How to Build Your Personal Knowledge Management System

What is PKM & Why you need it

“Personal knowledge management (PKM) ¹ is a collection of processes 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).”

Benefits

• Learning / self development competence
• Help your to understand
• Creativity competence
• Problem solving competence
• Analysis competence
• Communication competence

The DIKW Pyramid

• Data is just a set of signals or symbols. Nothing more — just noise.
• You get Information when you start to make data useful.
• Knowledge allows us to detect patterns based on the information we get.
• Wisdom allows us to predict the future correctly, not only by detecting and understanding patterns but also deeply comprehending the “Why” behind those patterns.²

The 4C Process

Capture - Collect & Store ³

Collect information is the first step for you to build up your Personal Knowledge System. These information resource could be: news letter, blog posts, tweets, books, scientific papers, note from conference etc. After collecting, I will store them in Pocket or Notion for next step.

Curate - Classify & Organize

I stored all the information in one place — Notion. I read most of the articles when I was in rush. I add them to Pocket for a more deeper reading. If the articles are worth noting. I will send them to Notion. Every few months, I will go through my knowledge base in Notion and clean it up. Remove the information is not relevant or out dated. Add labels or merge some notes together.

Crunch - Revise & Review

Information stored in Notion is not your knowledge yet. They are in your “Second brain” and stay there. Review some knowledges or retrieve them regularly until you master them. Revise existing information when new information added to you knowledge. Does it help you to understand this topic, or do you need update the old one?

Contribution - Utilize & Sharing

The last part of the PKM is to use your knowledge or sharing them.

Using your knowledge is a way to help you transfer knowledge to wisdom and help your future work or life.

Sharing knowledge helps you to understand the knowledge better by transferring the knowledge to others.

Slide

Here is the slides I made for one of the talk.