How to Create and Manage Your Personal Knowledge Base

Having a tool that can help you store all your information and saves you time searching endlessly for a particular piece of info is vital these days.

An effective personal knowledge base is here to act as your sub-brain and help you consolidate all your private information, work experiences, business information, and meeting notes in a single platform.

This blog article will discuss how to create a personal knowledge base, benefits and tools for setting up.

What is a personal knowledge base?

A personal knowledge base is an electronic tool that captures, stores, and retrieves information on individuals’ experiences, organizational information such as business ideas, company policies, and employee contact data.

It acts as your personal journal built on the cloud, with advanced capabilities to let you write and edit content on it.

With a personal knowledge base, you can store internal business information, personal experiences, project plans, meeting notes, and conference takeaways.

Key features of an effective personal knowledge base

A personal knowledge base is effective when you can easily capture, organize, and retrieve all your information easily whenever you need it.

According to McKinsey, a searchable source of knowledge can reduce the time by 35% of teams looking for company information.

A comprehensive personal knowledge base has the following features:

• Intuitive user interface: Your personal knowledge base has an interface that ensures easy organization, management, and information retrieval in simple steps.
• Search option: The software enables you to look for information promptly through tags, keywords, and other filters for easy accessibility.
• Integration: Private knowledge base syncs with other software and tools such as emails, calendars, and task management to increase efficiency.
• Customization and personalization: A personal knowledge base has custom fields and workflows, themes, colors, fonts, and layouts that you can tailor to match your business needs and preferences.
• Organization tools: Features such as categories, sections, and tags allow you to organize information for easy retrieval.
• Collaboration options: The personal knowledge management system encourages teamwork and collaboration with teams or department heads in projects or tasks completion.
• Privacy and security: Sensitive information must be secured to avoid access by unauthorized personnel. The tool ensures data privacy and security by features such as encryption and authentication.

Importance of having a personal knowledge base

Having personal knowledge is beneficial to you and internal operations of a company. Building your private knowledge base is important in the following ways.

• Helps you capture and retrieve knowledge: Keeping a personal knowledge base allows you to store knowledge or information immediately before it is forgotten. You can write your personal experiences, employee data, business notes, project ideas, and findings in real time. It also manages information and allows you to retrieve it easily and anytime.
• Improves information organization: A personal knowledge base helps you store private data in one place, making it easy to access when needed. Categorization of information in terms of topic, department, purpose, or content saves you time when looking for a particular piece.
• Helps make better decisions: A well-organized personal knowledge base allows you to access relevant information quickly and make data-driven decisions.
• Encourages creativity and innovation: By reviewing old notes, experiences, and ideas, you can develop creative suggestions and solutions to problem-solving. Sharing knowledge and insights can enable teams to collaborate and develop innovative products.
• Enhances learning and knowledge retention: Keeping and regularly updating information in your internal knowledge base motivates active learning and understanding of concepts. With time, it becomes an essential source for future learning, training, onboarding new hires, and development.

How to create a personal knowledge base

Creating a knowledge base requires you to know what aspects and information to include in it. We’ve outlined the following ways to guide you on how to create a personal knowledge base.

• Gather your knowledge: Identify and create a list of your knowledge inputs, to ensure you have a consistent source of information when building your personal knowledge base. You can get explicit knowledge from books, workshops, and conferences.
• Choose the right tool: A knowledge base management software should have features such as filters, customization, and search options to improve efficiency.
• Develop an organization system: Use a definite structure with a dashboard, categories and subcategories to arrange information clearly and enhance easy access to data. Use tags and labels to filter information and effectively link notes to show relationships between articles.
• Start capturing the information: The tool should allow you to add more information consistently such as daily meeting notes, operations data, and ideas in your private knowledge base. In the organization, you can assign roles such as editing, reviewing, and administration to employees from different departments to ensure the internal knowledge base is inclusive.
• Make your personal knowledge base visually rich: Use appropriate and easy to read font styles, themes, and colors for easy understanding of the private knowledge base. Use paragraphs, bullets, headers, and multimedia in your document for a clear and precise knowledge base.
• Setup security measures for confidential content: Create roles and permissions to ensure there is controlled access to information. To avoid unauthorized access, you can add encryptions, single sign-on, and access authentication to your personal knowledge base.
• Review your personal knowledge base: Maintain a regular review of your knowledge base to remove errors and make necessary improvements to the articles. Frequently reviewing your private knowledge base can help you add information you missed when writing and current data updates.

Tools for setting up your personal knowledge base

Below are the best personal knowledge management tools, their supportive features, and pricing options regarding the basic requirements of an effective personal knowledge base.

BoldDesk

BoldDesk is a comprehensive help desk software that provides an AI-powered knowledge base to help businesses document, store, and share private information such as company policies, internal processes, and employees’ data.

