My love-hate relationship with personal knowledge management tools
The theoretical gains from a good PKM system are tremendous. But are they enough to justify adding time-consuming new processes and abandoning a model that’s worked for 30 years?
I’ve spent much of the last decade on the hunt for a writing tool that’s made for producing digital-first content. Most recently that’s led me to Roam Research. Unfortunately, you can’t get anywhere in the general vicinity of Roam without being bombarded by conversations about personal knowledge management, or PKM.
My beef with the world of PKM is entirely personal.
I don’t do my thinking in front of a screen.
I think by way of constructing sentences in my head—usually while pacing around the room.
Maybe that’s just a product of age. I started graduate school just a few weeks after the initial release of Netscape Navigator. I was a member of one of the first classes at Virginia Tech to be allowed to publish an MA thesis electronically, and (I think?) the very first class at the University of Virginia to be allowed to publish a PhD dissertation that same way.
(Random aside: The old practice of requiring graduate students to spring for five bound copies of a dissertation and pay for a microfilm copy at the University of Michigan was every bit as money-grubbingly awful as paying for long distance phone calls. I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising, as the entire PhD-producing enterprise is a cesspool of truly awful and borderline exploitative practices.)
The point here is that I learned to be a scholar just at that point where the purely analog was starting to dip its toes into digital. My research methodology reflected that transition. I went through a lot of dimes photocopying pages from bound journals. But I generally found those journal articles via a digital catalog (accessed through a terminal!), and I certainly produced both my thesis and my dissertation on a Mac Performa.
But I didn’t draft either one on that Performa. I “wrote” whole sections in my head, and later transcribed them. The better part of a chapter-and-a-half of my dissertation was dictated into a mini-cassette recorder while driving to-and-from Hampden-Sydney College, where I was teaching in the Rhetoric program.
Of course the obvious downside to my method is that stuff gets lost.
In the 20+ years since I completed graduate school, I’ve probably written hundreds of articles and blog posts in my head, mostly while out for a run or while commuting to work. Very few of those were written down, as I’d get distracted by the next shiny thing before I got around to transcribing.
Would it be better if I had some sort of complex, multi-tiered note-taking system? Or if I did something more systematic than scrawling barely legible, half-baked article ideas in between grocery lists and notes from client calls inside whatever paper notebook is closest at any given moment?
Probably.
Is it likely that I’ll develop such a habit as I enter into the back half of the century or so that I hope to be allotted?
Not so much.
