The video above is a conversation between Nicole van der Hoeven who hosted it, Bob Doto who wrote the excellent A System for Writing, and Tris Oaten of the No Boilerplate YT-channel (that I did not know before). Having watched this video where PKM systems are discussed and the different approaches the three participants have, a thought emerged. A thought that I have had previously at PKM events, or when I browse through e.g. the Obsidian forum. In a lot of PKM conversations people can talk past each other due to unspoken assumptions about what your system ‘should’ be. Not necessarily in the video above, it’s just that watching this conversation made me think about it again.

One dimension is those that assume their system is for personal knowledge. Subjective and temporal as Bob at some point clearly says in the video. As opposed to a system to store references, facts and objective knowledge.

Another is using top-down and up-front created structures vs emerging structures that are earned over time and where noticing emergent structures is newly forming personal knowledge.

A third is whether your PKM system or your Zettelkasten is seen as the whole thing, a artefact-as-is (and thus perhaps transferable in its own right), or whether one’s interaction with it, your own thinking plus your PKM system / Zettelkasten is the whole thing and thus a fully personal tool. Do you see yourself as part of your PKM system, or not?

These three differences in attitude and resulting approach determine quite a bit it seems of what you choose to do and not do in practice (such as the Folgezettel part of the conversation in the video shows).

But it seems to me we hardly ever spell out our own starting assumptions (and thus design parameters) of one’s PKM system and where we see ourselves. We merely project our own ‘givens’ onto the outside world.

What Bob Doto says in the video for instance about his practices resonates well with my own, born from personal knowledge, emergent structures and personal interactive tool. To me PKM is personal along three dimensions, a personal system, personal knowledge, and personal management, which map well on the three dimensions of assumptions just listed. But I sometimes get the sense that to others that sounds like not as PKM at all, just as making it up as you go along. Which isn’t a false description per se, except for the implied judgement that it won’t yield results and isn’t a deliberate design choice. While I see ratchets and compounding effects.

Maybe we need to more often precede our conversations about PKM system design choices with speaking our usually unspoken assumptions about what type of systems works for us. Although it may be paradoxically the case that for some that isn’t perceived as a need, if they already assume there is a single cluster of ‘right’ ways of doing things. Then of course it is not needed to speak of assumptions, because what is right is external. Vice versa to me it is not PKM, is not P at all if the assumption there’s a single right way of doing it for all. Then PKM is a method and productivity hack, but not a system for thinking and knowledge work.

For next year’s European PKM Summit I think I need to come up with a short way of describing that and put it on my name badge.