The Future of Personal Knowledge Management: Apps, AI, and What’s Missing

In this episode of The Interconnectedness of Things, hosts Emily and Dr. Andrew Hudson explore the evolving landscape of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). They break down what PKM is, why it matters, and how the shift to remote work accelerated its importance. The discussion covers popular note-taking and knowledge management tools like Apple Notes, Obsidian, Notion, and OneNote, comparing their strengths, weaknesses, and the key features that make them effective (or frustrating).

But the conversation doesn’t stop there—Emily and Andrew dive into the critical missing piece in today’s PKM apps: AI. While AI integration is becoming more common, they argue that current implementations fall short in truly organizing and enhancing personal knowledge. They also discuss knowledge graphs and how AI could better assist users in managing and retrieving information more efficiently.

Whether you're a digital note-taking enthusiast or just looking for a better way to organize your thoughts, this episode offers deep insights into the tools and trends shaping the future of PKM. Tune in, share your favorite PKM tools, and join the discussion!

About "The Interconnectedness of Things"
Welcome to "The Interconnectedness of Things," where hosts Dr. Andrew Hutson and Emily Nava explore the ever-evolving landscape of technology, innovation, and how these forces shape our world. Each episode dives deep into the critical topics of enterprise solutions, AI, document management, and more, offering insights and practical advice for businesses and tech enthusiasts alike.

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QFlow helps manage your documents in a secure and organized way. It works with your existing software to make it easy for you to find all your documents in one place. Discover how QFlow can transform your organization at qflow.com

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Transcript

00:04 Hi, and welcome back to the interconnected interconnectedness of things podcast where we explore how technology processes and people shape the way we manage information in our ever evolving world.
00:18 I'm Emily, your host, and I'm joined here today with my co-host, Dr. Andrew Hudson. Good afternoon. Um, today we're going to be talking about personal knowledge management and, um, what that is and Why it matters, and we're going to be talking about different apps that we may use as individuals for personal
00:45 things or for our professional lives. We're also going to be talking about what's missing from these apps and how we can better organize our personal knowledge.
00:59 Yeah, that's a great kickoff, Emily. And one of the things I think is important just as level set for our listeners is like, why should you care?
01:09 What a personal knowledge management app is. Do you even know of that term that has been dubbed? And I'll be honest, I hadn't really seen that term until COVID.
01:23 And it seemed because so many people We're forced into a position where they had to start using technology in a way that perhaps they hadn't before.
01:36 That's where this resurgence came in of, like, how do I stay on top of stuff through my computer? It doesn't mean these things didn't exist before, but the term didn't really seem to be out there.
01:50 And especially if people that were in the office five days a week, they would, They would meet people at the coffee bar or in conference meetings, um, so they didn't actually have to share information or knowledge the same way.
02:07 You know, that's a great point that that reminded me of an article I read from 1999 by a researcher with the last name of Mimna that talked about the types of knowledge sharing that exist.
02:21 And so the three types that he talked about were Externalizing, meaning something you knew and getting out of your head formally by writing it down.
02:33 Internalizing, which is the opposite, where you're taking something someone else externalized and now pulling it into your own mental model.
02:42 And then there is a key one that folks often undervalued, which is called socialization. So that exactly what you talked about, that water cooler conversation.
02:56 Uh, and his example was with doctors and the importance of a doctor's lounge at a hospital. And those moments of interaction and socialization, how they improved care versus trying a single method of externalizing and internalizing care tips and tricks.
03:17 Right. And so if you take that across everywhere with COVID happened, an entire portion of that knowledge sharing went away.
03:27 So folks were trying to like, how do I, how do I fix that? Right? Yeah. And I guess like notepads and notebooks weren't as, I mean, you could still use them at home, but you still had to share that information some way with your coworkers.
03:46 That's a great segue. So like, A notepad, a notebook, I'm writing things down in my journal, physically having a thing with me that I'm writing in, for kids at home, that's like an iPhone without the electronics, right?
04:05 I think it's worth introducing a definition of personal knowledge management at PKM. And that's where it's a process of collecting information That you would use to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, or share knowledge in daily activities, in a way that it, uh, in which the, the processes support
04:32 work activities. So a great definition for this is really centered on the knowledge, uh, worker, which is a very broad term, but anybody who's working with Uh, the connections between different pieces of information to perform their job, right?
04:53 Uh, and there is, that's a growing portion of work today, where it's, it's less and less, uh, physically doing something versus working with an interface or a computer to, to make it do something.
05:13 Right. So how do you, how do you share that and how do you grow? If you have a piece of paper that you use to gather, classify, store, search, and retrieve, you can imagine there's some limitations.
