Continuing with Personal Knowledge Management Systems (PKMS), we all have them, whether we realize it or not. Some are in our brains, and others are more explicit, created with external tools.

We live in an age where large quantities of information bombard us. These include emails, phone calls, text messages, news, magazines, and letters. They come from many different avenues and pass through our consciousness. Because of our brains’ nature, retaining all the information we receive is impossible. We do our best to cull and surrender the information we process to keep what we need.

Even after we cull down what we care about and surrender to the fact that there is too much information, our brains are not perfectly cataloged libraries of the information. Information becomes hard to find or is lost in the basement of our minds.

That is where PKMs shine. They provide a location for us to store the information we find valuable. It is the perfect place for us to store this information. Computers are good at searching for content, and it’s easier to see if the database it is searching is limited to the information you care about and not just cluttered with everything anyone has ever written on the subject or even the subset of extensive data used by modern-day LLM solutions.

The overarching point is that whether we have a strictly codified system for creating our knowledge or not, we all have a limited subset of the knowledge available. If we don’t use a tool to do this, our brains act as our PKMs. They retain the information we have access to and function as the database we use.

So, right now, we have two options:

  • Manually write down what we need in our PKMs system, and I hope we find it later.
  • Trust our brains to make the connections and keep the information relevant and together.

Neither of these solutions is excellent, but I’ve chosen the first one. If you want to give it a go and put something together, again, here is a list of options and who I recommend them for:

  • Notion is an excellent option for someone who wants a lot of features, doesn’t want to learn Markdown, and wants a lot of enhanced functionality. However, it also costs money for features.
  • ObsidianMD is my tool of choice. You keep your data locally in Markdown and asset files. You are responsible for managing and backing up your information.
  • Evernote was once one of the most used systems for this, but it has lost market share over time. Another company bought it and is not as interconnected as some other tools. Also, it uses a priority feature to store its notes, so it isn’t as transparent as Markdown files.
  • Bear App — This was the tool I used before Obsidian. It uses tags, not folders. It uses Markdown but converts it to pretty styles. It uses predefined styles and doesn’t give you the same customization as Obsidian.
  • Standard Notes is another product I’m just learning about. It’s like another Bear App or Obsidian-like product.

Keeping files, screenshots, images, and other items on your computer is another example of your knowledge management. Cleaning up and managing your hard drive can be tricky, even following something like the P.A.R.A. method.

My database of information has become crowded, and information is placed in places that are either redundant or hard to find. Even when searching for phrases, it might be hard to find the exact document I’m looking for if I don’t use precise wording.

To conclude, while there are tools to help us with knowledge, they are all faulty and costly. The question is, where do they work and fail for you? Also, is what you are currently doing good enough?