In today's world we are faced with a never-ending flow of information across all types of media. We read emails, newsletters and RSS feeds, browse the internet, watch videos on YouTube and other platforms, listen to podcasts and follow posts on social media like Twitter or Facebook.

It is no exaggeration to speak of an avalanche, which can easily become an overload. We are curious, we want to increase our knowledge and we want to have an informed opinion about a large number of topics and areas of interest.

How to channel these online information flows without spending all day scrolling through newsfeeds and scannning websites? Information overload has been attributed to a 'Fear Of Missing Out': we keep reading and scanninng new information in an effort to keep up with the latest news and developments. Maybe this behaviour is more aptly described as 'Fear of Not Being Able to Keep Up with the Information Avalanche'.

Can Personal Knowledge Managent help us to stay on top of the daily flood of information? I think PKM can offer a useful set of tools to channel, store and process new information, but everything must start with the observation that however good our tools are, we will never be able to take in everthing that is available for consumption. We can only read so many articles, web posts and books in a given time frame, so we will inevitably need to make a selection. In an attempt to save time, we can read summaries and reviews instead of books and articles, but that will only replace original sources with second-hand information.

The realization that we cannot consume all new information and need to select and prioritize (and also need to build in 'disconnect time') will help us to put our minds at rest and concentrate on how to shape our information intake. PKM tools can help streamline this process.

Here are some strategies to improve the infomation intake process:

Prioritizing what we consume

Not all information is equally important. We need to determine what is most relevant to our goals and concentrate on information that aligns with our goals, interests and projects.

Building an information pipeline

A lot has been written about building an information pipeline. Information tends to be scattered around different media an platforms, which makes it more difficult to manage and process. There are several solutions available for this in the form of read-it-later apps that allow us to receive and store infomation from different sources in one location. Omnivore and Readwise are good examples of tools to store and process information from the web and to add labels, comments and highlights. Both tools can even manually or automatically funnel this information into PKM systems like Obsidian or Logseq.

Some PKM users report a high level of automation in their information pipeline. Newsletters and RSS feeds arrive in their read-it-later app, where they highlight and comment sections that they want to keep. That information is then automatically transferred into their PKM system, where it is stored in the right location based on rules or labels. Personally, I have never been successful in reaching that kind of automated information intake. I find read-it-later apps useful for quickly collecting interesting snippets of information from the web for further processing. But I manually transfer content from there to my PKM system.

Streamlining and speeding up information intake

While selecting content for inclusion into PKM notes will, in my view, always require active manual engagement with the information in question, there are tools available to streamline and speed up the intake process.

While AI may not be very good at creative tasks, it has become incredibly good at summarizing information, so it can be used to quickly summarize information for deciding which content engage with. There are all kind AI-driven summarization apps available, some as browser extensions, some as part of a read-it-later app, and some as plugins for PKM systems.

It is worth while spending some time experimenting with different prompts to get AI to produce the information that you are looking for in a certain PKM context. For instance, I follow a YouTube channel about practical sustainability, and for that particular channel, I get good results with this prompt to extract highlights from the video transcript: "Summarize the actionable advice from the following video as bullet points".

Selecting, upgrading and synthesizing PKM content

AI can also be used to provide additional context to content that we want to include in our PKM system. When transferring information from my read-it-later inbox , I often use Bing or ChatGPT to ask freeform questions. These are usually simple questions, like tell me more about the author of this article, what can you tell me about concept A, B or C, or how does it relate to X, Y or Z. The AI-generated answers can be helpful to make the new information more complete or to reveal new connections to releated information.

Takeaways

• Information overload is perhaps more a perceived problem than a real problem. Once we manage to align our content intake with our projects and interests, the amount of information to be digested becomes a lot more manageable.
• PKM tools can help us to organize the intake and storage of all kinds of online information that we encounter and collect everyday.
• A read-it-later app or central PKM input mailbox can serve as a central repository to temporarily store information that we want to further engage with and include in our system.
• Integrating new content into a PKM system will, in my view, always remain a manual process that requires active engagement with the content in order to decide where and how it fits into the system, how it relates and links to other information already in the system, and what new ideas and insights and content can be derived from it.
• AI can be used to create instant summaries for pre-selection purposes, or to provide additional context or information.