Personal Knowledge Management

As a knowledge management professional and professor I must ask are KM professionals practicing what we preach? This brings me to the adoption of personal knowledge management. Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is about getting your life (personal, professional and otherwise) in order. It can be as simple as managing your personal library (books, files and digital material), having more effective meetings (agenda items, strict meeting time frame, inviting the right people) and capturing decisions and ideas through journaling. Some of the more popular PKM tools involve wikis and blogs. PKM can be a powerful tool in this never have enough time to do what we want world. In practice leveraging these simple techniques will allow us to manage our time better and hopefully alleviate some stress at the same time.

At the core of PKM is the idea of "connect and collect". We must connect with what we need, and the people and resources that have it. Once we make that connection we must collect and store the knowledge gained from the experience of connecting. As mentioned before journaling is an excellent way to capture the knowledge from your connections in addition establishing a mentor/protege relationship where appropriate will strengthen the connection and the knowledge gained from the experience.

The following are some links to additional information on personal knowledge management:
http://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Found-Things-Information-Technologies/dp/0123708664/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225492741&sr=8-9

http://www.amazon.com/Informal-Learning-Rediscovering-Innovation-Performance/dp/0787981699/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225492741&sr=8-15

http://www.millikin.edu/webmaster/pkm/

So all you KM professionals and those who are inspiring to be KM savvy, lets go out there and "drink our own kool-aid" and connect and collect!