Personal Knowledge Management as Practice — Holding Information
A reflective Studio note on personal knowledge management, learning systems, and the instruments that help ideas become understanding.
Editor’s Note: This Studio essay sits beneath the wider Idea → Value body of work as a reflection on how knowledge is held rather than how it is taught. Where the public essays explore systems and judgement, this note turns inward to the instruments and behaviours that shape understanding in practice — the mechanics by which information becomes capability.
Holding Information — A Working Learning System
There is an overwhelm and subtle anxiety that comes from collecting more information than we can ever truly hold in our minds and behaviours.
Bookmarks multiply.
Tabs remain open.
Backlogs get filled.
PDFs gather in folders.
Courses linger unfinished, some not even started.
I noticed, some years ago, that my digital information library was growing faster than my understanding.
The act of capture had become easier than the act of crunching that information to turn it into knowledge.
And so, without really forward planning it, I began to refactor my Personal Knowledge Management System to suit who I had become and what my learning now needed. I moved to small digital and paper containers for information and knowledge.
Not a grand system. Not an elaborate single-system digital Personal Knowledge Management System.
Just places where the growing backlog of thoughts, information and ideas could be turned into action, into knowledge, into something more than fragments and snippets of accumulated learning information.
In this essay I explore the movement of action along with the tools and process I use.
For a podcast reflection, video and essay exploring the tension of where we choose to invest our attention in learning, see Your Career as an Idea → Value System.
