Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt . Every link dou... See more

Tl;dr: I think personal knowledge management, in many cases, is a fruitless effort and there are generally only very few cases (see above) in which note taking actually makes sense.

In both, many people value the output (product) more highly than the process of getting to the output. That’s a mistake. Often, the process has as much (and in the case of PKM, more) value than the final product. Let’s examine how this applies to each discipline.

The point of personal knowledge management isn’t capturing and managing information; it... See more