05:30 Oh yeah. Right. You can't, you can't press it to the desktop computer and be like, share it. Right. If I'm going to share it, I either have to.
05:41 Make a copy, physical copy, or I have to give someone else my journal, and now I don't have access to it, right?
05:48 So it has a very, uh, limited access to that information. Which is why people started to digitize it, because now I can have it backed up, now I can share it easier, and I can do other things.
06:05 I can use programs to help me find Bits of information that I couldn't find before. I don't know about you, but like the search on my journal just digs like.
06:18 Yeah, the search bar, you can't even find it. You can't find it in the journal. It is the worst. I gotta know what I'm doing.
06:26 I gotta make sure I follow all the right steps. I gotta really standardize it. So as a result of realizing The limitations of a physical externalization of knowledge.
06:40 People turn to apps as, as you would do. Uh, and there's a couple worth noting. Now, this is not a comprehensive list.
06:49 And I'm sure our listeners can rattle off a hundred others that we missed today. And please do. Please let us know about it.
06:58 Uh, we, we'd love to hear from you. But we're, we're gonna narrow it down to a few popular ones that We're pretty sure you've come across at least one of these.
07:09 And if you haven't, then how did you find our podcast? Right. Oh my goodness. So the one, probably how you found the podcast was using a mobile phone and we are Apple users ourselves.
07:22 Uh, Apple notes. Uh, another one, Google Docs. Uh, Obsidian and LogSec are some interesting PKMs that have come out. And really gotten popularity in the past five years or so.
07:36 Rome research was a why is a why combinator backed startup for externalizing knowledge and finding the interconnectedness of knowledge.
07:50 You may have heard of notion, which is a great enhanced wiki. Uh, Microsoft OneNote for our Microsoft users out there.
08:02 That's been out for a minute. I'd say 20 years. Uh, and I, I gotta tell ya, I have some great stories about it.
08:09 Um, but I've moved away from it. And then one, I'll just throw out there. Little bit esoteric, little bit on the edge, but bare notes.
08:18 Okay. Well, it's got it in the name notes. So there you go. So you would know at least half of what's going on there.
08:27 And I guess you could have fun with the, uh, uh, Senate, a hominem between pair and bear. Uh, so as we start to look at these different things, I was curious, Nava, uh, do you have any of these that you prefer that you're using on a daily basis?
08:48 I multiple times a day will click on my little note pad. On my MacBook. So Apple Notes is my go-to.
08:57 I use it across my iPhone and my MacBook. And that one does have a search bar. Um, so I've, I've gotten really used to that Apple Notes.
09:09 That's awesome. Uh, so then you kind of also alluded to some evaluation criteria that we put together for how you could really start to compare these different platforms.
09:23 Uh, one of them you are to key on is search. Can you find the information that you need to find?
09:30 Uh, you had mentioned the search bar. Uh, how about other organizational elements of Apple notes? Can you speak to those at all?
09:39 Um, well, it's I'm not sure how different or how normal how I use Apple note is, um, but the headings just being able to format it.
09:52 Makes it more easy to read. Um, and then there is a collaboration element. So other people that have Apple notes, you can share your notes and it can be a, uh, you can share those.
10:09 Um, so those are our features that I really like. Uh, yeah, I think they're great. Um, From a sharing standpoint, kind of the nice thing is, and I believe this happens, you can actually see which notes are shared by a navigation button inside of the app.
10:25 Oh, yes. So notes that are shared with me. So that's kind of like a pre-can search. I want to see everything that I've shared or has been shared with me.
10:34 Uh, there's directories, folders that you can move things to. And probably less used because it is a bit newer, uh, our hashtag tags.
10:45 Oh. If anybody has a trivia night that they have to win, um, those allow for a broader, freer set of metadata that you can add to your notes by using a hashtag.
11:02 And then you can use that filter in a single note can now have multiple hashtags. So it doesn't have to be limited to a single directory or concept, which is kind of nice.
11:14 Uh, which kind of leads to some of the other criterion. So searching is there free text? Uh, can I search for headings?
11:24 Uh, can I understand how things are interrelated? You mentioned collaboration and sharing as key for you, which I agree with.
11:33 Um, you know, we talk about personal knowledge management, but at the end of the day, every single person is not an island.
11:40 Right. You are interacting with others on your team and your organization. You are looking at external data sources that you're trying to sift and make decisions on.
11:50 All of these things come together to affect you personally, but they are not generated solely by you. So that connectedness is really important.
