[Monthly Digest] June 2024
In your quest to building a Personal Data Lake, storing things the right way is what might help you make or break it. June's issues help you make educated storage choices.
This month, I had the pleasure and the privilege of having a friendly chat with the brilliant
. We’ve discussed the concept she coined that took the PKM community by storm, branching out and taking a life of its own: the note-taker archetype.You can read her original work here, and my literature notes about it here. As is the case for many knowledge engineers, it was very thought-provoking for me, too—so much so that I took the liberty of extending the idea a bit further, perhaps even a tad too far.
I’m eager to share the results of this thinking in one of the future special issues. In the meantime, I encourage you to check out her work, subscribe to her newsletter, and patiently wait for the announcement of the pre-order of her upcoming book, Tiny Experiments.
In June, I attempted something new: a series of related articles spanning the entire month. This month’s issues became a trilogy dedicated exclusively to storage. The data shows that it resonated with many readers. Therefore, I might repeat the experiment in the future. Feel free to object in the comments section. In the meantime, here’s a quick summary of the month.
Store Like an Engineer. Chapter 1: Objects
We began our journey with the cornerstone of Personal Data Lakes: objects. It’s the most straightforward but foundational storage type for PDL. This issue compares large-scale corporate multimodal data solutions and household items organisation. Lift-and-shift tried-and-true corporate tricks to your Personal Knowledge Management.
Files and folders add additional hierarchical structure to our PDLs. However, the rigidity of this storage type can quickly backfire if you overtighten your classification. This issue attempts to help you avoid common pitfalls.
Some of my colleagues at work said it helped them in our company's Google Drive grooming. Other readers also applied these paradigms to their file management.
This is easily the most useful article that I've read on folders! This will help us a great deal explaining what folders are good for and where they fall short - without outright saying "Folders bad!"
Thanks!!
—Mark Meinema
I hope you can benefit from it just as much.
In the last episode, we discussed blocks, the lowest-level storage type, which powers all other storage types and represents the Holy Grail of PKM: Atomic Notes.
And that’s our month of June, Knowledge Engineers. I hope this will make you see such a mundane task as information (or things) organisation in a very different way, hopefully, a more conscious and optimal.