I’m experimenting with more effective and methodical ways to do “personal knowledge management” (PKM) — specifically how to analyze and share knowledge, not simply collect it.
I write for technology B2B, a big and complex industry with fast-moving market and technology changes. I’ve been around a long time so I know a lot, which makes it easier to onboard clients and communicate their products and messaging.
But when it comes to writing ABOUT what I do for marketing purposes and to create books and courses about copywriting and content marketing, it’s a lot harder. I so easily assume that, “Well, everyone knows how to do this.” Well, no they don’t. But wrapping my brain around what I know AND effectively communicating it is rough. I end up with a ton of internal and external resources, yet struggle with curating and sharing.
That’s when I read this quote: “Learning doesn’t happen by gathering resources together – it happens by discovering new ideas, blending knowledge together, implementing these new ideas (where possible) and observing and moving forward with what you have learned.” (Rob Lambert) This quote is from https://cultivatedmanagement.com/personal-knowledge-management-system/, a terrific resource.
I love this, and his practical suggestions for putting this approach to PKM into practice: Capture, Curate, Crunch, Contribute.
Capture is obvious: Capturing the universe of your knowledge about a topic, plus resources from others into a personal knowledge repository. I use Evernote as my repository, and am experimenting with OneNote.
Rob captures knowledge from multiple sources into Evernote, which filled in gaps I was missing. For example, when he handwrites notes he takes pictures of them, uses Evernote Clipper on web pages, imports Kindle clippings. He also loves IFTTT, which is new to me. I’m experimenting with that for knowledge capture.
He suggests that you don’t spend massive amounts of time finding info from sources that may or may not be reliable. He regularly follows 5-10 good blogs, some Twitter accounts, plus books, academic writing, and promising articles.
Curate means to review information for value. Rob handles this by tagging the data he imports into Evernote, reviewing it, and deciding what its next step is: filing into active folders, a to-review folder, or trash. The question is: does this information have value to me? Is it research value — in which case I need to use structure and tagging so can I easily find it again — or actionable, in which case it ends up in ToDoist.
Crunch: This is what I was missing before: taking the time to analyze new information for patterns and ideas, building it into the framework of my existing knowledge, and expanding my framework with new information. This is where PKM expands from capture and retrieval to meaning.
Rob uses mind-mapping to present this level of learning in a visual format, which I love — my highly visual learning style thrives on mind maps. (I use Freemind.) This is not a static method of throwing up new nuggets of data onto a mind map and calling it good; the mind map is a dynamic visualization of my growing body of knowledge and conclusions.
Contribute: This is the stage where I share original and authoritative findings through social media, client consulting, and books and courses on content marketing. My writing is already valuable to my clients; now I add a point of view that is uniquely valuable to clients and students.