PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) is in a hot phase these days. A lot of people are busy peddling their solutions to presumed problems of PKM.
There’s a basic truism in sales and marketing that successful products and services solve problems that customers have. In order to sell a new product, therefore, you must identify a problem that they solve. Better to use a breath mint than risk inflicting your (hypothetical) bad breath on your date. My innate skepticism, about this chain of reasoning probably explains why I found marketing such a difficult subject back in my business school days.
One of the go to problems that PKM purports to solve is the need to remember everything you read. Just because “what have you been reading lately” is a routine conversational gambit doesn’t mean that you have to have a clever answer. Stop making it a competition. There have often been cocktail party moments when I struggle to recall what I am currently reading, much less what a recent book was actually talking about.
At the other extreme, I review books from time to time. One of my very first published pieces was a review of Steven Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, which ran in The Hartford Courant. My copy of the review was lost multiple moves ago. As was my review copy of the book. How much better would my life be if I could lay my hands on either of those or on whatever notes I took in the process of writing that review? That seems a precarious hook to hang a marketing campaign on.
If we set marketing puffery aside, how important is it to “remember everything you read”? A Google search suggests there’s a lot of energy behind this goal. If you’re a current student and exams loom, you might be wishing your study habits and note taking practices were more robust. If you’ve finished the reading and your notes are organized and cross-referenced, then we can’t b e friends. If you do any sort of knowledge work, odds are you have more to read and remember than is remotely feasible.
Understand. I love to read. I did it well enough and long enough to finish a doctorate. I can identify over 2800 individual books that I have read at some point. Some, I’ve read and reread to the point of near memorization. Others are a title and a vague memory of what was inside. Your numbers might vary, but I think this is the reality for most of us.
Remembering everything you’ve read is about diligence not value. Diligence for its own sake is a waste of energy. You want to be diligent for activities that make a difference in the world. You’re allowed to do things simply for the pleasure of doing them. Don’t let someone’s marketing agenda distort what makes sense for you.