Hi there my beautiful friend!
This one is short.
One takeaway, one video, one CTA.
What changed in PKM this past year?
Over the weekend I spoke at the European PKM Summit. I spoke there last year too. Two years in a row, same event, very different room (but the same fashion sense, I guess?).
Last year, the geeks were quietly talking about AI tools in the dark corners of the converence. Still niche, still early adopter energy.
This year, that was everyone.
Old, young, no coding background whatsoever. Building read-it-later apps, book catalogues, study assistants, web scrapers, mindfulness applications. Someone built a music teacher for their kid. All of it inside Obsidian, all with Claude Code.
You can build something like that in 10 minutes. And the best part? It's yours. No subscription. No company that owns your data. Yours.
The age of traditional apps is dead. The age of personalised, self-built apps is here.
Clive Thomson, a tech writer who attended, said this PKM Summit gave him a glimpse of what the future of PKM will look like. And he's right. This is where we're heading. And honestly, I've never been more excited.
You, reading this newsletter, are right at that edge. Think of yourself as having early access.
But Clive also said this: "Every time new technology arrives, we're excited and overwhelmed in equal measure".
It is a flood.
20 years ago, what tools did we have? A word processor. Today we have too many to choose from. How do we manage this? How do we become essentialists now that almost anything is possible?
Most people never figure it out. Gene almost didn't. For years he tried everything - Notion, Roam, Logseq, GTD, PARA... All of it collapsed under its own maintenance. What finally fixed it wasn't discipline or a better app. It was removing the friction entirely, and letting AI handle the admin so the thinking could stay human.
We recorded the whole conversation:
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Want to build it yourself? We're opening a 4-week live cohort in April. You'll get a free email series and resources leading up to the launch, plus early access when the cohort opens.
Until next week,
Strength and Honour,
Dee
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