With BoldDesk’s knowledge base, you can easily create, organize, store, and share documents internally and externally.

Key features

• Unlimited articles: Allows you to add an unlimited number of articles for different topics and projects, brands, and departments to your personal knowledge base.
• AI copilot: Enable you to quickly create, summarize and rephrase lengthy articles. The knowledge-based AI also suggests appropriate meta titles, descriptions, and keywords for articles to improve their discoverability.
• Branding and customization tools: Allow you to tailor your internal knowledge base with your brand logo and name, color, and theme. Individual users can also add a profile picture for a more personalized knowledge base.
• User-friendly editor: Users can select either a WYSIWYG or Markdown editor to format their content, incorporate tables, and add multimedia files, enhancing the visual appeal of the knowledge base.
• Content management tools: Organize content in a more presentable manner using tags, sections, and categories. You can also clone articles to create a draft version that your team can edit and specify the expiration date of short-term articles.
• Workflow automation: Streamlines the management of articles by automating repetitive tasks such as sending notifications and reminders for content review and approval, scheduled updates, and publishing.
• Article templates: Create and save knowledge base article templates to ensure a consistent structure for knowledge articles.
• Multilingual knowledge base: Allows you to create content in one language and then translate it into other languages.
• Collaboration tools: Allow easy knowledge sharing, collaboration and internal communication between employees with features like @mentions, comments, article versions and private notes.
• Analytics features: Track article performance with detailed metrics, including views, likes, dislikes, and comments, to measure user engagement and identify areas for improvement.

• Security features: Ensure safety of confidential information using measures such as access controls, single sign-on, password policies, IP restrictions and roles and permissions.

Pricing plans

BoldDesk is the best tool that is cost effective, and you can customize to meet your business needs and preferences. Schedule a 30-minute live demo and experience streamlined documentation with BoldDesk today. You can also sign up for a free 15-day trial to try out these top class features for free!

ClickUp

ClickUp is a cloud-based software that lets you create documents and a personalized knowledge base with features such as customizable templates and styling options.

Features

• Categories
• Custom fields
• Integrations

Pricing

Free forever.

Starts from $7/month/user.

Evernote

Evernote is a platform for organizing documents. It can also be used to take notes, plan projects, and look for anything you need.

You can write down your thoughts and inspiration anywhere, any time, on any device, to streamline workflows using tools such as Calendar and Microsoft Teams.

Features

• Collaboration capabilities
• Search filters
• AI writing tools

Pricing

Starts from $14.99/month.

Notion

Notion provides an inherent solution for managing documents and notes using a robust data storage method called Wiki.

Features

• Search option
• Reports and analytics
• Customization

Pricing

Starts from $12/seat per month.

Document360

Document360 can help you create your personal knowledge base with its capabilities to handle several document versions and manage the general content of the knowledge base.

Features

• Feedback and ratings
• Integrations
• Collaboration

Pricing

Document360 pricing is based on the number of projects a user intends to manage.

Starts from $149/project per month (billed annually).

Confluence

Confluence enables you to organize your knowledge base in pages and attachments with labels for easy access. It can be suitable for teams using other Atlassian products to create their personal knowledge base.

Confluence features

• Integration with Atlassian software and other tools
• Co-editing capability
• Templates

Pricing

Pricing starts from $4.89/user per month.

HappyFox

HappyFox help users quickly access information with its structured index, which enables you to find the right information and offers suggestions to avoid time wastage.

Features

• Customs
• Tracking and feedback
• Collaboration

Pricing

Starts from $9/agent per month.

Obsidian

Obsidian is a private and flexible writing app that documents your thoughts, mind, and knowledge for easy access, even offline.

Features

• Security
• Integrations
• Publish option

Pricing

Free forever for personal use.

Commercial use: $50/user per year.

Guru

With Guru’s in-built knowledge base, you can create and store information. It uses AI to make a definitive source of information whenever you need it.

Features

• Integrations
• AI-powered search engine
• Editing and collaboration

Pricing

Starts from $15/user per month.

Mem

Mem is an AI knowledge base management tool that assist you in self-organizing large volume of knowledge sources. It is mostly used by content creators, researchers, and entrepreneurs.

Features

• AI suggestions
• Content organization
• Collaboration

Pricing

Starts from $14.99/user per month.

Ready to create your personal knowledge base?

Now, you are aware of the importance of having a personal knowledge base and you can easily create yours using the guidelines discussed above.

In summary, an internal knowledge base helps you organize all your documents, research projects, and personal information for easy access and reference.

We hope this blog helped you build your personal knowledge base. If you encounter any difficulties, please share them with us in the feedback section below.

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• Knowledge Management System: Examples and Effective Guidelines
• 7 Knowledge Base Metrics You Should Monitor