What the heck is PKM? -or- Organization for Authors

Ever since I re-joined Medium (after a hiatus of about a year), I have been inundated with articles on productivity apps and apps for “PKM”. For the longest time, I had no idea what this PKM thing was, but these articles were about Trello, Notion, Obsidian, Capacities, and others.

It turns out, PKM stands for Personal Knowledge Management — one kind blogger actually slipped that into their article for ignorant people like me. PKM is an author’s nightmare — or dream. We are inundated with information: writing craft, research for our books, marketing information, and more.

I have notebooks and random pads of paper all over my office filled with such information. I’ve got folders of it in my Gmail account. And I can tell you, if I needed to find some bit of information I remembered reading — or was it something I heard in a seminar at some conference? — and needed to find it… well, good luck! The odds are I’d spend about an hour searching for it and then eventually give up and either search for the information online once again (maybe I would find it, maybe not) or just give up.

So, uh, yeah, PKM sounds like a pipedream. But, strangely enough, there seems to be a rather large industry devoted to it based on the number of apps I’m learning about. Oh, and AI is only making these programs work better and faster…