My Personal Knowledge Management system - Version 0.1

Introduction

For the last few weeks the term Personal Knowledge Management (PKM from hereon) has been on my mind and fingertips. I’ve kept daily and long term notes for years now but I’ve never really managed to properly organise or collect them into cohesive thoughts.

I’ve been listening to podcasts, reading articles and discussing this a lot with a friend. We’ve both gotten to the point of enacting our systems and starting to record our knowledge inputs a bit better.

Overall the concept is reasonably simple: Filter the incoming information, rewrite or record it in a way that makes sense to you, and then save it into a repository of other information saved in this way, adding to the knowledge that you’ve gathered. You can then call upon that knowledge for creating new things or sharing what you’ve learned.

The more useful systems are those that include ways of linking these notes together and referencing other materials in a way that makes it easy to find source material and other notes that are related.

So, that’s what I’ve been constructing: My PKM system (Version 0.1)!

Immediate versioning

I immediately appended a version number to this as I highly doubt that this won’t evolve over time. In actual fact, this is not the first draft of either this post OR the system itself.

The issue with evolving this over time is also that there will be a number of template changes, formatting or even tags/categories that change as the system (hopefully) becomes more efficient. This is an issue as these changes will have to be applied to existing notes, as well as the new ones.

Thankfully, the system will continue my use of markdown for creating notes. This means that the files are (hopefully) easily readable/editable by any text file editor and, more to the point, easier to work with automation.

Software

I had a section about the software that I’ll be using but I’ll save that for a post on its own. Suffice to say, I’ve been using Obsidian for a while now and this works great for a PKM system.

The three stages

The three stages of the system are:

• Collect Capture
• Catalogue
• Create

This is adapted from a few different sources with phases like: capture, curate and create, or seek, sense and share. The idea is the same, have an input system, then sort and expand the information and, finally, do something with it.

My rough usage plan is that the Collect Capture to Catalogue stages will be a reasonably short timeframe, but the Catalogue to Create line may take longer. In fact, the Create stage may feed back into the Catalogue stage as I go through input sources and notes on various topics and consolidate them into more cohesive thoughts or writings, then pop them back into my main Catalogue. Just to add to the complication…

Collect Capture

The Collect Capture stage is in two parts:

• The hopper is a folder or note that I dump everything into that I think is relevant at the time. Mostly I will read, or at least skim-read, before putting into here with a couple of notes about why it’s here and where the source came from. The location of this will predominantly be my daily diary note, under headings for the topic that the article/video/media-thing falls under.
• From there I will use a pre-formatted template to formalise some notes on the thing if it’s worth keeping or added some value to some other topics that I’ve been looking at previously. These templates have a few headings and some fields to fill out some meta-data so that I can track down more information and file it appropriately.

At some point during the day (or maybe later), I’ll go through the information and transfer it from the hopper to the proper template or flag it for adding straight into the catalogue.

Anything that’s not been dealt with that day will be copied over into the next daily diary and, hopefully before things get out of control, I’ll go through and clear out the notes as required. If not, I’ll spend some time each weekend or something to go through and clear these out; either discarding things that aren’t really that relevant, or transferring things that are into proper notes.

Catalogue

The Catalogue of my PKM system will be the repository for all things that I consider perpetual. Hopefully all things contained will be factual snippets, but I imagine many other things less qualitative will slip in: conversation notes, thoughts on movies, collections of books read, etc.

The plan is that by the Catalogue stage, I’ve already read/processed the information (or in the process of) and have some rough notes and ideas from the source. I might tidy up the notes a little here and I will try adding conventions/standard tags here to group things logically.

Once tidied and concise it can be added to either an existing category in the PKM, or it will form the start of a new note. As I’m writing I will try to add as many links as I think are required, but at this stage I’ll try to consider these both to refine any I’ve already written or to consider adding more.

Create

The Create stage isn’t a final stage, but rather an output from the Catalogue stage. What I mean by this is that I’m trying to consider this phase as the place where I do anything with the information from the Capture to Catalogue stages. For example, creating a review of a particular source would fall into the purview of this stage, but would be fed back into the catalogue once complete.

