Reframing PKM as Personal Infrastructure?

There's a commonly discussed problem in this online space: working on your tools instead of in them. This framing is too flat: it treats tools as the site of the problem and the single site for a solution, and it forgets that these tools are part of a bigger system of your life, with inflows and outflows. This tool-first conditioning is not helpful and it's one cause of the dreaded Shiny New App Syndrome. We need to think systems first.

To be more precise, I think we should be thinking in terms of personal infrastructure¹. Where personal infrastructure is the connected tools + routines that reliably surface the right info at the right time with low ongoing effort to support you in your life. For me, personal infrastructure has replaced the ever-unconvincingly defined ~PKM~. This post will explain why.

• Why Infrastructure?

• More on personal infrastructural networks

• Maintenance is not a moral failing

• The Aim Is Transparency

  • Is this a node issue?

  • Is this a connection issue?

  • Is this a maintenance issue?

  • Is this a capacity issue?

• So Personal Infrastructure or PKM?

• Sources

Why Infrastructure?

I realised this after reading Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works² , the book that opened my eyes to the beauty of infrastructure. Four core ideas stuck with me from the book, and they underpin everything that follows:

1. Infrastructural systems are networks with nodes and connections (much like a networked note‑taking app).

2. When infrastructure works, it’s transparent: we don’t notice it, we can take it for granted.

3. Energy is the currency of the material world, and infrastructure is built to reduce the amount of energy needed to accomplish a goal.

4. By reducing the time and energy we need for basic tasks, good infrastructure frees up the time, energy, and attention we need to do other things.

The example that stuck with me most in the book was taps. Let me explain: a water system is a network made of nodes and connections that exists to reduce the energy required for me to get clean water. When the system is working, it is transparent: I do not think about where the water comes from or how it gets to me, I just fill up my water bottle. Because that system exists and is maintained by others, my time, energy, and attention are freed up for other things, such as writing this post.

In my thinking, I've seen how my "pkm"/note-taking/life practices echo these ideas. I've spent years thinking about personal systems, but the infrastructure book gave me what feels like the final piece to tie all my thinking together. I can now see my systems as my own personal infrastructure: a transparent network that allows me to live my life.

This reframes everything for me. Personal infrastructure is the infrastructure that supports my lived experience. It's not top-down management (personal knowledge management always felt icky). It doesn't start and end with notes on my interests, or task management. It's everything, everywhere, all at once.

More on personal infrastructural networks

I think that personal infrastructure is the network of intentionally connected tools and routines that help you run your life with less friction. Let's break that down with the help of the core ideas from Chachra's book.

Networks are made of nodes and connections. Systems are nodes and connections organized around a purpose³ . In the case of personal systems, the purpose is something like supporting your life in a way that’s meaningful to you.

Nodes in this context are the tools you use in your life, both physical and digital. Think of them as taps in your plumbing system. My tools include Capacities, Apple Reminders, Google Calendar, Raindrop, Readwise Reader and my paper planner.

To me, connections in personal infrastructural systems range from literal integrations between tools, like Google Calendar showing up inside Capacities, to the routines and habits that move information between them manually, such as capture and review routines.

This matters because a tool on its own is just a container. The connections create the paths that move information to where you’ll actually see it at the right time. They determine where things enter the system, how they move, and where they surface again when needed.

When those paths exist, you don’t have to remember as much, so the system takes less effort to run. For example, I don't have to return to Twitter to search for the exact tweet that will spark my next rabbit hole, I go to Raindrop where I know I save all my tweets.

A more relatable example is found in my quest to find the right task app that would help me actually execute on my tasks: I could never remember to check a task app because my work happens elsewhere. The fix to my task management dilemma was so simple in hindsight: put the tasks literally right in front of me. Not in a different window in my computer, but next to the keyboard I spend all day typing on, so I could remember the tasks exist and I'd have an easy way to check them. It takes much less energy than my previous failures did, even though it relies on manual routines to make it work.

In infrastructure terms, my task management dilemma was never a node problem, it was a connection problem. The winning planner wasn't inherently special (though I do like it). Any planner works as long as it's right next to me, in a concrete way that apps on my laptop cannot compete with.

If you have these connections in place, swapping nodes out is much easier. Last year, I switched from Todoist to Apple Reminders for some aspects of task management. My boyfriend and I have shared lists in Apple Reminders for the house, and I thought it would be sensible to have one place for tasks. It was just an experiment at first, but I liked it enough and stuck with it. It turned out to be an easy switch because the connections stayed the same: my task review and action routines, the shortcuts I use via Raycast to add tasks, and my approach to task management itself. Again, it's the connections that make my system, not anything inherently special about Apple Reminders.

So what does this reframe actually do? It shifts focus away from tools and toward how information works between them. In other words, it blows the problem right open. We zoom out from nodes and try to see systems. What's difficult about this is that no one can sell you your system. You can buy components, but you still have to build the connections and do your maintenance. That's how we get to personal infrastructure.

