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I have been interested in personal knowledge management (pkm) for a very long time. I have been an avid notes maker ever since I learned to write. Digital tools from the late 1980s onwards have been extremely useful. And a source of nerdy fascination, I confess. I am certain personal knowledge management (pkm) is of tremendous value for anyone who wants to keep learning and make sense of the world around them.

On March 14 and 15 the European PKM Summit is taking place for the second time in Utrecht, Netherlands. I assist with inviting speakers and workshop hosts for this event.

I am donating a ticket for a student in the Netherlands to attend this two day event. I did the same last year.

Are you a student at a university in the Netherlands with a strong interest in personal knowledge management (pkm)?
Is your interest in pkm to strengthen your personal learning and deepen your interests, rather than increasing (perceived) productivity?
Would you like to go to the PKM Summit on 14 and 15 March in Utrecht, but as a student can’t afford the 237 Euro ticket price?

Then I have one (1) conference ticket available! Let me know who you are and what fascinates you in pkm or attracts you to the event. If there are several people interested I will choose one. I will donate the ticket a month before the conference, by February 15th, so state your interest before then.

The single condition is that you attend the event on both days and participate actively in the event. It would be great if you would share some of your impressions of the event afterwards online on the open web, especially if that is something you’d normally do anyway.

Interested? Email or DM me (in Dutch, German or English)!

In reply to SPARK! Toon random kennis in Obsidian by Frank Meeuwsen

Leuk Frank! Ik heb het nog niet geprobeerd of bekeken, maar ik ga dit denk ik proberen te gebruiken om een random quote uit mijn map van web clippings te halen en af te beelden bovenin mijn Daglog. Om op die manier blootgesteld te worden aan dingen die ik al een keer bewaarde. Je vraagt naar aanvulling: zou je in plaats van een map ook naar een enkel bestand kunnen wijzen? Bijvoorbeeld naar de annotaties van een boek dat ik net las, zodat ik dat als het ware verder verwerk door toevallige interactie er mee.

… op mijn Obsidian homepage laad ik continu een random paragraaf uit de Tao Te Ching. Door op een button te klikken verandert de paragraaf en kan ik naar het origineel doorklikken voor verdere studie. Ik maakte hiervoor een eigen script…. Kun je hier iets mee? Zo ja, waar gebruik je het nu voor?

Frank Meeuwsen

On a mailing list last week someone mentioned they had a subscription to the university library of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. It turns out that Dutch universities offer outsiders access to their libraries. The conditions may vary, I don’t know.

Utrecht University being nearest to us, I checked out if they offer a similar service. They do. Registering with them as an outsider is free, and that provides access to their digital and physical collections on-site. They also have a paid subscription that allows lending books.

I registered for a subscription last weekend, and yesterday visited the university library to take the needed administrative steps and pay. I now have a library card.
On-site you log in into the university’s wifi network, with your library ID, and then have access to their digital collections.

I look forward to exploring how this can aid my reading and work.

Yesterday my new colleague J. successfully defended their PhD thesis at Delft University. It was fun to attend. It’s been a while since I was last at a PhD defense. The location was the Senate haal in the brutalist Aula building. Visiting the Aula while I was orienting myself on which university to attend as a teenager was a rather depressing experience, and one of the elements that made me decide against Delft.


The university logo woven into the carpet of the Senate hall where PhD defenses take place.

Also had a pleasant lunch in Delft with colleague P beforehand.

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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.

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I’m not looking back at 2024 with lots of excitement. I spent it mostly feeling burned out, grumpy and tired, and that carried detrimental effects for my family and my colleagues. Reading back last year’s overview I see I felt much the same then at the time of writing (my burn-out I now know goes back to the fall of 2022, so not a surprise I see it shining through in last year’s review). This time too I don’t feel much like making the annual review. Likely that makes it more important to do so. I’ve been doing this every year starting in 2010, making this the 15th edition. The original reason is still valid: I tend to forget a lot of the things I actually do, moving on to the next thing immediately, resulting in thinking I haven’t done much at all. Leafing through my notes and calendar at least once a year tends to resurface things and make me more aware of things I take a sense of accomplishment from. I’m also slowly moving to a place where I see things opening up again, moving away from burn-out, even if I’m not there yet. So here are the things that I count as some level of accomplishment in 2024, in more or less random order.

