State of the PKM Journey

Earlier this year I wrote about my onramp to Personal Knowledge Management. As acknowledged in that post, personal knowledge management is something I have been fascinated by as well as engaged in for years. I just didn’t necessarily know it had that title.

That specific onramp saw me venture down roads to a few different ideas.

The “second brain” was the first one that really grabbed me. I had been using various “cabinet” or “everything” apps for years. Evernote. OneNote. DEVONthink had an off and on interest. Notion was the most recent app of interest I was experimenting with. I had also been hearing a lot of chatter about Roam Research and Obsidian prior to finding the aforementioned onramp.

Two things really grabbed me as I found myself on my most recent journey. First was the “second brain” as I saw Obsidian and Roam implement it – specifically the backlinking and the ways it enabled so much better, deeper organization of information. The second was Tiago Forte’s PARA Method of organizing information.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention another idea that grabbed my attention – Digital Gardens.

For this exploration of a second brain I opted for Obsidian. There were a few different reasons. Honestly he first was cost. I wasn’t sure how far down I was going to end up down this road. If this was something that really found root in my life, I can always spend more later. The second was the number of people I keep track of on the internet that also use Obsidian thereby creating a bit of an automatic resource library of what’s possible and some degree of how.

I’ve enjoyed Obsidian. I enjoy the opportunity of this second brain functionality. Admittedly I haven’t done as much with it as I would like. It has been a really busy season and there haven’t been a lot of opportunities for new ways in which I’d use this second brain functionality. And for some of them due to various constraints it hasn’t been the most feasible thing to utilize a new system/app. It is absolutely still part of the plan. It is just slower going than expected.

I will say I’ve had a lot more experimenting with the PARA Method. One of the hiccups to some experiments is the split I have between my primary work systems and secondary systems. This wasn’t a hurdle to trying the Para Method as I was able to implement it independently in the respective systems.

All in all I think I’m really a fan. I have found myself making some modifications here and there. The main thing I find myself doing a little bit different is the concept of “Archive”. I guess I have his Archive and then my “deep Archive” for lack of a better term. It is what I would call “cabinet” in previous systems. Essentially things that are no longer Active and most likely won’t be get dropped into this deeper Archive.

There are a few other places where I still trip up. For instance I have two primary Teams that I work with in my professional Role. Sometimes having projects for each of them together in a general Projects bucket not split by Area will still throws me off from time to time. But that is probably more my ingrained way of doing things than a “problem” with the PARA Method. And as I’ve used the Method longer it is something I have gotten more used to.

I do sometimes wonder if I would need more distinct lines if my professional, secondary, and personal roles were all managed in the same systems. But currently that is not a bridge I have to cross.

The Digital Garden is an idea I have really experimented with very little. Right now the closest thing I have to one is my Daily Routines. All in all the high level items stay the same with the content within them changing and evolving over time. I’m not sure this is 1:1 the idea behind a Digital Garden. But I’m still intrigued by the idea and it will remain something I intend to investigate and consider when/where/how I can utilize it effectively.

Oh, and Writing Day 2 – Complete