Today and tomorrow I will take tons of notes on talks and workshops about note-taking, personal knowledge management and working in your digital garden. I will visit the PKM Summit here in Utrecht and I really look forward to it. For the talks, the niche nerdy bubble I’ll be in and of course the people. There will be dozens of familiair faces I haven’t spoken to in real for ages and there will be new minds to meet.

My focus for these two days is how to deal with my Collector’s Fallacy. This is a cognitive bias where individuals believe that the value of a collection of items is greater than the individual items themselves. This leads collectors to hold on to items with little or no actual value, simply because they are part of a collection. As a knowledge worker, this leads to collecting all sorts of intellectual stimulation. Without actually doing something with it. Christian over on the Zettelkasten blog has an excellent essay on this topic.

I’ve tried various strategies to deal with it but all to no avail. I feel there is still some way of dealing with the overload of notes and information in my inboxes that fits me. Not an overall framework, but rather small nuggets of various ideas and frameworks I can make my own. I look forward to actively talk and think about this. So when I take these tons of notes at the PKM Summit, I actually do something with them.