10 Questions to Get Started with Personal Knowledge Management

Personal Knowledge Management (or PKM) is a concept I swear by if you want to build yourself as an expert, thought leader, or content creator.

 (For more context and information about what PKM is and why it’s so important to your career, check out my article “The Power of PKM for Managers”.)

 But you don’t need to be a bestselling author, professional speaker, or luminary to embrace PKM. Tax attorneys, accountants, information managers, IT specialists, CFOs, consultants, and banking experts – you name it – are all dependent on managing and growing their knowledge base and improving how they apply it.

PKM isn’t something mysterious either. At its heart, 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!

1. What problem are you trying to solve – or what challenge are you facing?

To make PKM meaningful—and even urgent—so it helps you in the here and now, you need to look at the reality of your situation and that of your team, department, or organization.

What problem, recurring frustration, or crisis are you facing? What exactly is eating you at work? Is there something burning that you need to attack immediately?

Start your PKM journey with your most immediate, pressing goals and think about your information needs. Do you need resources to support a project you’re working on? Do you need to track an important new trend or regulations in your industry? Do you need ideas for an upcoming interview or pitch? Focus your attention there.

2. What are you looking to create?

Next, think about what specifically you are looking to create. In my own world, PKM is about helping me to write articles, create presentations, and improve the resources I use and share with my clients.

Are you writing a proposal, thesis, blog, or dissertation? Or are you creating sales or marketing materials? Or are you building a better collection or repository of information?

What would make the biggest change in how you work and the impact you and your team have?

3. What topics are most important to you?

While most of us track areas of interest naturally, we are often not as intentional as we should be. That is often because we haven’t thought enough about the topics that matter to us.

Think carefully about the subjects or keywords you need to follow to support your job and expand your career. Write them down and pursue them consistently. And beyond that, think about what inspires and motivates you (if money were no object).

My key topics are personal productivity, information management, internal controls and audit, and workflow. And I’ve also added habits, knowledge management, and digital adoption to the mix recently, subjects that keep me refreshed and interested.

4. What are your sources of content?

We consume multiple gigabytes of content each day, but most of it is garbage. Quality over quantity is what counts.

Books, online courses, podcasts, conferences, webinars, magazines, social media (if that’s your thing), newspapers – think about the sources of information that work best for you and focus on those.

5. What is your beacon?

A beacon is a concept I took from business growth and networking expert Pam Slim in her excellent book The Widest Net.

Your beacon is about the ways people find you or come to you. Slim’s examples of beacons are things you create such as blogs, videos, podcasts, presentations, social media, or events.

This is a marketing idea but I find it very relevant to PKM in the corporate world. In today’s world of work, we all need channels that drive others to our work. The resources, knowledge, and ideas you have–and share–will drive more people within and outside your company to take notice of you and what you have to offer.

6. When will you “ship”?

Most of us like the idea of PKM in theory, but it’s the application that trips us up. Deadlines drive PKM.

Even superstar author and marketer Seth Godin credits his success to his commitment to “shipping out,” which means delivering meeting deadlines, and pressing “send.”

To kick yourself into action, sign up to give a presentation to your team or an association you are involved with. Speaking from experience, this is a sure way to light the fires you need to speed up your PKM in a pinch.

7. How do you take notes?

Tiago Forte defines notes in his book Building a Second Brain as a “piece of content that has been interpreted through your lens.” This could be a quote, article highlight, image, video, personal thought, or other information.

Notes can also include to-dos, meeting and lecture notes, or even journaling. No matter your definition, notes are the building blocks of your PKM practice (and your broader documentation practices too).

8. What system to use?

A lot of discussion around PKM best practices involves technology. Forte’s advice in Building a Second Brain that I found hardest to adopt was the use of digital apps as the core of your PKM system. While I am an avid note-taker, moving my “brain” to an app is still scary for me. (To note, Forte has a big following of Gen Z and Millennials – I’m older than that, and so are my clients.)

By all means, try out digital note apps, but I’d recommend that you experiment with other accessible and more traditional, document-friendly systems like Google Drive, SharePoint, and Dropbox for Business.

While they aren’t as cutting-edge as some of the note-taking apps on the market like Evernote or Obsidian, they have all served me well in different capacities in my business and my PKM practices, too.

9. What is your community?

PKM isn’t a solitary sport. We learn and grow through sharing with others. Communities, whether online or in person, are not just a buzz word concept. They are essential for growing your knowledge in a meaningful way with others who share the same work experience, career challenges and opportunities, interests, and expertise as you.

I am a member of and participate in many different professional groups. With some groups, I have been involved for many years and am an expert on. For others, I am just learning and expanding my knowledge base. In my experience, the biggest learning benefit from the circles is not the official content shared, but the informal discussions and information shared through the people you meet.

10. What about the long game?

We started with the short-term in mind, but let’s now look to the future. This is the chicken and egg of how PKM works.

Your PKM system should help you beyond your immediate project or the job you’re in. Think about how the knowledge you collect will help your next career move. How will PKM bridge the gap between how you make money today with how you want to in the future? I haven’t figured this out perfectly yet. But even contemplating the long game makes PKM more interesting and exciting.

Our growth is confined by how much we learn. Let PKM give you the momentum and movement you need to be better. I’d love to hear about your own journey with personal knowledge and information management, and what’s working or tripping you up. Share in the comments or connect with me to continue the conversation.

If you are looking for more insights, resources, and advice on using the power of documentation to turbocharge your momentum and results for individuals, teams, and organizations, sign up for the Bellehumeur Co. Newsletter here.