The promise of a personal knowledge management (PKM) system is to help you think better and more creatively. It sounds incredible, but if you don’t set it up right, it can actually just create more mess (and more stress).

So what do most people do? They start looking for the perfect PKM app. The single app that they believe will unlock their creativity, multiply their productivity, and provide endless inspiration.

Only one problem: the perfect PKM app doesn’t exist.

But that doesn’t mean that a practical PKM system is a pipe dream. It just requires a little bit of a different approach.

Craft Your PKM Stack Instead

Instead of trying to find the perfect PKM app, you should build a personal knowledge management (or PKM) stack.

In the software world a “stack” is a set of tools, platforms, and components used by developers to create, develop, and deploy software applications. A software stack can include programming languages, frameworks, databases, back-end and front-end tools, APIs, servers, and software that is all used for a single goal. They all must tie together and information must flow seamlessly between all the different parts of the technology stack or the application won’t work.

I believe this is a perfect model to describe the personal knowledge management process. Information comes in, follows a process as it flows between the different parts of your PKM system, then leaves and causes output or action.

Your mind is like a waterwheel - information comes in, flows through your PKM system, and leaves in the form of a creative output.

The type of output isn’t important. It doesn’t have to be a public blog post, an email newsletter, or a YouTube video. It could be a private note where you wrestle through what you think about a topic. There just needs to be an output.

With a technology stack, each piece has a specific purpose. When applying this model to the world of PKM, it means that every app you decide to use has a specific job it's doing.

Nothing it there because it's new and shiny or technically impressive. In fact, the leaner you make your PKM Stack, the easier it is for information to flow into and out of it. Each app you decide to use should solve a specific problem and alleviate friction at a specific point in your information workflow.

The process where all the pieces of your PKM system (and the apps that you use) tie together is best seen in the PKM Stack model. And over the next few weeks, I’m going to be taking a closer look at each level of this PKM Stack.

This week, we’ll start with the first level of the PKM Stack, which is Information.

What Is Information?

Information is literally anything you consume - the books that you read, emails you receive, the videos you watch, the podcasts you listen to. Most of this information doesn’t require you to do anything with it - it’s just something you read, watch, or listen to.

Some information may be important someday and is worth sticking in an archive folder somewhere so you can dig it up when needed, but most of it is temporal and doesn’t really matter in the long run.

Examples of information include:

• Meeting notes
• Documentation
• Contact information
• Manual
• Receipts

Some of this information may spark Ideas (the next level of the PKM Stack as we work our way up), but for the rest of it, we just need an archive that we can stick things in until we need them again later.

What to Do About the Information Level

While the goal of the PKM Stack is to help us create (remember: there has to be an output), everything we create is downstream from things we consume. So if we want to have better ideas, we need to collect better information.

Garbage in, garbage out.

But when we curate the information that we collect, we add mental Lego bricks to our collection that we can put back together to create something new.

So step one is simply looking to collect better information.

The other important point about the Information level is that most of the stuff you collect here you won't actually need again. A lot of this stuff is kept "just in case" (i.e. meeting notes and receipts). So don't waste a bunch of time keeping your archive ultra-organized.

Yes, it's fine to have a little bit of organization so you can find things when you need them. But you don't need elaborate folder structures or to remember exactly where you put something. Search tools have gotten so good that you can quickly search your entire archive and find what you're looking for in seconds should you actually need it again.

The place to spend the majority of your effort instead is in the other stages of the PKM Stack. That's where the rea creative payoff is.

Something Cool: Nick Milo's Ideaverse Pro is Out

One of the people I look up to in the PKM space is Nick Milo. I learned a ton from going through his Linking Your Thinking workshop a while back, and this year he's been working on developing his Ideaverse concept. That hard work has culminated in a new product called Ideaverse Pro, which is now available for sale.

Ideaverse Pro is basically a premium version of his free Ideaverse starter vault that has a ton of resources for helping you manage your information. It leans heavily on a couple of Nick's frameworks (ACE and ARC) and there's a lot of custom stuff in here, like callout types and pre-made queries.

It's a premium product and not going to be for everybody, but if Nick's frameworks resonate with you then you might really like this done-for-you resource where you can just plug in your own information.

Book Notes: Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

If you want a resource to help you do more with the information you collect, I highly recommend Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. Even if you don't want to copy the system and frameworks that BASB teaches, there's lots of good stuff in here about making more of your notes and ideas. It's one of the best books I've read on this topic.

And if you want to download my notes, click this link.

Coming Soon: The Practical PKM Cohort is Starting Again in January

Want to go even deeper with crafting an Obsidian-centric PKM Stack that can actually help you be more productive and creative? Then you should check out my 4-week cohort where we tackle how to use Obsidian at all 4 levels.

I'm going to reopen my Obsidian cohort shortly after New Year's. If you want to be the first to know when it opens up, click here.

—Mike

P.S. You probably noticed this newsletter looks a bit different than others you may have seen. I'm trying to take my newsletter game up a notch 😉 If there's anything you particularly like (or dislike) about this newsletter format, please let me know. I'm going to be working hard on dialing this in over the next several weeks, so I'd love to hear your feedback! Just be nice please 🙂