The Rise of Knowledge Management Tools
Note-taking apps, wikis, journals, and other beasts.
Capturing information in any shape or form and using it to justify future choices is knowledge management, even if you don’t think about it in such formal terms.
We scribble hunches in notebooks or whatever napkins lay around. It’s so ubiquitous all personal computing devices come pre-bundled with mechanisms for capturing and organising thinking. A computer is a massive wisdom management system built from text editors, audio/video recorders, files, folders, and tags. You’re free to bundle these self-sufficient Lego blocks into custom information processing systems of any level of sophistication, making them fulfil your specific needs.
I previously wrote about making educated choices when erecting a PKM system.
Everything Old Is New Again
Although it might feel like Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is a fresh trend, people have been doing it for ages using so-called Commonplace Books or filing cabinets full of index cards, to name a few.
When someone mentions Leonardo Da Vinci, your first mental picture is probably one of his famous yellow-paged notebook sketches rather than his portrait. The Nobel Prize winner physicist Richard Feynman was famously “thinking on paper”. Pushkin’s museum in Russia is full of personal album examples in which owners collected anything ranging from random thoughts to locks of hair of a beloved one.
If our ancestors were limited to paper, filing cabinets, index cards, and Rollodexes, today’s PKM arsenal grew quite substantially, even resulting in mild non-sensical apps cold-wars: Roam Research, Obsidian, Notion, DEVONthink, One Note, Keep, Notes, Bear, Evernote, and other beasts.
The rate of technological development is, of course, responsible for unlocking the adjacent possible. Still, I’d argue that the number of tools to manage incoming information is directly proportional to the amount of facts we need to chew through. In one of the previous issues, we discussed what to do about information overflow and its byproduct, the echo chamber.
Why Bother?
One of the obvious reasons for keeping track of very personal things is to remember them. It’s one thing to skim through the book. It’s different if you highlight, rephrase, implement or re-explain what you’ve read. The so-called information retention rate skyrockets if you do.
No two people will absorb the same information by reading the same book. The younger you and the future you could benefit from this exact article in very different ways.
From the initial need above stems another fundamental need of any human being: the need to understand and explain. Few things are more unsettling than the unexplainable. Why didn’t it rain despite a whole week of dancing? Gods were, no doubt, unimpressed with our choreography.
So Many Options To Choose From
Almost every Venture Capitalist fund has at least one PKM tool in its investment portfolio. This says a lot about their importance.
Apple continues adding new features to their flagship notes and recently released a supercharged journaling app. MacOS also has the built-in underdog: Stickies. Although the lack of cross-device support prevents me from using these electronic Post-it equivalents, they are part of the knowledge management process for capturing Fleeting Notes, just like pre-installed voice and video recorders.
I wrote about this category of notes in one of the previous issues.
It’s great because many will start with whatever’s simply there and, hopefully, graduate to something that offers advanced features needed when one outgrows the basics. Some will even set up a few complementary ones and automate their synchronisation. In my case, it’s Obsidian, Apple Notes, DEVONthink Pro, Scrivener, and Notion that I tend to use for external collaborative work.
Which one should you choose?
It’ll depend on many highly personal aspects, such as how afraid you are to be locked into someone’s ecosystem, how much of a tinkerer you are, how much you like stationery and much more.
I’ve touched on this topic in one of the previous issues:
It’s a long conversation that’ll never result in a one-size-fits-all solution, though it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have it.