Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is a critical competency for the 21st century learning professional. It may be time to refresh your strategies and tools.

via It’s Time For A Personal Knowledge Management Refresh — The eLearning Coach

Very timely post for me from Connie Malamed as I work to get my PKM routine into place as I expand my PLN (Personal Learning Network).   So much information is flowing at us everyday it is becoming imperative that we find a way to vet out what we need to know.  How we keep track of it and, hopefully share it with others is an additional challenge.

Fortunately there are numerous tools being developed to assist us in this process.  I was happy to see that the tools I’m using (Feedly, Pocket, Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Diigo) are among Connie’s suggestions.  Although it sometimes seems that each tool tends to open up more information to deal with.

To that point,  I like that Connie advises that we spend time on 1) Knowing your Purpose and 2) Defining you Boundaries. I’m an explorer by nature.  Give me something new to learn and I can lose half an hour in a heartbeat.  Having a purpose for what I’m doing helps. But if I haven’t set boundaries, I’m like my black lab was when she saw a squirrel two yards down the street – gone.

Focus and discipline are the corellary behaviors. Staying focused on content that fits my purpose is key.  If my purpose is to curate 5 entry level items, I may already have them collected. There’s no need to go exploring.

The need for discipline really kicks in whenever exploring for new content.  Like my lab, remembering the boundaries I’ve set can be a challenge.  Two techniques that work for me are 1) putting a stickie note on the edge of my screen with a note of what my purpose is and 2) setting a timer (ala pomodoro) to keep me in the yard.

How do you keep the ideas from spinning out of control?  please share in the comments to this post.