This week we have one more issue dedicated to the 6 skills of Personal Knowledge Management. If you lost the previous issues, read them here:

• ​6 PKM skills​
• ​Active note-taking​
• ​Active reading​

Hello Reader,

I have good and bad news.

The good news is that if you have followed my advice about active note-taking and active reading for a while, then you can easily express yourself and understand your sources in depth.

The bad news is: you now have a pile of notes!

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If your goal is to explore your thoughts, then a pile of notes shouldn’t be an issue.

But if you need to consult your notes frequently (and quickly), searching for an idea among 100s or 1000s of notes will become a time-consuming challenge.

That’s when I invite you to move from note-taking to Personal Knowledge Management.

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Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) will help you organise your notes in a way that best fulfils your goals.

I don’t know what all your personal goals are, but if you are here it is safe to assume it has something to do with learning and research 😊

When doing PKM for research we may be talking about: action management, reference management, output management, idea management, etc. In this series, I will be focusing exclusively on Idea Management and a bit on its interaction with reference management.

The Idea Management framework I developed is optimised for:

• finding ideas quickly, so you don’t waste time when you want to find, improve or write about an idea;
• finding references quickly, so no more paper hunting within Zotero; and
• growing your knowledge to generate original ideas.

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Here are the basic principles of this framework:

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1. Organise ideas, not documents.

We think about ideas, we write about ideas, and we look for ideas within our notes.

So when it comes to organising our notes, we should stop looking at them as “documents” and start seeing them as notes representing “ideas”.

If each note focuses on a single idea, then finding an idea becomes super easy. Just find its one note and there you have it!

This way, rather than organising document notes, we will be organising idea notes.

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There is also a CRITICAL side effect to that!

Organisation becomes sensemaking. That means you are making sense of your ideas while organising your notes, rather than using organisation as a form of procrastination 🙃.

Instead of asking yourself: in which folder should I put this? You will be asking: Which idea am I trying to explain here?

So, even if you choose to procrastinate, you are still improving your knowledge 😉

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2. Links represent associations between ideas.

Depending on your note-taking app, you can easily create links between notes. If notes represent ideas, links represent associations between those ideas.

I call them “associations” because we are not always aware of what these associations are. We know two ideas are related, we can somewhat explain that relation through text, but we can’t always label it nor want to deeply focus on it. So, as a simple form of relationship, I like to call them “associations”.

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When an association becomes so important to you that you want to focus on it, describe it, or just think more about it, then it graduates into a relationship and becomes an idea itself. As an idea, it ceases to be a link and becomes an idea note 😉

If you look at the image above as an example, as soon as the relation becomes my focus of attention, then it would generate a new note named “Frame as Nameable Bundles give rise to the dichotomy between classes and instances”. That note would then become the link (“the bridge”) between the two ideas currently there.

And this concept of “relation as idea” is very common in research.

It is often the case that our topic of study IS a relation, such as “X impacts on Y” or “Z moderates the impact of X on Y”. In that case, you don’t want your whole topic to be represented as an arrow on the screen or be trapped in veeeeeery long document notes. Instead, make it an idea and link it to other ideas.

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3. Organise sources in relation to ideas.

Many of the ideas in your notes came from your interpretation of your sources. They are “associated” with your sources.

If there is an association, there is a link.

At the time you organise your writing into idea notes, make sure to keep a link from the idea not to the source associated with it (either the whole source or a specific quote).

So when the time comes to write a report, you don’t need to be searching for your references. Instead, open the note for the idea you want to talk about and all citations you need are already there. No need to hunt them down in Zotero or another reference management app.

To check what it looks like, notice the link to ”Hayes 1981” in the image above. That’s a link to a source.

If you link to your sources this way, your idea notes are also the point of synthesis for knowledge coming from multiple sources, but we will cover that when talking about Networked Reading in future issues.

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How to do Idea Management?

These 3 principles are the foundations of Idea Management, but despite being simple to understand, applying them is not always a trivial task.

Instead, Idea Management is a practice that requires:

• Mindsets to identify ideas when looking at very long documents (I created the concept of “objects of attention” to help you do that),
• Methods to convert long document notes into idea notes (and naturally create links between them), and
• Tool features that support (or hinder) linked-based Idea Management.

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So instead of leaving you wondering how to get started with Idea Management, let us spend a little bit more time on it in the next issues. Let’s investigate what I mean by ideas (and how they differ from concepts and misconceptions about atomic notes), how ideas matter for research and knowledge creation, and the challenges you may face if you write notes in OneNote, Google Docs, Notion, or MS Word.

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But remember, Idea Management is an organisation step, not self-expression!

If you can’t express your knowledge, there is nothing to be organised.

So if you want to learn all mindset changes and methods you need to start expressing your knowledge within your notes, join the waitlist for the Active Note-Taking course (to be launched in a couple of weeks).

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Talk to you soon. If you have any questions before then, please let me know by answering this email.

Until then, take care.

Bianca