The Power of PKM for Enhancing Organization and Creativity
Why do I use PKM, and what do I want to get out of it? This article outlines why I use a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system and what I get from it. On the professional side, I use a PKM to help me stay organized and on-task and to avoid getting distracted by other tasks that need to be done. On the personal side, I use it to journal and to help me make new connections between seemingly disparate topics. It helps me to spark my imagination and stay inspired. PKM is a great tool to help me get and stay organized with my thoughts and projects, as well as to help me stay on-task and make new links between seemingly disparate topics. It serves both a professional and personal purpose, helping me to organize my work but also keeping me inspired and creative. By using a PKM, I am able to make the most of my time and make new connections that can be useful in both my professional and personal life.
On the professional side of the things
The why is out of a want to have my thoughts and projects organised so that I am not hunting for information. My mind always goes a million miles per hour and makes many concurrent connections. When something is right in front of me, easily accessible, it is easier for me to stay on task. When I have to hunt for a piece of information, or it is scattered all over the place, it introduces more opportunities for me to want to try to multitask and string things together. My mind sometimes feels like a pinball machine linking all these seemingly random occurrences. I will get the work done though it might be after I string together ten different things.
An example would be there is a slack message about a project. To answer it, I need to go into email, though I see ten different emails when I get there. I see one that is new and looks important, so I open it up, it is a quick request, so I do that while I am looking at it. That request had to do with the mighty network, and while I was there, people were asking some questions that I wanted to answer, so I took 5–10 mins to reply to them. My mind jumps back to the original slack message I had been working on and is like oh yeah, I should do that now. that is why I try to plan out tasks and put all the relevant information right in front of me so it is harder for me to get distracted by other tasks that need to get done though it might be more busy work.
On the personal side of things
When journaling and writing in a stream of consciousness, I will put down any thought to see where it may lead me. Then when I feel stuck or uninspired in some way. I can go to the sidebar, see notes similar to the topics running through my head, and make new connections. It helps spiderweb all sorts of ideas that might seem far removed from what I am writing about though they dovetail into it nicely. It is another type of networked thinking. That is helpful to stoke my imagination.
This week I was reading this story I had written, and one of the related notes was about the relativity of truth. I had to read this paragraph several times to grasp what I had written. It was a dense philosophical question of the difference between a truth and a lie; when a person holds what they believe to be true so closely, it becomes a part of their identity, even if based on a lie they made true for themselves. I was basing it on a perspective of how people are perceived in a thousand different ways since everyone has their own lived experiences that create their own filters and noise. I am autistic is a truth for myself that people have challenged me on saying I am lying since I don’t look autistic. Growing up, people called me weird and introverted. I had no vocabulary or life experiences to explain my sensory processing difficulties and other challenges. The self-harm truth I took on was that I was not valid and that to fit in, I needed to hide and conform to how every else acted around me.
This makes me think about how damaging and dangerous inferences can be when I have taken them on as my truths. Sometimes my logic can fail me. Which then networks out to chaos theory, noise in systems, anti-fragility, dealing in bets, and a host of other topics. I similarly use my PKM to jump from one thought to the next. Finding that older note I had written sparked my imagination earlier in the week and had me returning to it, reimagining this question I had asked myself.
My PKM is an invaluable tool to help with my professional and personal goals. It can help to organize thoughts and projects, stay on task, and spark creativity and imagination. By using a PKM, we can make connections between seemingly disparate topics, allowing us to explore ideas in new and creative ways. In this way, PKM can be a powerful tool for both professional and personal growth.
