This is the next chapter in a multi-part story on The State of PKM. By the end of this informal manifesto, you will leave with a clearer and empowered sense of PKM.

Lost thoughts.

I know you've felt it. We all have.

There's just too much information these days.

We try to save the important stuff. But no matter what, eventually we feel lost and confused in our digital world.

It's frustrating when it's on the internet.

It's crippling when it's with our personal thoughts.

It's like a bad dream where you just want stand on solid ground, but some mysterious force keeps blowing you around in the air—so you're always floating just above the land. Sometimes a toe or two touches, but you never feel grounded.

That's the hand that Fate has dealt us. We are the generations dealing with the explosion of 1's and 0's. We are the guinea pigs of the information age. There are no rules for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), so we're left to figure it out on our own.

It is our gift and our burden.

In the previous decade, roughly from 2010 - 2019, we gained the ability to easily save chunks of information ("articles") to new digital spaces ("Evernote").

Let's take a moment to appreciate this new ability. When Evernote came out in 2008, it gave us the ability to easily "clip" information from the internet with the click of a button.

But we haven't yet developed the skills to effectively manage these waves of information.

That's why you're here. You are someone who cares about your thoughts and you are trying to be better at managing them—whether it's a thought from 18 years ago (like the image I shared in Chapter 2), or a thought from today.

Over-collecting is a major part of the problem. So is over-highlighting. (Yes, linking your thinking is part of the solution, but I don't want to go there just yet.)

Let's see how we give ourselves digital dementia through the lens of The 3 Laws of Sensemaking: Encounter, Connect, Express.

If you recall from Chapter 1, we can't avoid these three things. We cycle through them countless times a day. But that doesn't mean we are all doing it the same way.

This shows three ways people move through The 3 Laws of Sensemaking

The first person, on Autopilot, doesn't want or need a digital PKM. Not everyone does. At least, not everyone needs a robust system. But that number of people shrinks with each passing year.

The second archetype is cruisin' for a bruisin'. (I know because this was me.) They are well-intentioned. They want to learn and improve. They want to be able to quickly find stuff they saved. But they don't know what to do, so they SAVE TONS OF ARTICLES AND HIGHLIGHT TONS OF STUFF. That's the red line.

And yes, "clipping" articles is a form of "Connecting". It's just one of the weakest forms, and it's a major habit that leads to digital dementia.

That's because over time, your digital thoughts become less of your thoughts. As you clip more articles, the ratio of your own words and thoughts decrease. This makes it harder to search for your thoughts. While each article feels important at the time, they almost always cause more harm than good.

I have a whole story about this, but here's the relevant part:

Little did I know that my habit of saving articles was—over time—increasing the NOISE and decreasing the SIGNAL. I.e. my digital library was filling up with garbage.After 5 years, opening Evernote was no longer fun. It was stressful. It caused my mind to feel scattered. Just the thought of opening it created surprising amounts of anxiety.The happiness I used to feel using my digital notes was experiencing “death by a thousand cuts.” And when you have tons of valuable thoughts locked away in an environment you don’t want to enter — you start feeling the effects of “digital dementia.”My joy evaporated.

But there is way to think sustainably well in the information age.

It starts by winning with knowledge at the point of contact. That means, don't try to capture everything. And for the stuff you do want to save, connect it to another idea.

This is basic note-making.

It's not hard. It's just that we were never trained how to do it. So now we have to instill this crucial habit on our own.

Here is the simplest version:

• You walk around in the world and ENCOUNTER something. You say "Huh, that's interesting."
• Then you say, "That reminds me of...FILL IN THE BLANK"
• And because you care about sustainably working with ideas over your entire lifetime, you make this connection in your digital ideaverse.

That's it.

There is incredible power hidden in note-making and having a well-connected ideaverse.