Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is the practice of capturing the ideas and insights we encounter in our daily life, whether from personal experience, from books and articles, or from our work, and cultivating them over time to produce more creative, higher quality work. I teach people how to master PKM in my online course Building a Second Brain.
By collecting our knowledge in a centralized place outside of our own heads, we can create an engine of creative output – a “second brain” – to advance a career, build a business, or pursue a passion. By making this knowledge digital, we can reap the benefits of searchability, backups, syncing between devices, sharing with others, and more.
But there’s one aspect of personal knowledge management I haven’t fully addressed, which is tags. In the past, I criticized tags harshly as being too taxing, overly complicated, and low value for the effort required. I advised people not to use tags to manage their knowledge, favoring notebooks or folders instead.
But I’ve changed my mind since then. Over several years of observations, findings, and experiments, I’ve come to believe that tags could be the missing link in making our knowledge collections truly adaptable – able to reorient and reconfigure themselves on the fly to enable any goal we wish to pursue.
Let me tell you what I believe is required to unlock the immense potential of tagging for personal knowledge management.
Its very good and I am still to finish reading it. I have made similar observations myself, have learned some good new ideas.
Yet I also belive it over values tags in some ways by ignoring other structures such as the use of categories, keywords and subjects which can be implemented with tags but unnessasarily overuse tags, some would say polute the tag space. I would be happy to explain further.
Another area it falls short in in a deeper understanding of the new maths and science of networks including the many possible types of networks, some of which resemble hierarchies. And example of different networks can be found in database design and models.
I can only raise these objections because to a great degree it already puts some good arguments and raises some important points. To me, experienced in this area as I am, it is easier for me to criticize. But it is a good piece of writing (so far).
Tony