How to Build a Personal Knowledge Management System?

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📝1. What’s a Personal Knowledge Management Sytems?

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a system in place to capture, organize, distill, and share your thought, notes, and files. Its definition in Wikipedia is as follows:

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities (Grundspenkis 2007) and the way in which these processes support work activities (Wright 2005). It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers need to be responsible for their own growth and learning (Smedley 2009). It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management (KM) (Pollard 2008).

You maybe know it by its other name, such as:

Personal Information Management (PIM).

Personal Management Systems.

Knowledge Management (KM).

Knowledge Management Systems.

Information Management Systems.

Note-taking Systems.

(Digital) Note-taking Workflow.

Paul Dorsey defined seven Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) skills:

Retrieving Information.

Evaluating Information.

Organizing Information.

Collaborating Around Information.

Analyzing Information.

Presenting Information.

Securing Information.

📝2. Why do we need a Personal Knowledge Management System?

Nowadays, we can acquire knowledge or information from not only books but also videos, podcasts, blogs, and other sources on the website. Because of the overwhelming of sources, the traditional commonplace book paper-based can’t quickly track and find the knowledge or information we learned. So we need a digital system where we can collect or search for them. And what’s most important is that, in this system, we can,

make our thought concrete.

reveal a new connection between our thoughts.

incubate our thoughts over time.

sharp our special perspective on the issue.

find the pattern and structure of our work and life.

📝3. How to Implement a Personal Knowledge Management System?

📝 3.1. Methods

There are many different methods to build a Personal Knowledge Management System, some of the most popular methods include:

Zettelkasten

Johnny Decimal

Personal Kanban

Getting Things Done

Building a Second Brain (BASA) & PARA

Digital Garden

📝3.1.1. Zettelkasten

The Zettelkasten created by academic Niklas Luhmann and popularized by Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes, was originally an analog knowledge management system composed entirely of slips of paper or index cards. It looks like as in the following picture,

With the development of computer software, we can just need a note App supported hypertext to implement the Zettelkasten online-based. A new note on paper slips called “Zettel” is created by connecting to the existing notes. This process is described vividly in the following picture.

Pciture from [Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method]

There are three components in each Zettel, including:

A unique identifier.

The body of the Zettel.

Reference.

By creating the connection notes, we can acquire a web of our thoughts. However, it is not enough for our knowledge creation, due to the importance of a hierarchical structure notes. Luckily, we can get a structure of our notes, by the following methods:

Hub Notes. It is a list that contains these Zettel related to a topic we want to research.

Meta-Notes. It is a Zettel about other Zettels and their relationships.

📝 3.1.2. Johnny Decimal

The Johnny Decimal System, created by Jonny Nobel, is a number index system acquired by assigning to each category to find easily the digital files you need. The four steps of the approach are:

Divide everything into 10 areas.

Divide into 10 categories in each area.

Give each category a number.

Assign IDs to files and folders.

The chart is drawn by Mr.Charley.

Finally, everything you need to organize is look like the following picture.

📝 3.1.3. Personal Kanban

Personal Kanban is a way for people to make conscious informed decisions about the actions they take. There are four steps to start a Personal Kanban:

Choose a medium and visualize your work.

Start to prioritize your tasks.

Start to pull your work into your Personal Kanban.

Reflect on your week: how did you do?

And My Personal Project Kanban looks like the following picture described.

📝 3.1.4. Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done, a method created by David Allen and introduced in his book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”, is composed of four steps, including:

Capture: Collect what has your attention

Clarify: Process what you capture. And decide the next action and project according to the actionable.

Organize: Put it into the appropriate project and list the tasks.

Reflect: Review the tasks and projects you are doing currently.

Engage: complete your task and projects, and update the status of the projects.

The chart is drawn by Mr.Charley.

📝 3.1.4. Building a Second Brain (BASA) & PARA

A Second Brain is an external brain to help our physical brain remember, connect and search for the knowledge or information we’ve learned, which makes our physical brain can more focus on knowledge creation. The concept of the Second Brain and its building methods are introduced in Tiago Forte’s book “Building a Second Brain, A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential”. The four-step method is:

Capture what you resonated with.

Organize what you captured into Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives (PARA) the four categories.

Distill your notes to find the essence by the method called Progressive Summarization.

Express your ideas with others.

if you want to learn more about BASA & PARA, you can read the article I wrote in Chinese in my blog.

