Wired News, Etch a Site as Easy as Pie: Even in the age of computers, prying pencil and paper out of the hands of designers is harder than charming the tar out of a cat.

Fantastic. Note that the statement above applies equally to personal knowledge management, and all technologies for that matter: Successful technologies adapt to the habits of prospective users. It’s possible, but much, much harder, to convince users to adapt, because it’s an enormous amount of effort to change habits, so the benefits of the new technology have to be enormous to justify a change. In most cases, they aren’t, or at least not immediately enough.

I’ve tried a raft of technological solutions to the personal knowledge management problem that claimed to help me find my stuff, but I haven’t stuck with any of them yet. Why? Because I work a certain way, they all demanded I work differently, and none of them seemed to provide enough of a benefit to be worth the effort to do so. Perhaps they would have been if I had stuck with them, but I just don’t have that kind of time, or patience. Most people don’t.

The fact remains that I like to take notes on pads of paper. I like to hold things in my hand, highlight things, jot notes in margins, dog-ear pages. I’m a visual person, so I like to spread things out, color-code things, draw lines between things that are related, to be able to see everything at a glance. I organize things in piles and stacks, because for some reason, I can find things that way. I have piles and piles of things on my desk, on my shelves, on my office floor, and I can typically locate what I’m looking for in any of them relatively quickly. I don’t know why, but it works for me, so I don’t fight it.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I’ve stuck with the weblog for as long as I have: I’m used to getting up in the morning and reading various web sites to get the news of the day, bookmarking stuff, sending links and jotting thoughts in email to various people who might be interested in the stories or my take on them. Linking to sites and typing my thoughts into a weblog entry form isn’t much different than linking to sites and typing my thoughts into an email, so this particular tool fits well with the habits I already have.

But it’s just part of a complete solution, a convenient information collection mechanism for a slice of my life. There’s also a ton of stuff in my email, in my documents, on my whiteboard, in piles of paper on my office floor, and I want to find all of that stuff too. What’s more, everything is related, so I want to be able to draw lines between things, highlight, and dog-ear across the whole, not just individual slices. The ideal personal knowledge management solution adapts not just to my habits, but realizes that I have different habits when it comes to different things and adapts to that as well.