Generally though this will be the stage at which I’ll try and produce something from the information gathered on a category. The ‘Share’ component of many PKM systems seems to be just as important as the gathering and processing stages as it is here that value is added and where I personally believe that a lot of the ‘knowledge’ is added.

Harrod Jarche, during episode 213¹ of the Teaching In higher Ed podcast, said that (and I’m paraphrasing a little) you don’t have to actually share what you’ve done, but just create in such a way that it could be considered shareable. I really liked this comment as it gives the creation stage more purpose even without actually having some of the stress added from deadlines or pressure to have a completely finished ‘thing’ (in my case it will mostly be articles on here.

Example

I was going to go into a bit more detail on the categories or tagging conventions that I will be using but this is already getting a bit long winded so instead I’ll show an example, using the process of writing this post. The self-reference reminds me a lot of this XKCD comic.

Collect Capture

Over the last few weeks I’ve been in constant collect capture mode and reading a lot about the Personal Knowledge Management systems, process and other peoples techniques.

This has resulted in me noting a number of articles that resonated with me about this (and adjacent topics), noting the ‘why’ and source of the materials so that I could go back at a later date to re-read and generate some notes on it.

Each of these was recorded in my daily diary entry for that day.

Another source for this article was the podcast referenced above ¹. I listened to this once through, grabbing what notes I could on the first listen through, then I went back to re-listen to certain parts and expand up some of the notes I’d already taken and any new ones that stood out.

Catalogue 1

To transfer the notes to the Catalogue of my PKM I went through and re-read my notes; adding information to some of them and removing others.

Create 1

I then created a formalised summary of the podcast using the standard template for collecting capturing information and using the more concise notes developed in the previous stage.

Catalogue 2

Once the information was there I lodged it in the relevant category in my PKM system (under Media/Podcast) and added in the relevant links to other categories or notes within my PKM system.

Create 2

Finally, in the process of creating this article, I went through a number of notes in my PKM system (including the note for the podcast) and pulled together various ideas to form this process and article.

Finally

Hopefully that all made sense and, if not, it’s probably because I’m still working it out in my head as well so struggled to explain what I might not understand myself!

But, as mentioned at the start, I think that this is a starting point for this topic only, there are a lot more posts to come.

Capture template (completed)

---
author: 
published: 2018-07-12
date_added: 2022-04-14
tags: podcast complete
---

# Episode 213 - Personal knowledge mastery
Categories: [[Personal Improvement]], [[Personal Knowledge Management]]
Source: https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/personal-knowledge-mastery/

## My Summary
A podcast with [[Harrold Jarche]] where the host quizzes [[Harrold Jarche]]about his Seek, Sense and Share system for PKM and why he uses the phrase Personal Knowledge *Mastery*, rather than Management.

## My Why
Initially, this was suggested to me after trying to explain my PKM system, particularly about the proposed collect, catalogue and create.

## My Key Takeaways
* Traditional model was DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom). Harrold didn't agree as he reasoned that you need knowledge to be able to use the information.
* Knowledge is two things: Personal, social. No man is an island
* Management vs. mastery: Differentiating between a system and a discipline that you will never 'achieve', but work towards.
* Harrold's three parts of [[Personal Knowledge Management|PKM]]:
	* Seek: Looking out different perspectives and opinions, not just the information itself
	* Sense: How do you take in the information and doing something with it?
	* Share: Make it shareable, which is different to *actually* sharing. Make it your own or add some value to the information before sharing.
* Harrold's tools:
	* Seek: A feed reader for aggregating the incoming information. Maybe consider putting together an RSS or something? [[Twitter]] and [[LinkedIn]] are two other networks that he uses a lot.
	* Sense: Blog is his active and public working out loud. Uses Slack and other communication tools for private communicating for the sensing phase. He, at the end of each year, curates his blog posts into eBooks... that's an EXCELLENT idea.
	* Sharing: A lot of the sensing stuff from above can be used for this, Harrold's is obviously the blog.
* Recommends that you pay for tools that you find useful.