At its heart, personal knowledge management (PKM) is simply the practice of selectively, intentionally, and consistently capturing the ideas that resonate and are the most useful for you and then finding ways to implement and share them in your current and long-term work.

While I am still new on my PKM journey, I created these 10 questions to help myself get started, which I hope that you can benefit from too. Read on, answer them, and jump into PKM…on your own terms!

There’s a myth that documentation is always “capital D” — what I call “Big D” documentation — requiring teams of IT, systems, and information management experts to design and implement. If Big D is about how we traditionally see documentation, “Little d” is about the everyday practices and skills you and your team use, like your notes, to-do lists, emails, informal communications, reports, presentations, policies, and the skills to make this all happen.

If you are in the corporate world or go to conferences, you probably hear a lot about Big D initiatives—innovation programs, information governance, change management, corporate minutes, and so on. But it’s those Little d skills, disciplines, and actions that keep Big D projects running.

“Content creation” has become the new-new thing with every business advisor and branding expert eager to unpack their advice on how to build an audience, gain authority, and generate a revenue stream.

Don’t get me wrong, I love and believe in content, but I have found much of the discussion (or hype) off the mark. From experience, I believe that content creation is an incredible accelerant to improve how you learn, work, and think, but it’s nothing like what marketers or branding experts sell it to be.

Let’s explore why content creation might be important for you and how anyone can get started by taking mini, safe, realistic leaps, even if you are a newbie.

Do you routinely find yourself nitpicking your emails for no reason? Or are you more likely to leave a major presentation to the eleventh hour?

You might be a perfectionist. You strive for immaculate PowerPoints, detailed spreadsheets, and zero typos.

Or you could be a winger. You maximize momentum, responsiveness, and moving work forward quickly.

While we may lean towards one or the other, perfectionism and winging it are not mutually exclusive states of being. In fact, we need to know how master both worlds.

What makes one person productive doesn’t make the other person productive. In my 18 years of consulting, I have worked with incredible entrepreneurs, business owners, and leaders and I can tell you they don’t all groove to the same productivity beat. Some are constantly on their phones and jumping task to task. Others enjoy working in deep states of focus.

Let’s explore the pros and cons of 4 key productivity styles that shape our ways of working.

I recently read an amazing new book by Tiago Forte called Building a Second Brain. I have been evangelizing its merits ever since.

Forte introduced me to the concept of Personal Knowledge Management, or "PKM", and the principles he’s taught to thousands of students for managing their ideas and increasing their creativity and productivity.