What is personal knowledge management?
The concept of creating a process for gathering and storing information for future use, especially for writing content, is referred to as personal knowledge management.
And this is not like what we do currently – accumulating vast numbers of bookmarked articles, jotted down statistics, and highlighted book passages.
Personal knowledge management involves system creation, adding your context, and making things easy to locate when you want to reference them.
This has been traditionally popular in writing, but only recently, it is being used popularly in online writing as well.
Here are some steps you need to include in your personal knowledge management system;
- Detaining information and ideas as you encounter them
- Process the collected information & have your context
- Incubate your thoughts until you need them
- Using the data to create new things
Before we jump deeper into this, let me give you a pro tip to find emails effortlessly.
How to find people address?
You can use email extractor tools such as GetEmail.io to find people address.
This tool uses the mechanism of machine learning and big data to find emails. It comes with a free plan where you get to ten email addresses every month.
Detaining information and ideas as you encounter them
The primary step in personal knowledge management is to develop the habit of capturing any information you feel will be helpful for you the moment you encounter them.
Why should we capture information?
The ultimate goal is to create a way to effortlessly save useful information, irrespective of where you come across them.
Howbeit, it’s just a digital hoarding without the rest of the process.
Process the gathered information & include your context
In this step, you will go through your saved information and add sufficient context so that in the future, you may locate it quickly when you require them.
When you process the information, you will get rid of the data you no longer find useful.
Have you ever experienced this where you have saved files to your system, but later, when you look back at this stored information, you have no clue why you kept them?
That’s why you must add hints to your future self.
And then, instead of keeping all the information in one place, you can create separate folders to store this information based on their requirement or where you will use them.
Incubating Your Ideas
Now that you have saved and organized the information that inspired you, you can now allow it to lie there until you require them.
Your brain needs this time to process the information and come to a conclusion.
Use the information to create new things.
Finally, you will use the information to create new things.
When you have good personal knowledge management, you never have to start from scratch.
That’s why it is essential to have a knowledge management system as it gives you the medium to save & sort your plans and references as building blocks.
And at any point in time when you need to start a project, you have to choose the relevant building blocks and combine them into a finished piece.
Final Thoughts
Now that you understand what personal knowledge management is and why it is essential, you may start setting up one for yourself, and then you can save time and effort on almost any task.
