Glossary
Personal knowledge management (PKM)
Definition: the practice of capturing, organizing, and revisiting your own knowledge — notes, reading, research, conversations — so it compounds over time instead of evaporating.
Plain-English definition
Personal knowledge management — usually shortened to PKM — is how an individual captures, organizes, and uses what they learn. It covers notes, reading, decisions, research, and increasingly AI conversations. The aim is that everything you learn ends up findable, linkable, and useful months or years later.
History
- Commonplace books (15th–19th century): hand-curated personal notebooks of quotations and observations.
- Zettelkasten (Niklas Luhmann, mid-20th century): an index-card system of atomic notes with cross-references.
- Getting Things Done (David Allen, 2001): inbox + projects + next actions, focused on capture.
- Modern digital PKM (Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, Notion, MindWiki): wikilinks, properties, knowledge graphs, AI access.
Related terms
- Second brain — a more product-oriented framing of PKM.
- Knowledge base — usually team-shared; PKM is the individual case.
- Note-taking — narrower; PKM includes retrieval and synthesis, not just capture.