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Practical PKM

by Mike Schmitz

A weekly newsletter where I help people apply values-based productivity principles and systems for personal growth, primarily using Obsidian. Subscribe if you want to make more of your notes and ideas.

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🧭 You Need a Compass, Not a Blueprint

In this edition of Practical PKM: 💡 The Big Idea: You need a direction, but not a completed plan 😎 Something Cool: Note Toolbar plugin 📖 Book Notes: Your Best Year Ever by Michael Hyatt I’m a planner. I like to have everything figured out. No surprises please 😂 But when it comes to sensemaking (an important PKM skill), the path isn’t straightforward. Life often takes twists and turns you don’t expect or see coming. When that happens, you need to be able to reorient quickly. Which is why it’s...

5 days ago • 5 min read

Cartography (the study and practice of making and using maps) is somewhat of a lost art. On one hand, the rise and fall of cartography makes perfect sense as the exquisite handmade maps of ancient times have been replaced by readily available satellite imagery. The word cartography itself is antiquated, combining two Ancient Greek words that mean “write” and “sheet of papyrus.” It’s a bit difficult to translate that to modern times. A collection of map-making tools. But while you may not see...

12 days ago • 5 min read

In this edition of Practical PKM: How to use the 4 Levels of Reading to get more out of books you read An example of how I use MOCs to connect ideas Details on my upcoming Reading Masterclass A cool Obsidian plugin to streamline creating book notes My book notes from How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler “How to Read a Book has to be the stupidest book title I’ve seen!” That was my first impression when my friend Joe originally picked this Mortimer Adler classic for Bookworm. Turns out, it’s...

19 days ago • 6 min read

I remember several years ago being enamored with people I followed online sharing their OmniFocus setups. Custom perspectives were the big thing back then (views that showed only tasks that met specific criteria), and everyone was coming up with clever ways to slice and dice what they needed to get done. I carefully studied how my Internet heroes had set up their systems believing if I just had the right tools, then I could be as productive as they were. So I bought OmniFocus, went through...

26 days ago • 5 min read

In this edition of Practical PKM: The problem with pseudo-roductivity (and what we can do about it) How to apply Slow Productivity principles using The PKM Stack A great new podcast about the creative process My notes from Slow Productivity by Cal Newport Pseudo-productivity is a term Cal Newport uses in his book Slow Productivity to describe the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort. And to be honest, it’s not a new concept. Managers and...

about 1 month ago • 7 min read

In this edition of Practical PKM: Why the idea of work/life blanace is a myth for the modern knowledge worker How to live a more balanced life through the application of intentional imablance A step-by-step walkthrough for setting up the Wheel of Life in Obsidian A cool new Obsidian plugin for taking notes on YouTube videos My book notes from The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly The whole idea of work/life balance is a bunch of baloney. Maybe in the past you could establish firm boundaries between...

about 1 month ago • 6 min read

I really enjoyed listening to Cal Newport’s Deep Life podcast last week in which he interviewed entrepreneur Noah Kagan about his new book, Million Dollar Weekend. During the interview, Cal & Noah started talking about the importance of trying a bunch of things since you never really know what’s going to work. And if anyone would know, it would be Noah. He was employee #30 at Facebook (worked directly with Mark Zuckerburg before getting fired) and employee #4 at Mint.com before starting...

about 2 months ago • 5 min read

I’ve always been fascinated by how the human brain works. It really is incredible. The amount of information it can process in a single moment rivals even the most powerful supercomputers. In fact, as amazing and powerful as our computers have become, in some ways, they still can’t compare to the biological hardware between our ears. For example, computers are great for automating repeating tasks and searching for answers, but your brain is better suited for ideation and brainstorming. Which...

about 2 months ago • 4 min read

I’ve been journaling for about 15 years. And truth be told, for many of those years, I’ve been struggling to make the journaling habit really stick. But a few years ago, I came across a technique that made journaling easy for me by eliminating the guilt from traditional prompt-based journaling called Daily Questions. In this newsletter, I’m going to share why I find it so effective and my personal workflow for journaling in Obsidian. Let's start though by talking about where things went wrong...

2 months ago • 4 min read

The average person uses their smartphone over 5 hours per day. And before you say, “Maybe other people have a problem disconnecting from their phone but I’ve got it under control,” I dare you to go into your Settings and look at your Screen Time stats. It's probably higher than you realized. And that's the problem — our technology is engineered to be addictive, and will steal our time and attention if we're not careful about how we use it. The truth is we all struggle with this stuff. The...

2 months ago • 5 min read
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