This was inspired by a discussion on the Obsidian Discord, started by @Battle_beaver’s post over at Two basic designs for a PKM library: mind maps vs. mind diagrams.
TL;DR
I present “PKM” as a collection of at least two fundamental disciplines, and argue that acknowledging this separation of ideas has benefits for us as individuals and as a community. I suggest two categories: “The Library” in which we act as “librarians” and “The Study Room” in which we act as “students”, and suggest that these two roles, while mutually beneficial, utilize unique sets of skills.
Read If
- You have ever had a discussion in PKM where it took too long to even figure out where the other person was coming from.
- Are interested in PKM theory.
- Find yourself struggling to organize or struggling to think within your PKM system. Especially if you find yourself struggling to do one when you meant to do the other.
The Argument
Something I have observed in the PKM community is a tendency to have difficulty explaining what, exactly, PKM is. This doesn’t surprise me so much; defining abstract ideas is hard. What surprises me is how often people who have been “doing” PKM for years find themselves talking about different things, having difficulty understanding which of their fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of PKM the other party doesn’t share.
I suspect the reasons for these fundamental miscommunications run very deep. But one particular area jumped out at me that I wanted to write about: PKM is at least two things, but is usually only acknowledged as one.
By this I mean that, to be successful in “managing one’s knowledge” (for the majority of use cases I have seen), you need TWO unique skillsets. The only person I have seen acknowledge this is @nickmilo in his Linking Your Thinking course. But his observation was only around the different mindsets from which different individuals approach PKM. I want to go further, and suggest that there are different sets of skills and optimizations which are best applied in isolation from each other, depending on which “area” of PKM we are facilitating.
I call these areas “The Library” and “The Study Room”.
When in The Library, we are librarians. Our goals are to organize, optimize, categorize, and otherwise prepare knowledge for consumption.
When in The Study Room, we are students. Our goals are to research or combine old ideas from our library, and to record new ideas. We may bring in new brand new resources as well (research material), and take notes on them for future use.
To be effective in each of these roles is a completely different set of skills! In fact, I contend they are often opposing mindsets!
If you have come to study, but instead end up thinking about alphabetization and the pros / cons of the Dewey (or Johnny) decimal systems work, you aren’t going to have an effective thinking session. You’re acting like a librarian, not a student.
If you have come to organize, but let your mind wander, reading and experiencing everything you have stored previously, you won’t have an effective organizational session. You’re acting like a student, not a librarian.
In both cases, the consequences for distraction from a given role are potentially severe. If you are a poor librarian, then you cannot find what you need as a student. If you are a a poor student, your library stagnates and you lose many of the benefits PKM promises for better thinking and accelerating production of knowledge.
So, it seems to me these roles are separate and mutually beneficial. They also overlap, to some extent. After all, a good librarian is often a good student, and there’s no reason a good student cannot be a librarian! Why not be both at once?
But I maintain they are separate roles best thought of and executed separately, simply because the attentional space necessary to execute them well is sufficient that focusing on one will always detract from the other.
In Conclusion
I believe these two roles are the fundamental disciplines of PKM, and that we can strengthen our discussions and approaches to PKM by acknowledging and adopting terms for these different sets of skills. They don’t have to be my terms… just any shared terms for these ideas.
Some of us, I suspect, are natural librarians. Some, natural students. Maybe some are both. But when discussing any problem one has encountered in PKM, I think it is beneficial to at least first ask “Is this a librarian problem or a student problem?”.
On an individual level, simply recognizing the need to change mindsets may bring some level of clarity to the situation.
On a community level, I hope recognizing these fundamental disciplines may help us miscommunicate just a little bit less, and understand where others are coming from just a little bit more. I also believe we benefit by studying each discipline’s unique skills and attributes and recognizing which discipline they belong to, to better help apply them at the most effective time.
All the best, and thank you for reading,
– Price
P.S.
If there’s existing writing on this topic, I would love to read it!
The “PKM Community” as a whole, in my mind. Beyond that, the whole “knowledge worker” community as well. At least. Anyone who cares about externally storing, creating, and utilizing knowledge.
