Personal Knowledge Management, Logseq, and my New Way of Managing Ideas and Information
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Today (and for a few decades actually) there is an overload of information, online or offline, whether it is from a professional or personal point of view.
How can one properly manage what they read, learn, come across, with the objective to re-use, enhance, and share?
In the past, and probably like many of you, I’ve used a fair load of Moleskine® notebooks. They were great. They are still great. I used them in specific use cases (as a field hockey coach, taking notes during games, for instance, to-do lists, cigars I smoked with ratings and comments, …), but as more and more of the data and information we consume is digital, I’ve reached a point where I cannot manage [offline] my personal knowledge in a way that I can effectively leverage it on the long run.
What is Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)?
If we’re looking at Wikipedia, this is the definition it provides:
Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities (Grundspenkis 2007) and the way in which these processes support work activities (Wright 2005). It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers need to be responsible for their own growth and learning (Smedley 2009). It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management (KM) (Pollard 2008).
In other words, capture ideas and information.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always strived to build myself a good “database”, or “repository”, of knowledge. When it comes to the support, or tooling, as mentioned above, it ranged from the use of notebooks, but also GitHub repositories, local (or shared) hard drives, notes and highlights of (e)books I’ve read on my Kindle, notes on Zotero.org, e-mails, to-do lists,<enter your SaaS app here> favorites or likes, etc… What a mess you’ll tell me. Hex-actly.
Logseq
To be honest, I can’t remember how I found Logseq (pronounced “log-seek”. “Log” for “logbook” and “seq” for “sequence”). Probably some night, scrolling through Twitter.
