Personal knowledge management

January 25, 2026

Personal knowledge management (PKM) in a research context is fundamentally about reducing the friction between encountering an idea and being able to use it later. The gap between reading a paper and incorporating its insights into your own thinking is where most intellectual value is lost.

The Capture Problem

Researchers read constantly — papers, books, preprints, technical reports, blog posts. The volume of potentially relevant material far exceeds anyone’s capacity to process it deeply. This creates a tension: you need to read broadly to stay current and find unexpected connections, but reading broadly without processing deeply produces an illusion of knowledge rather than the real thing.

The first challenge of PKM is therefore selective capture: identifying the specific ideas, methods, results, and arguments that are genuinely relevant to your work, and recording them in a form that will be useful later. “Useful later” is the key phrase. Highlighting passages in PDFs is capture without processing; it defers the intellectual work to a future self who, in my experience, rarely gets around to it.

The Processing Problem

Effective processing means translating captured material into your own words, connecting it to what you already know, and identifying what it changes about your understanding. This is effortful, which is precisely why it works. The cognitive science literature on “desirable difficulties” in learning supports what most researchers know intuitively: you learn more from struggling to articulate an idea than from passively re-reading someone else’s articulation.

In practice, this means that the note I write about a paper should not be a summary of the paper. It should be a record of my reaction to the paper: what surprised me, what I disagree with, how it connects to other things I’ve read, what questions it raises, what it suggests for my own work. The paper itself is always available for reference; what’s scarce and valuable is my processed understanding of it.

The Retrieval Problem

A knowledge system is only as good as your ability to find things in it when you need them. This is where the choice of organizational structure matters enormously. Chronological systems (lab notebooks, journal entries) make it easy to find what you did on a specific date but hard to find everything you know about a specific topic. Categorical systems (folders, tags) work until you encounter ideas that don’t fit neatly into predefined categories — which is most ideas.

The approach I’ve converged on combines several strategies: atomic notes organized by concept rather than source, dense cross-linking, a few broad entry-point notes that serve as maps of territory I’ve covered, and full-text search as a fallback. No single organizational strategy works for everything; the goal is to have multiple paths to any given piece of knowledge.

Tools vs. Practice

It’s easy to spend more time configuring knowledge management tools than actually managing knowledge. I’ve been through several cycles of tool adoption, customization, migration, and abandonment. What I’ve learned is that the specific tool matters far less than the practice of regular engagement with your notes.

The minimum viable PKM practice for a researcher is: read actively, write notes in your own words, link new notes to existing ones, and periodically review what you’ve written. You can do this in plain text files. You can do it in expensive specialized software. The software doesn’t do the thinking; you do.

Integration with Research Workflow

The ultimate test of a PKM system is whether it makes your research better. For me, the benefits have been concrete: I write paper introductions more easily because I can draw on processed notes rather than re-reading stacks of papers. I spot connections between subfields more readily. I waste less time rediscovering things I already knew but forgot. And I have a more honest relationship with the limits of my own understanding, because the notes make visible what I actually know versus what I’ve merely been exposed to.