Karl Voit's 2023 talk: The Art of Organizing Yourself and Your Data

| pkm

I'm starting to dig into what other people have shared about personal information management and personal knowledge management. Karl Voit is one of my favourite people in this space, and I've enjoyed

I thought I'd sketchnote the recording of his talk at Worklab 2023: "The Art of Organizing Yourself and Your Data". Here it is:

Text from sketch

The Art of Organizing Yourself and Your Data - 2023 presentation by Karl Voit

My focus

  • personal information
  • methods, not so much tools
  • developing your own methods

Vocabulary problem

  • water, water bottle, bottle, drink, beverage, container
  • If you ask different people to list words to describe it, you have to go far down the list to find shared words.
  • Everyone has a different mental model, even past you vs. present you

Navigation, search

Desktop metaphor

  • Things in the real world can have only one specific location
    • Hierarchies
  • In the virtual world, you can have multiple ways to find what you want: tags, search, …

Tag trees, filter

  • ex: sports, hardware

Tagging tip: Controlled vocabulary: develop a short list of preferred words

Everything is Miscellaneous - David Weinberger

  • physical order: only one order at a time (can change)
  • index: library index catalogue
  • no order

It nudges me to think about:

  • where I can use tags to connect ideas that I file in different places, such as Embark-related context menus in my Emacs configuration
  • reviewing my tags to see how I can consolidate terms or develop further distinctions
  • creating maps and linking notes to improve navigation
  • improving search for my personal notes so that it's easier for me to find things

I also edited some captions for it, because captions are nice. Enjoy!

Links:

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