What is Personal Knowledge Management?

I have a deep love of learning.

And there’s never been a time in history where so much information has been available to us.

It’s truly overwhelming how much stuff we can access from a tiny device that fits inside our pocket.

With this amount of information hitting us at all times in all directions, it’s impossible to make sense of any of it if we don’t have some way of capturing and organizing the things that are most important to us.

This has given rise to what has become known as personal knowledge management (PKM). A PKM system is a place to filter, store, explore, and connect ideas and information. Put simply, it’s where we take and store our notes. It’s a sandbox of things that interest us, a place to play with ideas, and make sense of the world around us.

Personal knowledge management systems can range from a series of index cards shoved in shoeboxes to volumes of journals stacked neatly on shelves. In this day and age, digital tools offer ways to collect and store thousands of notes and ideas in a single space.

There’s no right or wrong way to create a personal knowledge management system. Ideally it should be designed in such a way that allows you to easily find whatever it is you’re looking for. It should provide a way to link notes together, creating a network of ideas forming your own personal knowledge base.

The apps I’ve been using for PKM are Obsidian and GoodNotes. I also do a fair amount of idea capturing and note taking in my Bullet Journal.