I ordered a Tablet PC yesterday (a Compaq TC1000). My hope is that the features of the tablet will enable me to work the want I want to work, yet allow me to take advantage of the unparalleled search and retrieval capabilities that computers (are supposed to) afford me.

So, rather than grabbing a pad of paper, kicking back in my chair, and scribbling ideas down the way I do now, I’ll pull my tablet from its docking station and kick back with that instead. Rather than printing out documents and news stories so I can jot my thoughts in the margins and highlight what’s relevant or important to me, I’ll save them digitally and use the tablet’s “digital ink” to do my annotation and highlighting. It’s close enough to the way I work now that it just might work, and this method of information capture will certainly allow for more effective search and retrieval down the road than the brute-force methods I use now for handwritten notes and annotated documents.

My personal knowledge management philosophy is based on the notion that knowledge is a byproduct of everyday activities. The email I send and receive, the web sites I read for news and others’ perspectives, the ideas and conversations I’ll have today, all of these things contribute to my collective “knowledge”.

Said a different way, there’s more to knowledge management than just search, though search has certainly gotten the most ink. Information capture is also an enormously important problem to solve, since without effective capture, the knowledge behind the search is necessarily less valuable.

The key to successful information capture is to make the process as unobtrusive as possible. If knowledge is a byproduct of everyday activities, then the only viable way to capture it is to fit invisibly into those everyday activities. If I have to change the way I work to capture knowledge, then chances are I won’t be able to create it as effectively in the first place, and I’m actually worse off than when I was creating it and then losing it.