读书笔记：《Building a Second Brain》 | Charley’s Blog

如今我们每天面对的信息各种各样，纷乱烦杂。如何将有用的信息进行有序组织，为我们的生产助力。本文是Tiago Forte《Building a Second Brain》的读书笔记，主要包括什么是第二大脑、构建方法、行动的一些技巧习惯以及如何建立可执行性标签。

https://blog.rahc.top/article/note-building-a-second-brain.html

📝 3.1.5. Digital Garden

Digital Garden is a collection of thoughts that isn’t strictly organized by their publication date but rather by contextual associations. These notes aren’t refined or complete that are published as half-finished thoughts growing and evolving over time. It is less perfect than traditional personal websites, such as blogs. Maggie Appleton defined the six patterns of Gardening.

Topography over Timelines. These notes are linked to others by related themes, topics, and shared context.

Continuous Growth.

Imperfection & Learning in Public. Due to the imperfect, these notes published need some indicators of how “done” they are, or how much effort you’ve invested in them, which make it clear to readers.

Some indicators are advised in Maggie’ Eassy and her Garden, including:

Seedings for very rough and early ideas.
Budding for work I’ve cleaned up and clarified.
Evergreen for work that is reasonably complete.
planted and last tended a post so people get a sense of how long I’ve been growing it.

Another good example is Gwern.net. Each note comes with:

topic tags.
start and end date.
a stage tag: draft, in progress, or finished.
a certainty tag: impossible, unlikely, certain, etc.
1-10 importance tag.

Playful, Personal, and Experimental.

Intercropping & Content Diversity.

Independent Ownership.

How to set up your own Digitial Garden? There are many tools we can use. In “Digitial Gardening for Non-Technical Folks”, Some tools like Notion, Obsidian, and Roam Research are recommended for the person non-technical. And you can find more tools in Maggie Appleton’s digital-gardeners repository.

📝3.2. Strategies

We’ve known the most popular methods to build our own personal knowledge management system in Chapter 3.1. The next question for us is which method is suitable for our needs. The answer depends on the final system’s form due to no existing single best method. If you hope your system can track the connection of your thoughts, maybe you should choose the Zettelkasten, Johnny Decimal, or Digital Garden. If you hope your PKM systems can help you focus on the things or projects you currently doing, you should choose the Personal Kanban, GTD, or Second Brain. The best practice maybe is the hybrid of these methods according to your needs. The Calmer Notes approach “find what fits, and leave the rest” created by Elizabeth Bulter, maybe give you some inspiration. The method is composed of six steps, including:

Start where you are.

Define Your Destination

Draft Your Blueprint

Choose Your Library.

Maintain Your System.

📝4. What does look like my own PKM system?

📝 4.1. My Considerations

The following reasons I considered when I build my own PKM system, including:

Firstly, my own PKM system where I can capture the interesting thing from the website or my thoughts, then organize them into different folders which are sorted according to the things I currently doing. The most of notes I captured should be first used in my current project. And other notes used someday should be stored someplace. What’s most important, I can acquire simply the connection of the notes to support my knowledge creation, such as writing a blog.

Secondly, the blogs, as a part of the notes, should be organized into my PKM system and published on my personal blog website.

Thirdly, I’ve read Tiago Forte’s book “Building a Second Brain”, so the BASA method is a good choice for me.

Fourthly, I can track my time spent on my work and life in my own PKM system.

Finally, Notion is not a new tool for me, because I’ve used this software to take notes when I learn and work.

Therefore, I choose a hybrid method centered on the BASA method to build my own PKM system in Notion.

📝4.2. The Structure of My PKM System

The structure of My PKM system, also called My Second Brain, is composed of 10 parts sub-sections, including:

Goal & Milestone.

Quick Capture.

PARA Dashboard.

Project Manager.

Task Manager.

Note Manager.

Book Tracker.

Time Tracker.

Promodoro Time.

My Blog.

The relationships between these sub-sections are shown in the following mindmap.

This mind map is drawn by Mr.Charley.

📎 Reference

Personal Knowledge Management. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_management.

Personal Knowledge Management: Educational Framework For Global Business. https://web.archive.org/web/20090523110010/http:/www.millikin.edu/pkm/pkm_istanbul.html.

Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method. https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/#luhmann-s-zettelkasten.

Johnny Decimal System. https://johnnydecimal.com/.

What is Personal Kanban. https://kanbantool.com/kanban-guide/personal-kanban.

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history.

Maggie Appleton’s Garden. https://maggieappleton.com/garden.

Gwern Branwen’s Website. https://gwern.net/index.

Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Forlks. https://maggieappleton.com/nontechnical-gardening.

Maggie Appleton’s digital-gardeners repository. https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners.

How to organize your digital notes: build a personal knowledge management system with the Calmer Notes method. https://elizabethbutlermd.com/organize-digital-notes-personal-knowledge-management-calmer-notes/.

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Any questions or comments about this article are welcome.