As we tinker around with our personal knowledge systems (PKM) and make them more intricate and fit for our own patterns, I often tend to look back on how I did things, sometimes to leave them around unchanged.. Since every version is stored in Git, we might as well keep a history.

If I would start over again, I would guide myself a bit better by using a series of commandments much like religion has it. The 10 Commandments is a list of principles that might guide you to lead a good life. And as religion has it everyone kind of runs their own list based on a translation or interpretation.

Having a list of commandments for you own personal knowledge management might help to choose and structure knowledge. I don’t have a full list of 10, but here are 5 that mean a lot to me:

1. A system needs to be trustworthy
2. It needs to be fast
3. I should be able to tinker with all data
4. It should me help make discoveries
5. In the future I’d like to take it with me

If you need more inspiration, here are some others as I talked to friends about this:

• I want to make connections
• It should foster creativity
• I want to organize it properly
• I don’t want to organize it
• It should be a visual aid
• I want it as secure as possible
• I want to gain insights and see graphs
• Information should be represented on a timeline
• It should be really easy to put data into it
• Notes should adhere to a certain format
• Notes don’t need to have a format at all
• Or maybe both a format and non-format
• I want to search trough everything
• I pure use it for myself
• Sharing knowledge should be easy

Of course, you can’t have it al (or can you?!). It’s good to take a moment if you’re planning on starting (or have one really!) to ponder over your own commandments and how they relate to your PKM! And you can always ask ChatGPT or any large language model for inspiration!