  • While my burn-out is obviously not making this list as an accomplishment, I am glad that once I realised what was happening (or rather Y and E helped me see) I sought assistance from a psychologist and actively worked to change things.
  • Gaining new habits in order to address my burn-out, that also helped me change long standing patterns, and taking up systems again that have been helpful in the past but had fallen aside. If anything it makes my note making more key to my functioning in the various aspects of my life. Interstitial journaling is the latest addition to these habits, and it tends to make the difference between a good day and a bad one.
  • My company has been doing well this year. We added 4 people to the team this fall, including an office manager. We’re now a dozen people. Business was good, we achieved our budgeted turnover, meaning revenue grew by a third. Our portfolio for 2025 is already filled up to 75%, which is a very solid starting point. Most important of all we worked on data policy, data governance, digital and AI ethics projects that are meaningful beyond the scope of the projects themselves, and had a good time doing so. I’m amazed at the bright and fun people I get to work with all the time.
  • We created new internal structures, holacracy based, spreading the ownership of roles and tasks across the entire team, and doing away with me and my businesspartners as management and sole decision makers. Colleagues stepped into new roles, one joining me on the financial management side of things, another doing amazing work w.r.t. recruitment. My burn-out stems largely from trying for too long to close gaps left by others, and the changes in our organisation this year have contributed much to my ability to let go of various things because team members stepped in so well.
  • This is also now resulting in me looking at my company more like something that is also there to support me in what I want to achieve, as opposed to something I’m only in service to in order to keep it afloat.
  • In 2023 with our company we took a Systems Convening training, which more or less puts method under my natural behavior of making connections where they are missing, of taking into account a much wider context when considering interventions. This year with one client I’m pleased to see that I’ve been able to more purposefully move with them to a different position, where they have more agency towards their core mission.
  • I’ve been slowly but steadily losing weight again, by avoiding carbohydrates mostly. I easily overindulge when I’m stressed, and the past few years it showed. I’m down 9 kilograms since the summer, about half way to where I’m comfortable. It took me a bit to start the process, but once I could it hasn’t been hard to keep up.
  • There wasn’t much travel this year, something I missed. Yet I did enjoy visiting several conferences, including the Belgian national geographic conference BeGeo where I organised and hosted an entire conference track on the European (Green Deal) Data Space(s), with different DGs of the European Commission.
  • I didn’t interact much socially or with friends this year. Yet I did enjoy it when I did. Visiting dear friends in Switzerland in February, which included an awesome private viewing of great art, visiting other dear friends in Switzerland for their 50th birthday in June, and having friends visit from afar. It is a wide variety of kinds of wonderful to me to see how ripples of interaction spread out, how networks of meaning emerge. Awareness of intermingling layers of complexity is where my sense of beauty resides. Working through my burn-out to a large extent is about strengthening my original sense of wonder, and the webs one weaves with friends are a good source of it.
  • I helped shape a European conference on personal knowledge management, PKM Summit, that took place in March. I got involved because I wanted to make it more pan-European, varied, and less strictly formatted. I helped find a wider variety of speakers, introduced several things to loosen up the program and do away with the distinction between speakers and audience. I also aimed to not just have people speak who have turned speaking about PKM into their main professional activity. I like people who normally just do PKM to talk about what it helps them achieve and how. It was a fun event, and I was happy to bring several of my colleagues to it as participants. Also because I think PKM is a prerequisite for the systems convening I mentioned above. One participant who had been to Reboot in 2005 remarked to me about how it achieved that sense of wonder and inspiration. I’ll take that compliment! The event also helped my company to do more with PKM internally and across our team. Preparations for next year’s edition have just started again.
  • Around the conference the national government academy for digital awareness and skills for civil servants had programmed a monthlong series of webinars and events about PKM and digital skills. It was fun to do a webinar with them, and I enjoyed creating an overview of my perspective on PKM (in Dutch) and provide people an insight into how I do things for myself.
  • One of the outcomes of that PKM conference for me was doing more with visualisation in my notes. I have never done much of that, because any illustration tends to be a frozen artefact, an outcome even, of an otherwise ongoing iterative process. Thanks to Zsolt’s Excalidraw plugin in my Obsidian note making tool, text and image are now part of the same note and seamlessly interact and flow into each other. That integration has been key for me.
  • I’ve enjoyed making tiny software tools for myself. Such as a local small form to directly search my Flickr.com photos by date, or creating an RSS-feed from the things I bookmark in Mastodon and import that into my notes. Even better when it turns out such a tool is useful to someone else, such as the person who let me know they adopted my Mastodon RSS thingy because their RSS reader is the only way they can interact with the web.
  • It’s been 22 years now since I started blogging. The past 12 months I didn’t write much, but did keep up my weekly notes, and have changed some of the ways how I write and prepare blogposts. Hopefully that will manifest itself in the form of more postings in this space over time.
  • I’ve read over 75 books this year, half as much as last year, about 90% fiction and just over 10% non-fiction. Reading fiction is key to my wellbeing. I’m also pleased that I’ve found better habits for myself to read non-fiction. Even if it doesn’t really show in the number of books, interacting with non-fiction works consistently during the year (about 1 book per 6 weeks or so) is something I enjoyed.
  • Watching Y, now 8, grow and develop is a delight. Like me and E she reads a lot (and listens to yet more books), and we have many fun conversations based on things she picks up on in her reading. Exploring Roman history in our region and in nearby Germany, the etymology of words and names, and visiting locations she reads about like the Botanical Gardens in Berlin. Her creativity, her music and sense of humour, and the general sense of wonder behind it I hope she can sustain for a very long time.
  • Traveling together is something we’re good at. E aims to come up with something most weekends to go do or see somewhere, and during school holidays we plan various day trips or go away for a few days. We spent time vacationing in France, Germany, Luxembourg and Switzerland, and made a city trip to Berlin. We visited museums and different cities in the Netherlands. I still strongly appreciate what a difference it makes that since some years we live in the exact center of the country, bringing so many things within easy range.

That concludes this year’s Tadaa! list. Still a good number of things to mention all in all, despite the grey veil that covered my year. Onwards!

E and me during a walk earlier this week along the Laak river, silhouetted over the fields by the low sun in our backs.