PKM Practices in the Wild

Going forward, my content is mostly going to focus on my real-life use cases of my PKM practices and digital systems to hopefully inspire people to create an eco-system of tools that genuinely make their lives easier and that they enjoy using. I will refer to this as PKM in the Wild. I leave my 9–5 next week, and after a couple of days to rest and reset, this is my biggest focus.

But it’s not just my practices that I want to talk about. I’ve just finished reading a book that has inspired me to a put a list of three publications together that have interested my PKM brain. Let’s explore

1. The Travelers- Regina Porter

The cover alone might explain why I bought this one. I saw it in a bookshop 2 years ago and have finally read it today!

It’s a very human story about how over the course of 60 years people, places and worries intersect in various and often unpredictable ways. The cover is one thing, but before page 1 there is a cast list, a list of places featured, a note about the time period covered and some contextual remarks about a play that is referenced throughout.

I really liked this. I like having the reference but it also helps me out for my post-reading task which is extracting any interesting people, places, time periods and contextual remarks. So this was most helpful!

I’m working on a bigger article about why I extract this information from books and why it’s in Notion and not Capacities.. so look out for that if that’s of interest!

2. Brené Brown’s Integration Index

Anthony recently shared this tweet and I loved it. I love to see this level of detail going into the creation of a book and for the experience the reader will have when reading not only that particular book, but other works by the eminent Brené Brown.

I try to do this where I can, such as my ‘what I talk about’ section on my website, and I’ve got some more ideas brewing thanks to tweets like these for my upcoming website revamp 👀

3. Interesting table of contents pages and their effect on my writing

Here chapter titles are used to essentially make a nice summary of the book at a glance. This fully influenced my Logseq usage. I try to distill what I’m reading into a one line point in the parent block that links with the previous and next parent blocks. The child blocks are freer with more detail, but that means if I collapse everything, I get an overview of what I’ve read. I don’t do this all the time, but the notes are great when I do.

The next tweet in this thread also influenced me when I started using Capacities and writing permanent notes without an outliner. I started putting TL;DRs at the start of my pages and it’s great when looking back. Especially because permanent notes grow over time, so the need for the TL;DR grows.

So there we go, three publications that have inspired my PKM brain or made it happy in some way.

It also shows the value of consuming content about PKM and saving whatever makes you curious for review later. I have a folder in Raindrop (one of the only times I use folders!) called PKM Wrapped 2023 which is where I put the content that has stuck with me in any way throughout the year for a roundup I’ll probably do on Twitter/here in December.

Here’s a sneak peak of it so far…

I was so inspired by the bottom two that I recently wrote a post about it here!

But anyway, spotting PKM practices in the wild is fun, engaging and inspiring. I tend to see real system improvements from implementing some of what I see, and that makes me very happy :)

Have you seen any PKM in the wild content, be it books, tweets, or anything? Please do share with me!