There is no right answer in PKM. There are only processes that work. The test of PKM is whether it works for you. A person’s PKM practices will change over time, and the most important aspect is being aware of how we seek sources of information, make sense of our own knowledge, and then share it at work, in communities, or through networks. —learning & the future of work (2015)
It might seem harmless – it’s just another AI assistant! To-do app! PKM tool! – but it will catch and keep you in an endless cycle of vocabulary changes that never shape or produce the words you so desperately want to share … I’ve started to see the loudest voices and influencers in the productivity space as little more than productivity tourists; the travel influencers of the various Getting Things Done cults, all of whom pronounce that they’re becoming better people for their experience and documentation of the world, and none of whom stay in one place long enough to absorb anything meaningful. —JA Westenberg (2026)
“simple enough to be boring” — that’s my PKM framework:
Seek > Sense > Share
That’s it.
More from Joan Westenberg:
“Epictetus was a freed slave who used a rented room as his classroom, where he taught philosophy and shaped an almost embarrassing amount of modern thought.
And the poor blighter did it without Obsidian, without a PKM, and without any AI agent to manage his second brain (bad luck). He didn’t even believe that capture itself was the right problem; his system started instead with a simple question.
What is yours to manage?
Epictetus focused on three things: your judgments, your desires, and your decisions; in particular, he emphasized choosing what to pursue, what to turn down, what to keep, and what to cut out completely.”
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/epictetus-ran-a-better-productivity
I’m along time user and advocate of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) method and have benefited massively from it. Even David Allen highlights that it’s not the GTD tooling that matters but instead the principles and practices. He wrote recently “A method that needed updating every time the tools changed wouldn’t have been much of a method.” which I think neatly sums things up.
Excellent advice from David. Thank you, Duncan.
Seek > Sense > Share being “simple enough to be boring” is probably exactly why it has lasted. Duncan’s David Allen quote makes the same point from the GTD side: a method that needs updating every time the tools change isn’t much of a method. The Westenberg line about productivity tourists rings true as well; it is easy to spend more time migrating notes between apps than making sense of them. Share is arguably the hardest step, because it forces the sense-making to become explicit. Do you find that people new to PKM struggle more with Sense or with Share?
My experience over the past decades is that it is sense-making that is the most difficult, especially behaviours that will last over time.
I have come to think of sense-making as a process of iterative reductions in uncertainty.
Well said. Makes sense to me.