Maintenance is not a moral failing

"Infrastructure" as a term sounds big; it sounds like you need to be wearing a hi-viz jacket to operate it 👷‍♀️, but that is not the case. You just need connected tools (nodes) working together to support your life.

Our lives change constantly, and we should embrace that. But if personal infrastructure is what supports our lives, then we must also accept that the personal infrastructure will change too. Downstream of this is accepting maintenance as a welcome practice, not something to avoid. Maintenance is what permits the changes, which keeps the system working. It's inevitable and valuable. It is not a moral failing to need to spend some time on your systems.

We know this from public infrastructure. Maintenance is built into project costs and jobs are created for it. When something is in need of maintenance, you notice it, such as potholes on the road. Maintenance teams take care of the issue, then that infrastructural system can return to its magical property of transparency, and you get to enjoy the smooth road going forward.

Personal infrastructure works the same way, except you're the entire team: you are the engineer, the manager, the construction worker, and the end user. That's a lot of roles, but it's all for you, meaning you can go at your own pace, in a way customised for your needs, toward an outcome whose rewards you get to enjoy. The cost of that is some maintenance, and that's ok.

Much of this maintenance task is outsourced to the makers of the tools we use through updates, bug fixes and new features. But that's not the end of the road. No tool will organise your life and give you the results you want if you don't show up for it with processes that support your life. What routines do you need? What review process? You've got to connect the tools you are using to your life.

This is the core misunderstanding of tool-first thinking: we've been sold the idea that the right app will save us, when what we actually need is infrastructure, because the things that go into supporting your life are bigger than the boundary of one tool. You have to craft and maintain your systems to keep that transparency, but when you do, it just works.

The Aim Is Transparency

Let's talk more on that transparency, and how you can identify what is preventing it.

Infrastructure should be invisible until there is a problem. If transparency is the aim then friction is the biggest signal you can listen to. We should be curious about friction we experience. I treat it like a problem to solve when I notice it, and like a part of the maintenance that is required to maintain transparency.

Here are some examples of questions you could ask, with recent examples from my own experience:

Is this a node issue?

As mentioned above, no task app could beat the environmental reminder of my paper planner.

Is this a connection issue?

My core mobile capture method is via a Shortcut from WhatsApp to Capacities' daily note. I recently had a day where shortcuts refused to run, and I had no idea what to do because my reliable connection was broken! After a few seconds of confusion, I realised I could just open Capacities and add it manually, but as soon as I had chance, I fixed the shortcut issue and returned to the input method I’m used to.

Is this a maintenance issue?

I've been using Capacities since 2022, and in that time we have released many updates. Some have required my time to adjust workflows, such as when we introduced variable queries. By investing time in converting old queries into the variable queries ones, I now save so much time every day. For example, my whole weekly review now depends on variable queries. I get to my Sunday thinking time faster than I did before because the information is automatically there for me with no manual changes to queries required. The maintenance time was worth it. 🔧

Is this a capacity issue?

I had to accept I was reading and highlighting more articles than I wanted to process in Capacities, so I reduced my inflow. I'm in a heavy thinking and writing phase at the moment, and less of a reading phase. I change with the seasons, and my systems must too. I don't need to change how the parts work together, at times, I need to reduce the amount I feed it.

These are examples of different problems that require different approaches to fix them. The more clarity you find in asking yourself similar questions, the less friction you will experience and the more transparent your systems will feel. With this comes comforting reliability, lower cognitive load, with less energy needed to get there.

So Personal Infrastructure or PKM?

Systems are made of nodes and connections that work together for a common purpose. Personal infrastructure compels me because good infrastructure is transparent and I feel my systems have that property, and I am living the benefits of it.

There are endless think pieces about working on your apps versus working in them, and I wonder if we need to zoom out to the personal infrastructural level: don't just think about tools; think about them within your routines and habits too. Don't expect tools to solve all problems out of the box; accept that maintenance is part of the deal. Life changes constantly so the supporting systems around us have to change as well.

Taking all of this into account, I'd like to suggest we reframe PKM away from top-down management and toward infrastructural thinking, because top-down management doesn't fit how we actually live. Networks that flow in all directions make more sense to me⁴ . Noticing the network (the nodes, the connections, the maintenance required to keep the system together) changed how I think about the role of tools and gave me a better explanation for why certain things work and others don't.

This understanding will keep evolving I'm sure, but I'm enjoying this new view of my personal systems. I'd love to know your thoughts!

Sources

1. I first saw this term on are.na

2. Deb Chachra How Infrastructure Works

3. Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

4. I think this is part of the “network mindset shift” which is a concept I learned from Impact Networks by David Ehrlichman. You can also read about the network mindset shift in Ehrlichman’s Medium article too.