Organize your PKM system the way you want for the best results
I’ve studied many different concepts for organizing personal knowledge; Second Brain, Zettelkasten, and Digital Gardens. Of all of these methods, I prefer the Digital Garden the most; the Digital Garden just makes the most sense to me.
Over the past year I’ve tried all of these systems for managing my Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system but each time it just didn’t work for me.
In almost every case I found the systems to be difficult to follow and cumbersome. This led me to create my own Digital Garden that was simple and a culmination of other systems.
A digital garden is a metaphor for cultivating thoughts and ideas. At its core, it’s a note-taking system for capturing ideas, linking them together, and curating the content for later reference.
The Digital Garden is a new way to store and organize your already-learned information. It’s like a garden full of fruit and trees, where you can freely pick as many as you want without worrying about starting from scratch.
When we take a step back to think about the Digital Garden again, there is a distinction between active and passive content. The active part of your life is the Projects and Workflows, but the passive role — Stories and Notes are just as important.
Dividing the Digital Garden into two parts, we extend the metaphor to include a Greenhouse and a Garden. The Greenhouse is for planting new ideas & working on projects, and the Garden is for curating content for future use.
What are the two types of content in a Digital Garden? Active and Passive
Defining Active Content
Active content is anything you’re working on at the moment. This can be a project with a specific start and end date or an ongoing activity like managing a workflow. A workflow can have tasks like projects, but without set dates — they can be ongoing and may include other kinds of content.
Content collected or generated for active content is important now and maybe referenced later but isn’t intended to build your knowledge.
Examples of active content:
- Projects
- Finances
- Processes
- Journals
Defining Passive Content
Passive content is excellent for helping you build a knowledge base or make gradual improvements over time. The real value of passive content lies in it being in your back pocket for when you want to combine pieces of different content to form new ideas. Passive content is most often used to imprint information that needs to be memorized over long periods of time.
Examples of passive content:
- Stories
- Topic Notes
- Research
- Goals
How this fits into a Digital Garden
The Digital Garden can be divided into two parts. The Greenhouse is for planting new ideas & working on projects, and the Digital Garden is for curating content for future use.
Like a real garden, the Digital Garden has a Greenhouse and a Garden with many varieties of content.
The Greenhouse is for active content and is often the starting place for passive content planted in the Digital Garden.
The Garden is for curating your passive content. The content planted here can be used repeatedly to form new stories or notes.
Putting it all together
The Greenhouse is a place to store notes related to your projects and workflow.
You can turn to the Greenhouse, consume external content, or your original thoughts for inspiration when using a digital garden. I have a list of stories & notes on various topics, which I’ve collected over time, and it’s my information in my own words.
It’s great to look back through it when brainstorming new ideas, and adding new content ensures fresh ideas.
These are my thoughts on Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), with borrowed concepts from every framework. This work-in-progress will undoubtedly change, but perhaps you can find it helpful for your knowledge repository.
Which PKM frameworks do you follow?
Do you strictly use one PKM framework or customize multiple to your preference?
