Personal knowledge management (PKM), explained simply.
PKM is the practice of capturing, organizing, and revisiting what you know across years so it compounds instead of evaporating. Here's the working stack and how MindWiki fits.
What it is
Personal knowledge management — usually shortened to PKM — is how you, as an individual, capture, organize, and use what you learn. It covers your notes, your reading, your project decisions, your research, and increasingly your AI conversations. The point is that all of it ends up linked, searchable, and useful across years.
PKM as a concept goes back decades (commonplace books, Zettelkasten, GTD). The modern wave is digital, link-first, and increasingly AI-aware.
What a PKM stack actually looks like today
- An inbox you capture into without thinking — email, voice notes, web clips, AI chats.
- A vault where notes live, ideally in a portable format (markdown).
- Links between notes (wikilinks, backlinks) so retrieval works without folder gymnastics.
- Properties or tags so you can run views ("all my decisions", "all my projects").
- Search — keyword + vector — so older notes resurface when they're relevant.
- An AI surface that can read and write the vault on your behalf.
Common PKM workflows
- Atomic notes: one idea per page. Easier to link, easier to reuse.
- Capture → process → file: rough captures flow into an inbox folder, get reviewed weekly, then move into project/area folders.
- Maps of content: hand-curated index pages that link to a cluster of related notes.
- Daily notes: a journal entry per day that links out to whatever you touched.
- Annotated reading: highlights and short responses live on the same page as the source citation.
How MindWiki maps onto PKM
- Inbox: a single capture/ folder that the Quick Capture box, email-to-vault, and the mindwiki_capture MCP tool all route into.
- Vault: plain markdown files on macOS and the web. Frontmatter for properties. Wikilinks for connections.
- Atomic notes: pages, not bullets. The unit is a markdown file.
- Backlinks + graph: every wikilink builds the graph. Navigate by following connections.
- AI: a single MCP endpoint Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, and other clients connect to. Your AI reads the same vault you do.
- Pro automation: scheduled tasks (Auto-Linker, Weekly Classifier, Pattern Detection, Monthly Summary) propose changes you review.
Frequently asked questions
Is PKM the same as a second brain?
They overlap heavily. "Second brain" is the more product-marketing term; PKM is the underlying practice. A second brain is usually a particular implementation of PKM.
Do I need to pick a system before I start?
No. Most working systems emerge as you write. Start with an inbox, link aggressively, and let folders form when you actually need them.
Where does AI fit?
AI sits between your notes and your thinking. It surfaces what you forgot, drafts based on what you know, and writes captures back into the vault. The trick is connecting the AI to the same notes you read, not a separate cloud.