Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

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.

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

When it comes to building a personal knowledge management system for yourself: Your elaborate system impresses no one but you The complexity of your method matters less than the simplicity, clarity and impact of your output from that knowledge

A year ago, the idea of networking our notes with bi-directional links became the biggest thing in the tools for thought space since Vannevar Bush described the memex. Top-down hierarchies and tag systems became the pet explanation du jour for everything that was wrong with note-taking. So we all hustled on to the Double-Bracket Express determined ... See more

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

On PKM influencers:

• Do not trust anyone whose only apparent output is producing PKM-related content. They are trying to sell you the PKM fantasy.


• Of those who do produce something genuinely valuable with the help of PKM, do not believe that simply doing PKM will make you that kind of person. Just because an essayist uses PKM, don't think learning

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