In part one I looked at why I use a personal knowledge management (PKM) system and why I chose Notion as the tool for that system. If you haven’t read part one you can do so here. For a quick TLDR of part one, I think an extract from Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain sums up “the why” for PKM systems quite nicely:
“Find anything you’ve learned, touched, or thought about in the past within seconds. Organize your knowledge and use it to move your projects and goals forward more consistently. Save your best thinking so you don’t have to do it again. Connect ideas and notice patterns across different areas of your life so you know how to live better. Adopt a reliable system that helps you share your work more confidently and with more ease.”
In the subsequent posts in this series, I’ll discuss the Notion functionality and knowledge management frameworks that make this system powerful. I’ll also explore how you can use it, and integrate it into your own system.
Let’s start by looking at the primary databases that make this system tick. There’s a number of tangential databases which integrate with the PKM system but we’ll focus on the primary ones for now:
Notion Knowledge Management Kit Library Dashboard
Notion Knowledge Management Kit Clippings Dashboard
This is the creator of the related library item or clipping. So that could be the author of a book, host of a podcast or the person a quote is attributed to.
Tags act as high level categories for items in the library or clipping database.
The Content database is where I manage all of my content like this blog article from ideation to completion. Content ideas inspired by items in my library can be related to each other. Individual quotes or thoughts I want to use to improve my content are linked in a Clippings to Content relation.
Having a PKM system can inspire more than the content of a blog post. My library would also be related to other databases in my Notion system like Projects or Tasks. The idea here is that my PKM system is structured around an action or output, so saved content should be related to at least one item from the Content, Projects or Tasks database.
This system is strongly inspired by Tiago Forte’s C.O.D.E. (Capture, Organise, Distill & Express) framework for knowledge management which he outlines in his book; Building a Second Brain. The core databases of my PKM system leverage this framework. Content is Captured into the Library, Organised with meta data like adding a tag and an author. The content is consumed and the distilled into individual clippings that resonated most. Those clippings are used to fuel and inspire my own content which is where the Expression takes place. Now for the nitty gritty, let’s explore the system through each phase of this framework. In this post we’ll focus on Capture.
”We are the judges, editors, and interpreters of the information we choose to let into our lives” - Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain
It’s time to get a little picky. Saving every article, tweet or podcast that might be helpful at some point will create an overwhelming backlog. A backlog that’s likely filled with irrelevant or mediocre information. Curate. Be selective. That’s my advice. Here are some principles that might help you capture and decide what’s worth keeping and what’s not.