How to Design Your Own Personal Knowledge Management System

There are books, articles, podcasts, courses, and videos out there that have the potential to change your life.

The problem is, there’s just too much.

We are spoilt for choice when it comes to incredible content to consume, and as a result (to coin a phrase I heard a lot at school), it often goes “in one ear and straight out the other.” This (potentially life-changing) information hangs around in our short–term memories for a few minutes — hours if we are lucky — and then it’s gone.

If you want the content you consume to stand a chance of finding its way into your long–term memory, you need to do something with it — you need to interact with it and create new ideas. Furthermore, you need a system. Your input, ideas, and output need a home and an operational toolkit. This is where personal knowledge management (PKM) comes in.

What is PKM?

According to Tiago Forte of Forte Labs, PKM is the practice of capturing the ideas and insights we encounter daily, whether from personal experience, books and articles, or our work and cultivating them over time to produce more creative, higher-quality work.

For me, PKM ensures that the learning I get from the content I consume (usually text, audio, and video) is not…