12:01 Access and portability we talked about. That's another big criteria. How easy is it to get to? Very recently. Apple put their Apple notes on the browser.
12:16 Prior to that, it was really hard to access notes on anything other than an Apple device. Oh, I did not know that.
12:25 So you can go ahead. You can access it on a Windows machine. iCloud.com log into a browser, Linux, Windows, Mac, and you can get to those notes.
12:38 Now, it's limited functionality. And I believe you still have to have an Apple ID, which is another barrier, but it does allow for more access options.
12:49 Uh, something like Obsidian, however, from a collaboration and sharing, it doesn't have great collaboration, but it does have great publishing.
13:03 It doesn't, it isn't as easy to share with Obsidian and with another Obsidian user, but you can publish it to a website and Obsidian will even host it for you.
13:12 That's crazy. So that comes really good with like the externalization and internalization, um, just as an example. The, the other thing is how easy would it be portability to extract all of your Apple notes and move to something else?
13:33 Are you asking me? Cause I feel like that would be really hard. It would be really hard. I agree with you.
13:38 Yeah. It's in a proprietary format. It seems and you can export it, but it's a lot of clicks. There isn't like a bulk export.
13:47 Uh, it isn't saved. There's files on your directory that you can easily get to. There's all this stuff that comes along that kind of blocks that.
13:54 And so that's another way to evaluate Personal knowledge management is are you locked in to the method you're currently using or can it top into other?
14:05 Apps as you evolve your workflow your work process your needs can't it go with you? And more and more people are finding man I really want something that I'm not locked in because I don't know where else I'd want to share or collaborate on this right if it's locked into this apps That that could exclude
14:26 a whole population of folks, uh, or even myself as I evolve in the future. Uh, which kind of leads to a next thing, I guess you could say in sharing, which is when I don't want to share.
14:41 Security and privacy. That's a big thing, right? Yes. So there you can start looking at end to end encryption. So not only is it encrypted in transit, but is it on both sides on your device and the other devices that you have?
14:57 Is that also encrypted? You're going to have varying levels of that as you use different apps. And you have to kind of decide what's most important to you.
15:08 Important to think about. Uh, but something kind of cool. You said you use Apple notes. You can put FaceTime. I didn't know that either.
15:16 I've been using Apple notes since this. It started and I feel like I use it so basically. I didn't even know.
15:25 You could lock out a note about the face time. That's why. Yeah, all the goodness, which is also kind of nice because if you think about the usability, the ease of use, there's a lot more capability that's there if you look for it, but not knowing about it doesn't seem to have prevented you from adopting
15:47 it. No, not at all. So the, the core purpose of how you can use it and how approachable it is, I think, is important.
15:55 And then how it can offer you more features as your needs get more sophisticated. Yeah. All of that, I think, is really important.
16:03 Uh, the final thing I wanted to bring up brand new AI integration. Yes. So we'll stay on our Apple Notes journey.
16:14 All right. Yeah. If anybody has heard of Apple Intelligence, apparently AI no longer means artificial intelligence. It means Apple Intelligence to a certain cohort of the consumer population.
16:30 Where do you see the options to use AI in Apple notes? Honestly, I can't imagine that being, that making Apple knows any easier.
16:47 If anything, it makes it more complicated. Um, because the only way I can think of it being used, which I'm pretty sure I could have used it this way to begin with, is asking Siri to make a note.
17:01 Like, hey Siri, can you create a new note and blah, blah, blah, blah. So that's just where my mind is.
17:09 Um, I'd be curious. Of other use cases for apple intelligence in terms of apple notes. I think that people are still trying to find that themselves.
17:22 Um, for me, if we're really focused in on personal knowledge management, I do think apple intelligence is potentially limited. Um, it can summarize, but it also isn't always great at that.
17:39 If you need an example, hop over to apple intelligence fails, uh, subreddit and delight in the very uncomfortable awkward mistakes that the summarization can offer.
17:53 Kind of funny. Do you love it when AI fails? It's so funny. I know. We feel like so superior, right?
18:00 Because humans never make mistakes. Yeah, never. Uh, but it is, it is a lot of fun to see it and I think that's coming into Where some of these PKMs kind of have limitation because they're, it seems across the board, the integration is either summarizing content that's already there or generating content
18:24 based off of a prompt. And that can be very difficult to try to navigate through if you aren't really sure on how you'd want to use that.
18:34 And so that's a whole new learning mechanism. And at the end of the day, it could actually be a barrier To adopting some of these tools, if you feel like that has to be mastered in order to get value from it.
18:45 Um, and the number one thing that none of these apps talk about, and I'll, I'll mention it now, uh, will you use it?
