Peter Drucker said in 1967: “The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself.�

Bicycle for my Mind - How I Organize Myself and My Knowledge

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2024-04-18 07:30:07

Peter Drucker said in 1967: “The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself.”

As a serious knowledge worker for a lifetime, I honed how I “direct myself” over the years quite a bit. I have settled on a relatively flat and simple system to manage myself, linking my active project to-dos and my entire knowledge base—comprising everything I’ve accumulated from YouTube, podcasts, etc.

The cornerstone of my personal knowledge management system is Obsidian. I switched from Roam Research a few months ago and have grown to appreciate its simplicity and robustness. It’s primarily a tool for managing markdown files, but it also allows linking to other files and shows backlinks within documents. I use it fairly “vanilla” to avoid complications with future changes or if I want to switch tooling in the future, though I subscribe to the syncing feature to use it across multiple devices.

Adopting an idea from Cal Newport, I rely on a set of core documents that I routinely reference. These documents outline their purpose, my review frequency, and update procedures, serving as my operating system.