What Is A Personal Knowledge Companion (PKC)?
What Is A Personal Knowledge Companion (PKC)?
A Personal Knowledge Companion (PKC or PK companion) refers to one's central notes app, or "PKM app." It forms the heart of one’s PKM system or second brain.1
Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, and many others are popular apps that can become PKCs. An overview of the PKM app landscape in 2024 can be found here.
For an app to be called a PKC, it must be engaged with regularly (daily) and in a way that goes beyond mere transactions. It must become a digital "companion" we entrust with our most important personal information and knowledge. It must become the center of our personal knowledge-building efforts. It must be where we do our most important thinking, writing, journaling, and reflecting, …
Talking about a “companion” makes for a few nice metaphors, one pertaining to oxygen flow. All your interactions with a PKC (your app usage) can be seen as breathing air to it. But when you stop interacting with it, you start to suffocate it. Your trust starts to wane, and your ideas start to fade.
A second metaphor could be to talk in terms of How To Feed A Personal Knowledge Companion. Think of a Tamagotchi fed by note-making.2
A third and last reason for calling it so is that the term “companion” hints at something more active than a “heart of a second brain” or just a “PKM app.” With the rise of AI, our PKC will increasingly transform into an assistant, a smart actor, and no longer be a passive entity.
Knowledge Builders, a Fractal Productivity spin-off, extends PKM to Personal Knowledge Building (PKB). A personal knowledge builder aims not only to manage but actively build upon his/her knowledge. For this a PKM app is not enough. What the knowledege builder needs is a true companion, a PKC.
Sometimes, people use the term “second brain” somewhat interchangeably with “PKM app,” even though Tiago Forte coined the usage of the term within the field of PKM to refer to one’s overall system, which comprises various software tools. As an example, find my current second brain setup here. So a PKC and a second brain are not the same thing. A PKC is part of a second brain.
Thx to Emma Schmelzer for this idea of “a tamagotchi fed by note-making”.