I know…
