(As you probably notice this post is in english. Mostly this blog is in finnish but I don’t know what PKM is in finnish…)

I’ve been reading a bit about personal knowledge management. How does that relate to sport and kettlebells and all that? Well, it relates to anything these days. At least to anything you want to get better at or learn.

We are living in constant bombardment of information at work and during our free time. How to deal with all that without going totally crazy? How to find the useful information related to the goals we are pursuing? The answer is, thinking (and doing something) about our personal knowledge management. Basically, which kind of info do we want to let into our focus?

One good example would be a person looking for info on her new hobby, the trendy kettlebell sport. Where to find info, how to know if the info is any good?

Here’s a person living among a lot of info. The flow of information comes from family, friends, co-workers, internet, magazines, TV, whatever. There’s all kinds of info, the good (a beginner’s guide to lifting), the neutral (a story about a kettlebell telling nothing about the lifting) and the ugly (a story about how some celebrity used kettlebells to do drugs and rob stores). Of course, as we have a limited time to live, it would be a good idea to focus as much on the relevant, the useful, the things that make us happy etc.

Find the folks who know where to find the good stuff

Here’s the person again, this time having found a couple of sources. In reality, the number of sources is probably bigger, tens, even hundreds. Anyway, some of the sources (the red one in this case) will share only negative stuff about the hobby, such as badmouthing other sports people or sharing only yellow press articles on social media platforms. It doesn’t make much sense to listen to these people.

On the other hand, there are people sharing useful tips, showing how the exercises are done in real life and also sharing good stuff on the networks. These could be worth following. A good example is of course Ross Enamait about general training stuff.

This is just an imaginary situation but as we have the means to find many sources of information, it can be a good idea to check the quality of these sources from time to time.

Here’s some more reading for you. This is a big subject and this was just scratching the surface.

Toni Nummela talks about how to find the experts on your field using Twitter (not many kettlebell lifting experts seem to actually use Twitter but try this with your own interest):

http://www.toninummela.com/blog/2013/01/twitter-vinkki-miten-loydat-alasi.html

Wikipedia article on PKM:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_management

”

Skills associated with personal knowledge management.

• Reflection. Continuous improvement on how the individual operates.
• Manage learning. Manage how and when the individual learns.
• Information literacy. Understanding what information is important and how to find unknown information.
• Organizational skills. Personal librarianship. Personal categorization and taxonomies.
• Networking with others. Knowing what your network of people knows. Knowing who might have additional knowledge and resources to help you
• Researching, canvassing, paying attention, interviewing and observational ’cultural anthropology’ skills
• Communication skills. Perception, intuition, expression, visualization, and interpretation.
• Creative skills. Imagination, pattern recognition, appreciation, innovation, inference. Understanding of complex adaptive systems.
• Collaboration skills. Coordination, synchronization, experimentation, cooperation, and design.

”

Harold Jarche and what has PKM have to do with the future of work (and also how to support any activity with a goal):

http://www.jarche.com/2013/01/prepare-for-the-future-of-work

”Much of PKM is about finding balance. In seeking knowledge sources, we have to balance aggregation, or getting as much information as possibile, with filtering, or ensuring that we have more signal than noise. Our networks need to be diverse and varied in order to be exposed to new ideas, but we cannot keep track of everything, so we have to be judicious with our time.  ”

 

And finally a PDF entitled, Climbing the Personal Knowledge Mountain:

http://thinkingshift.com/web/downloads/ClimbingthePKM0503.PDF