WPenner's Blog

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is the idea that a systematic approach to storing and retrieving for personal use is helpful. Different systems like Building a Second Brain or Linking Your Thinking attempt to leverage software to enhance the brain's natural linking abilities. In a world awash in information and drowning in information overload, PKM seems highly practical, which possibly helps explain its surge in popularity.

Yet in Personal Knowledge Management is Bullshit , Justin Murphy takes issue with the whole concept¹. Justin paints many of the sexy new systems as snake oil designed to dupe the credible into paying those who won some kind of genetic organizational lottery just to get systematized.

Murphy's analysis of the knowledge graph as mostly useless seems spot on. Other than an aesthetic element to visualize your work later, it does not provide much benefit to the writing process. It could provide, as Murphy suggests, a signalling benefit, but it seems unlikely there are many people thinking, "I really want to get to know someone with a enormous knowledge graph". Horny teenagers will probably never use the symmetry of a potential mate's knowledge graph, like the symmetry of their face, as a marker of eligibility.

Writing to Forget isn't always positive

Murphy also asserts that meaningful work requires not only production but also forgetting. He takes forgetting much more literally than I do.

Once I started taking notes diligently, I found I was re-discovering and re-thinking the same ideas again and again. Now, I find the note with my idea and can extend it, link it to something new, or develop a new line of thought from it. Rescued from the circularity of repeatedly rediscovering what I already knew, I conserve my energy instead of "breaking through open doors".² With so many interests, PKM note taking principles help me move forward.

David Allen's "Getting Things Done" system offers users the same productive forgetting because the system remembers. I want to forget so that my mind is clear to focus on what I'm working on, comfortable knowing that when I return, the notes will be there for me to pick up where I left off.

Different Perspectives from Commonplace Book and Journaling

Murphy's lampooning of Luhmann as the only successful user of PKM is terrific fun, but seems to me to ignore a lot of history. My initial training in this kind of system came from keeping a commonplace book or just "commonplace". A commonplace was once an ubiquitous way to gather thoughts and ideas into a notebook. Once John Locke published his treatise on keeping one (1685) the commonplace became standard equipment for intellectuals and amateurs alike.

Because of the constrained space, ideas ended up where they best fit, often incongruously in terms of topic. Steven Johnson notes that the unexpected juxtaposition of ideas can spark creative insights. In a commonplace book, ideas get jumbled and jangle against each other, have idea sex and birth children of serendipitous insight³.

Currently, note taking and journaling serve very similar intellectual functions to the commonplace book. Because of the long and illustrious list of great thinkers who regularly wrote things down, students in the sciences and humanities regularly receive exhortations to keep a notebook or journal, as if the mere act of writing something down carries a talismanic effect on creating better writing. PKM extends this intuition with systematic principles to make note taking productive.

Note Taking Principles

Murphy considers writing "discovering novel and non-trivial truths" and then judging decisively to impose order, hierarchy, and linearity. This is a fantastic description. In my note writing I find some simple principles --- mostly derived from Sönke Arhens⁴ --- extremely helpful in transforming collections of notes into linearity.

1. The goal is to effectively and efficiently write larger pieces for publication. Arhens frames the whole of intellectual work as writing --- whether the final output is text or some other medium. He argues that the only work that matters is publishing ideas for others to consume, and every other activity supports that purpose.

2. When taking notes, always paraphrase the writer's thoughts. This makes remembering much more likely.

3. Link to at least one other note so that a hierarchy or a thought-chain forms. I use keywords in the title to link topics together, making it easier to stumble across insights previously forgotten. Linking to multiple thought chains regularly exposes unexpected insights.

4. When working on a project, create a project specific subset of notes, rather than trying to manage the whole "slipbox" with hundreds or thousands of notes.

Note Taking as Deliberate Practice

Arhens describes this process as "deliberate practice": focused on practicing on a small part of a larger whole to create faster learning cycles. This certainly accords with my personal experience: my writing has improved more in the last six months of this sort of practice than ever before.

No doubt that a profit motive animates many offerings in the PKM space and there is some excess worthy of both criticism and mockery. Yet, the baby, in my experience, is worth separating from the bathwater.

Photo Credit⁵.

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