18:54 Cause you could have the best app in the world. You could have the, the most beautiful physical journal that you're going to write in with like the best card stock paper and I don't know, gold leaf everywhere, but if you're, if you never want to touch it, or you don't use it, or it's incorporated with
19:11 what you do, it's, it's valueless. It's not there for you. Well, as someone who writes one line and a journal, and then doesn't touch it for a month, and then I'm like, I need to start journaling, and I have to go buy a new journal.
19:26 Can't relate to what you just said, but. Yeah. And it works the same with my Apple notes, too. I'll write a sentence in an Apple note.
19:35 And then start a new one. That's amazing. And, and when you're doing that, though, the, the ease to do it digitally probably surpasses the physical.
19:47 Yeah, but then also the ease to add that in is probably why you keep using it, because I mean, we use Google Docs, but that isn't our go-to note-taking experience.
20:00 You'll go to Apple Notes. Yeah. It's easy. How do you take notes? You know, I've been all over the place.
20:07 Thank you for asking. Uh, I first started seriously with digital note taking with Microsoft one back in the day. And I was blown away and we're talking like the version from 2007.
20:24 Uh, hopefully people listening were born before that date. Uh, and then it got better in 2010. And then I stopped using it.
20:36 Because Microsoft had all of these robust features on one note. And because they wanted more people to adopt it, they took away features or made them harder to find within the interface.
20:50 And I had such a sophisticated use of this. I had templates made so I could click it. It was integrated with my calendar.
20:57 I was publishing or printing is what it would call it. PDFs and PowerPoints so that I could search across those and find them.
21:05 My graduate school professors hated me because I could take open, uh, note exams within 10 minutes because I had one note and I could search across all 50 articles that they had out there.
21:16 It was like having superpowers. It's actually crazy in early 2000s, I guess, late 2000s that you could do that, right?
21:24 Like that seems like, oh man, that'd be something to do now. Uh, and I think that folks really don't maybe have the same use case I did, or I think what's crazy is that Because it was so sophisticated, they had to pair back on the features.
21:38 Because at the end of the day, people saw it like Apple notes. Just an easy way to jot down a note, not a full management system of knowledge, right?
21:51 But it wasn't approachable, too. I think that was it. To the person starting out, it might have felt overwhelming, because it had all the features.
22:02 So they paired down on showing the features, but also accessing those features, which then I'm like, well, man, I'm like stuck on this.
22:12 I have to get off of it. So I had to go through a whole thing to get off and make sure that I was taking a different method with markdown notes.
22:18 That's my go to now. And that allows me to switch between multiple different editors of notes. I've gotten deep into obsidian, for example, uh, and logs sec.
22:32 Because they really allow for a strong interconnectedness of the different notes that I would take. And they have kind of a need daily journal.
22:43 So every day you would open it up and have the today's date on it and you could make notes but then you could tag it to anything else within the system.
22:50 And so it became a nice little habit. Okay, what am I now today? I don't have to think about it.
22:54 And then it had great integrations so I could import my calendar information into the note. But I could also share it.
23:01 Because it was a markdown file, so it kind of hit more notes for me than Apple notes did. But at the end of the day, I started using Apple notes again.
23:10 Oh, interesting. So as all the power that I could do with that, because it wasn't great on mobile, because there was some barriers to it, um, I ended up kind of moving away from it and I went deep into it, just like I did with one note.
23:25 At the end of the day, being able to click on something and write it fast and not have to think about it, That's kind of what it wins more often than not.
23:34 It certainly does. So that now we get to a point, I think we've exhausted what a PKM is. Hopefully everybody is, it's kind of has it.
23:46 I've never heard of apple notes. That's what KM is moving on. Moving on. And I wanted to talk about what it isn't because I've I've done the research for everybody who's listening right now.
24:05 I've, I've been through the pain. I've adopted different tools. I've seen the strengths and I've seen the weaknesses. We've mentioned a few already.
24:13 But the biggest thing, things that I would say that are blocking the future of these personal knowledge management devices rests on a couple of big topics.
24:27 The first is AI. AI to me, if it's limited to generating some text on a page, it's not enough. At the same time, the large language models that are out there, don't have my context.
24:50 Because how I think about things, how I've collected conclusions I've made, what I think is more important to connect is going to be different than Emily.
24:58 And it will certainly be different than the training set that they use to go train that model. As a result, I want the ability to take what I'm contributing to every day with externalizing my knowledge to not only be able to share that with others, but also benefit from the work I'm doing to get it out
25:22 of my head, to get it back by the use of these powerful, large language models. And none of the PKMs today take that really into strong consideration for how it's helping you organize your knowledge.
