There has been a huge discussion in the productivity space: is PKM, or personal knowledge management, dead? It is hard to predict the future, but a lot of content creators and people on social media are talking about the death of PKM. My argument is that it cannot be dead because it has never really been alive.
Personal knowledge management gained a lot of traction with the rise of the second brain and a lot of new note-taking and productivity apps. Especially during the pandemic, a lot of people thought that the future of work would be in remote teams, which meant that we would need a lot of productivity apps. Then, right after the pandemic, we got AI. At first, a lot of productivity influencers thought that the future of AI would be that you could just take notes and AI would resurface things whenever you needed them. The dream of note-taking. Now we have seen that AI can do a lot, both good and bad, and I will write a post about AI more generally later. The focus now is that, with the rise of AI, the question is whether or not we still need notes and note-taking apps.
You still need notes
The question is not whether we need notes, but whether we need PKM and advanced note apps. Everyone agrees that notes are still important. Some might even say that notes are more important now, to give context to AI. I am actually one of those who believe that a good note-taking habit is what will differentiate good and bad AI use, but that is right now, and with the pace of AI development, what I think about AI will probably change.
Notes are still important. But what no longer feels important is spending time connecting and organising notes and having note-taking apps with a bunch of features, because user interfaces will matter less when your main interaction with your notes is through AI. Basically, because we no longer need to interact as much with our notes, we no longer need typical PKM features.
With that being said, we also no longer need the management part of personal knowledge management, because AI is supposed to figure out what knowledge is needed, what is outdated, and make sure the information you need is delivered to you when you need it. I have two great examples of this. The first is Mem AI, which has created a feature where AI finds your projects and tasks based on your notes. The other is Tana, which uses your knowledge base inside your meetings to answer questions. For example, you could ask your knowledge base whether you have any notes about the Q4 report that you are discussing in the meeting. It is supposed to be proactive as well. None of these features are perfect, but they are great examples of what the future might look like. There are also a lot of people and apps that now rely on local files, basically just markdown files on your device. So we still need notes, but we do not need to manage them anymore.
PKM was a hobby
Based on this, PKM has been declared dead by many productivity influencers. My argument is that PKM has always been a hobby. A note-taking system is good for productivity, and I believe most people will benefit from one, but I think most people who spend a lot of time managing their notes do it not only to be productive but also because they find it really fun. I am in that category, and a lot of people I know in the PKM community fall into the same category. We love testing new apps, and we find it fun to connect notes, find new workflows and play around with our applications.
What does this mean for the death of PKM? I think PKM will still be alive, because it is more a hobby than a productivity system. What has kept a lot of personal knowledge management apps alive is content creators and people who use them as a hobby. We have had too many apps for a long time, and there will have to be some sort of desaturation in the productivity app space, because we cannot have five to ten apps doing exactly the same thing. However, a lot of the good apps out there will continue to exist just because people really enjoy using them. Not to be more productive, just because it is fun.
I have a slightly silly comparison that I think applies. There are tools that will play video games for you and make sure you get a great score, and in chess an AI will always do better than a human, but people still play chess and video games for enjoyment. My thought is that personal knowledge management apps have been, and will continue to be, that. There will be people who move over to mainly using AI, and there are people who have used personal knowledge management to become more productive and who will most likely move on too, but I think a lot of people will continue to use apps and test out apps just for the fun of it.
PKM will not die
Because I see personal knowledge management more as a hobby than something you do for productivity, I do not think it will die. I think it will continue to be something people use even with the rise of AI. I think a lot of personal knowledge management apps will incorporate AI or be incorporated into AI. I just do not think the whole idea of advanced note-taking apps, moving and connecting notes will disappear, even if AI can do it and probably can do it better. I think productivity will change, especially for work. A lot of project management apps will change, and a lot of apps that rely heavily on revenue from businesses will change a lot, but the personal knowledge category will exist and people will still be into PKM. We might have fewer apps, but I think that would happen regardless of AI. I just think AI has emphasised the fact that we have too many note-taking tools. But I think PKM as a hobby will continue, even though PKM for productivity might die out because of AI.