My PKM Guiding Principles

I have been building my digital systems for years now and over time, a set of principles have emerged. I want to share them with you today.

Being conscious of these principles helps me not get distracted by every single new tool on the market because they’ve helped me learn what I like. They also mean I can more critically analyse whether or not I need to try one based off its marketing pages, as I have a really clear idea of what my needs are, and enough experience of other apps to make comparisons on what has previously worked or not worked for me.

The big principle is:

This just makes sense to me. Why wouldn’t I do this? This affects how I lay out my Notion homepage, how I organise my emails, even the kitchen posters I hang on my walls. Maybe this is implicit, but having it written out somewhere somehow allows me to actively commit to it.

To achieve this I have some other principles:

Reduce friction

There is a constant critical voice in my head saying “is this introducing friction?”, “how can I make this easier for myself?”, “what isn’t working here?”. This means my system is constantly improving because I am reducing friction.

I can do more, more efficiently and normally I have more fun doing it with less friction. I take the view that my overall system needs to reduce friction rather than the individual apps, hence why I’m not all in on one app, but that means interoperability is increasingly important.

Reducing friction is definitely a journey, but it’s super rewarding.

Connect whatever makes sense

If 2021/2022 Beth had written this, the subtitle here would have been connect everything. But actually what I need is useful connection in order to put info where it actually needs to be, and add the link where it actually makes sense to.

I used to treat connections like mentions. Every single time a word/phrase was seen in a page that I knew was an entry in my system, I’d link it. It ended up being meaningless, so now I only link when I actively want a link between the page I’m in, and the page I’m referencing. It’s taken a while to get out of this habit, but now, the connection is useful.

It’s even more useful with Capacities’ contextualised links in their graph view. I can see what the relationship is between two entities at a glance.

Record essence

I’ve spoken about essence before but it’s really a life practice for me. I want to seamlessly combine media and text to create a visual, textual and aural representation of my life at various stages, and I use PKM practices to do this.

It transports me into a past version of myself and my interests, that my current self can use as a reflection practice. But it is also as a way of collecting commentary on society in various years, capturing pop culture, and generally trying to remember those little bits of life that get forgotten.

My system has to support this.

Foster curiosity

Curiosity got me into PKM and I want that to continue. I’m lucky now to call PKM content creation a part time job, but I don’t ever want to lose the essence of what made me like it, that is it was fostering curiosity in a meaningful way.

I make sure to ask myself questions, to find time to watch things that answer those questions and to work that into my daily practices.

For example, when I’m on the treadmill, I always watch a documentary on Wondrium. If there is anything in there that piques my curiosity to the point of wanting to take notes, each course on there comes with a guidebook that I can highlight and take notes on. It’s fun to learn in different forms, and the documentaries are a lot more interesting than looking at a bunch of gym equipment!

These principles guide me every day in my digital systems and they allow me to have fun with it. Defining your needs is really important to give you clarity and direction in your PKM practices :)

What are your note-taking or PKM principles? I’d love to know!