25:38 And that's really the key. How you organize it is the key. If you, and you've probably seen this before, have you ever written, seen some of these notes and like, you can't make heads or tails of it?
25:50 Yeah, it's all the time. We've all had that, right? Like, I don't know what this person was thinking. What the heck is going on here?
25:58 Uh, are you okay? Well, uh, and that's going to now extrapolate that across eight billion people around the world, right?
26:09 You're going to get some variation. The, the key is if, if you can center on an organizational method, without it being burdensome, then you can start to get power out of the LLMs.
26:22 And there is a specific Type of organization that LLMs really respond to well and that's the knowledge graph. So we talk about on this podcast.
26:32 And the reason why that's powerful is it's built to work with natural language, but also the knowledge graph organizes bits of information and how they relate to each other using that natural language so that it is able to be traversed easily by an LLM.
26:50 So it can start to better match its responses With your questions, it's great for Q&A. So, just to make sure I'm understanding, um, we're talking in terms of let's just say like a company's knowledge base.
27:09 And you mentioned like, have you ever looked at someone's notes and can't tell what they're saying? So, let's just say that person wrote their notes using Some company software that the LLM has access to with that, then that AI that's using the LLM be able to break their notes down into a way, like a
27:35 standardized way. It can. It can pull things out of that. So some evidence of that happens with like doctors notes and pulling out the prescription information that's been used with LLMs to try to better structure and organize.
27:50 Uh, when there's a, uh, diagnosis, that can be better structured in the system, where it, it does help no matter what is when you can combine some descriptors, we'll call them properties, uh, and, and explicit relationships to those notes.
28:12 So the system that you're in needs to be able to provide an easy way to add context Without hindering your ability to free think.
28:24 And so the marriage of those two things is very difficult uh, to accomplish. It is not accomplishable in things like Apple notes today.
28:34 Right. Uh, and it takes a lot of effort to accomplish it with something like obsidian, where you can start to add properties and linkages between those notes, but it is don't You have to learn how to do it.
28:50 It's not going to teach you. And you have to want to do it. If you don't, it's, it's done. There's nothing else to do.
28:59 So you have to have something that kind of strikes that balance. Yeah, guarantee the majority of knowledge workers do not want to learn how to build a knowledge graph.
29:10 I agree with you. And even if they wanted to, it's not, it's not like a thing you would do over brunch.
29:17 Yeah. Like, let's have some of the moses and pineapple and maybe a croissant and figure out knowledge graphs. I mean, it's, it's, you need the ability.
29:29 Well, you need to be able to get someone who's done it before and they can simplify it for you. Yeah.
29:34 And that's really what we're trying to do. Like, we've worked a ton with organizations that have enterprise content that are integrating data, they want to automate And they want to standardize.
29:48 They are already going through that process with their documents and other bits of content. What we want to be able to do is offer the ability to take that same experience that they've already committed to learning today, not ask them to learn something new, but help them build those meaningful relationships
30:08 between information that are interpretable by an LLM so that they can start to take advantage of it. And the use cases start to get really big.
30:18 You can imagine for a law firm. They want to go to do a search on, uh, the past litigation that they've done in the past that are similar to what they need to work on now.
30:29 Well, that's a sophisticated question that can be difficult to answer. And a few lawyers are trying to do that with open source, or not open source, but proprietary LLMs like Chatchee BT.
30:39 And it'll start to make up cases. Legal precedent that doesn't exist. Allucinations, that's right. But if you're able to say, use this corpus of data that I am confident is accurate, you pretty much alleviate the risk of hallucinations and increase the reliability.
30:57 Because at the end of the day, all in LLM is, is probabilities. For everything that you ask them to give it back, the response that you're asking for, it is saying, this is the highest probability response that I can offer.
31:13 And if it doesn't have your context, how in the world can you increase the probability that it's correct? The answer is you can't.
31:21 Yeah, I can't. So that's that's our episode today. How personal knowledge management systems are out there, how they can be a great help, how they aren't new, but also how they're missing the boat with the future of AI.
31:37 Uh, and we welcome everybody to comment on this one. If you want to us to deep dive into more areas and to talk about this topic more, just let us know.
31:46 We're excited about it. Absolutely. We would love to hear from any and everyone who have listened to our podcast, especially this one.
31:54 What personal knowledge management apps are you using? Um, let us know. Um, and also if you found this discussion, helpful.
32:03 Don't forget to subscribe and share with your network. Um, we'll be back next time, um, with another great episode. Thanks guys.
32:12 Thanks Emily.