Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

Last updated Jan 6, 2025

The PKM workflow to capture knowledge and todos is essential for any human, developer, or knowledge worker. It should reduce stress and improve your quality of life in a way you wouldn’t believe before you had one.

Why doing it?

For me, it’s linking and getting new ideas. It is also less stressful to think about where to put the information instead of just putting it into the Zettelkasten folder and linking to relevant information or finding it when needed. That needed a more restricted way of only using my thoughts instead of copying and pasting exciting articles. But the whole process and also how it profoundly influences my life.

“What Is a PKM Methodology or Workflow”

I combined most of them in my Second Brain. Using PARA as a general setup, I can have repeated notes around family, health, personal, work in areas, and a dedicated folder for Zettelkasten. I am applying the linking of your thoughts from Nick Milo with the principles of Sönke Smart Note Taking. If this is of interest, I wrote a little about how I do it and much more in  Personal Knowledge Management Workflow for a Deeper Life — as a Computer Scientist | 108.

# Smart Note Taking

# Second Brain

# Zettelkasten

# Getting Things Done (GTD)

# Email

See PKM Tools.

A comment on Reddit:

PKM is not definitely only buzzword. There are scientific and historic studies about it (e.g. Cevolini: Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe). It is basic methodology of every scholar who works with information for hundreds of years.

If you are historian or social science scientist or anybody working with lot of info, you need PKM/PIM. Yes, there are influencers and gurus speaking about it ridiculously. But this is like healthy eating - there are nonsense dangerous influencers speaking about keto- and paleo-, yet it does not mean that healthy eating is not scientific subject of many serious researchers. Just a Markdown editor : r/ObsidianMD. Related PARA

Origin: Personal Knowledge Management Workflow for a Deeper Life — as a Computer Scientist | ssp.sh
References: My Tweet.
Created 2022-08-13