Thoughts on Personal Knowledge Management

Last month, I picked up Building a Second Brain from my local library after seeing the book recommended on a number of sites. My relationship with Obsidian had been getting pretty dusty, and I wasn’t certain if it was that useful of a tool, especially the way I had been using it.

So far, the book has been really helpful for me, giving some clarity to the concepts of personal knowledge management (PKM) and suggesting some ways to frame my organization to make it actually useful.

We have to remember that we are not building an encyclopedia of immaculately organized knowledge. We are building a working system. Both in the sense that it must work, and in the sense that it is a regular part of our everyday lives. For that reason, you should prefer a system that is imperfect, but that continues to be useful in the real conditions of your life.

- Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain

That’s why I like the quote from above; my system isn’t just organized knowledge for the sake of an immaculate system. Instead, I need to have something that is actually useful for my work and life. Thanks to a number of the suggestions from this book, I’m back to using Obsidian and other tools to collect, organize, and actually use my PKM system.

I expect that I’ll have more posts in the future about my system and some of the changes I have made to it recently. But for now, I’m going to keep pressing in to make it practically useful for my work and life. And perhaps as the usefulness grows, I can dedicate some time to documenting my process.