Going Beyond BrainFrame

This page came about because I had a conversation on Mastodon about reigniting webrings. My hope is that this can be the beginnings of a personal knowledge management webring.

BrainFrame is not the only way to work with your knowledge. In fact, there’s an entire universe of tools and methods that have been put together to help you achieve your goals. Over time, I’ll make blog posts that will address most (if not all) of these items and how they intersect with BrainFrame. For right now, I want to give you a tour and enough information at each stop to make your visit here worth your time.

What is a Personal Knowledge Management System?

A personal knowledge management system (PKMS) is simply a way for you to record what you know in a way that helps you find it again later. You may have your own method for curating your knowledge, or you may use someone else’s guide to get started. These links are some of the more popular varieties.

Methods and Approaches

Evergreen Notes
Designed by Andy Matuschak, this system emphasizes that notes are forever being updated. To compare, other systems tend to create notes once and then reference them forever without updating them.
Getting Things Done
Created by David Allen, this system focuses more on tasks and projects as opposed to personal knowledge management. However, by following this system, considerable knowledge is built up in written form, so working with a PKMS will help you navigate GTD more effectively.
Linking Your Thinking
Designed by Nick Milo, this system trains you to use Maps of Contents to organize your knowledge. This allows you to transcend some of the limitations of files and folders to store your data.
PARA
Designed by Tiago Forte, this system focuses on Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. This allows you to focus on how much you can do with the ideas, starting with your current projects and carrying through to your long term archives.
Zettelkasten
Made famous by Niklas Luhmann, this is a system that was created for a set of notecards living in a box. This method provides a set of small notes (usually no more than a paragraph or two) that are all interconnected, with the links between the notes being the source of inspiration that allowed the creator to be as prolific as he was.

Tools

Over time, these links will expand to include information about the tools.

Personal Knowledge Management Systems

PDF Readers

ePub Readers

Library Management and Reading

File Sync and Storage

Reference Management

Hardware

Ebook Sources

Build This Webring With Me

The field is huge, and always growing. Your help in adding to this list is greatly appreciated.

And right now, it’s not even actually a webring (something I’d love to change).

With all that said, do you know a tool or a method I should add? Feel free to email me at getbrainframe@gmail.com or tag me on Mastodon at @pedersen@c.im and let me know.