Highlights

• What is personal knowledge management? (00:47).
• “Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is the practice of capturing the ideas and insights we encounter in our daily life, whether from personal experience, from books and articles, or from our work, and cultivating them over time to produce more creative, higher quality work” (Forte Labs, 2019).
• Ness Labs creator, Anne-Laure Le Cunff describes the 5 C’s of PKM as: creation, circulation, curation, collaboration and communities (Ness Labs, 2020).
• My interpretations of the 5 C’s (02:08):
  • creation: managing knowledge derived from learning allows the creation of new knowledge.
  • circulation: that new knowledge can be circulated/shared.
  • curation: it’s also a way to collect and curate things that make you think.
  • collaboration: collecting information in this way can lead to collaboration.
  • communities: you can share anything collected or created in communities (e.g. Twitter).
• For me, PKM is about ensuring the content I consume is not wasted. How many times to you read or watch something and then forget it straight afterwards? (03:56).
• While I don’t expect to learn from everything I consume (ahem.. dog videos on TikTok), if I am consuming to learn and/or generate my own content afterwards, I want to increase my chance of retention. Furthermore, from an ethical standpoint, if someone’s work influences my thinking, I want to give credit.
• The best way to design a system for PKM is to draw it (I used Excalidraw) (05:28).
• Work out (07:18):
  • Input: where do you consume content? (Examples: YouTube, web, academic papers, reports, Kindle, Twitter etc). Also include ideas.
  • Output: what do you want to achieve? (Examples: share notes, write blog posts/articles, write a dissertation, write a book, create a podcast etc).
• I then divide my workflow into three levels (09:21):
  • Quick capture (temporary repository)
  • Literature notes (notes taken while consuming content)
  • Permanent notes (notes in my own words - usually atomic)
• See diagram on show notes - loosely based on Zettelkasten.
• Tech stack (11:39):
  • Quick capture: Drafts, Highlights and Readwise (clear weekly)
  • Literature notes: Notion (knowledge hub), Highlights and Readwise
  • Permanent notes: Obsidian (public)
• Obsidian is my digital garden (15:20).
• A Digital Garden is personal, but public learning space for live, interconnected notes.
• Or, more eloquently, “A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public” (Le Cunff, 2020).
• Obsidian allows you to see connections between notes. Things planted in my digital garden might eventually become articles, podcasts etc (16:49).
• Wrap up: let’s discuss in the community! (17:12)

Helpful links

• Martine’s Digital Garden
• Excalidraw for diagrams.
• Shower notepad.
• Notion
• Obsidian
• Readwise
• Drafts
• Highlights
• Zettelkasten method.
• Martine’s Twitter thread on this topic.
• Notion Mastery course.
• The Teaching Space Community.