Some thoughts on Personal Knowledge Management

I've spent a lot of time obsessing over my Personal Knowledge Management system (PKM). This made a lot of sense when I was at university and needed a way to wrangle the vast amounts of information I was consuming. But I've continued this obsession with finding perfect tools and systems for note-taking despite having nothing to use these notes for.

Over the past couple of days as I've opened my personal Zettlekasten in Obsidian, I've started to see the ways in which my system works and where it falls over.

In an interview with Maria Popova about her work on The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), she discusses her own systems for how she approaches her research, knowledge management and writing, she talks about how it was just out of necessity that she developed her process. In other words, she needed to achieve a certain end and found the necessary means to do so because she needed to get the job done. She was goal-driven rather than process oriented. The optimisation is just a necessary by-product of being output driven.

This made me realise I've been approaching this all wrong. I was coming up with systems based on a hypothetical problem I might encounter, or a solution to a problem someone else has had in their own work.

Moving forward, I’m going to focus more on the output.