What Is Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)?

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is the practice of managing one's most important information and insight.

The first use of the term personal knowledge management can be traced to Frand & Hixon (1999), where PKM is defined as follows:

• PKM is personal: designed by individuals for their own use.

• PKM deals with knowledge, which is complex, unlimited, and grows when shared.

• PKM is about management: creating, gathering, distributing, and using knowledge.

Proper PKM becomes increasingly relevant, as our biology doesn’t equip us to handle modern-day demands exclusively cognitively. As our lives revolve more and more around information, PKM makes individuals more effective as it allows them to better gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share that information.

In PKM, relevant information is made personal, added, and manipulated within a personal knowledge base — the organized collection of all one’s personal knowledge. A related and nowadays popular term and concept here is maintaining a second brain. Since PKM is gaining importance, second-braining is becoming increasingly relevant.

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. Since PKB depends on PKM, Knowledge Builders will focus on PKM topics first, and later shift over to PKB.