The past year I’ve had more conversations about personal knowledge management than for a long time before. Regularly questions come up along the lines of what structures should one use, what should one keep in their notes, what are the best tools? Most of my contributions to such conversations boil down to ‘there’s nothing you should do other than what fits you, and I could show you what I do and why that works for me’.
Ultimately I keep thinking people don’t take the P in PKM far enough. I think PKM is personal not just in one way, but in at least three ways.

1. It is personal knowledge management in the sense that your system is yours only. You do it, build and extend it as you see fit. It can exist independently of whatever other working environments you have, it is fully personally yours. This enables and secures your professional and learning autonomy, allows you to be pro-active. You bring professionalism to its upkeep and tools. When you go someplace else, you take it along with you.
2. It is management of your personal knowledge. Personal knowledge in the sense of your own networks of meaning, your insights, the expressed connections you made between pieces of it, your associations and verbiage that tie into your internal world. It exists to feed your agency, your combinatory creativity, and is aimed at your own mix of evolving personal interests. It’s there for just you to interact with. This allows you to steer the direction of your own learning intentionally, and enables an activist and artisanal stance towards your interests, professional or otherwise. Your personal knowledge doesn’t need to be understandable or be useful to others. Sharing in context is an act in itself, an output rather than a function.
3. It is personal management of knowledge. You have your own methods and structures, that are geared to how you work, think, learn and create best, and which have emerged over time and you then reinforced because of their utility to you. You create your own mechanisms and algorithms working with your material, and reflect on them. Your system does not need to be understandable or workable for others. Your structures fit your internal world, have their logic and starting point in the fact that your behaviour is pretty predictable to yourself at least. Some of the structures in your system may well be just in your head rather than made tangible in your external system. Some structures may be intentionally omitted to ensure you can surprise yourself with your system, feeding discovery and wonder.

I can’t tell you how to do PKM, I can show you what does and doesn’t work for me and tell you why I think that is. I will tell you to take PKM very personally, and then some more.