🎙️ Shownotes - Martijn Aslander - A Digital Fitness Missionary & Information Capitalist
What a lovely conversation that was!
I always try to create rich notes to accompany a podcast — it’s a great way to add extra context and valuable links for my audience. It also helps me reflect on the conversation and sprinkle in a few afterthoughts and hidden gems. For people that didn't listen to the podcast, this page may seem unstructured, but the topics follow the rythm and structure of our open talk.
I hope you enjoy the fruits of my effort — and perhaps even the little rabbit holes I’ve created for you to explore.
I had so much fun putting these notes together. It made me realize that I’ve been immersed in the world of PKM my whole life without even knowing it — a bit like a miniature Forrest Gump, stumbling into the action by accident.
Enjoy — and thank you for reading and listening 🙏
Notes and afterthoughts
Every week, I publish a newsletter (in Dutch) that covers most of what I've been up to in that week. My target audience is my mother (so she knows what's happening in my life), my kids (they don't read it but hopefully in the future) and my future self. It functions as a public personal story archive as well. You can subscribe here or via RSS. I publish them on LinkedIn as well. If you can't read Dutch, I bet that there is a nifty button in your browser that can translate it in the langue of your choice.
I'm NOT in the world of productivity. I think we should focus on regaining mental space and the art of effortless achieving and causing movement. That is really a different space.
Most of my time is spent on reading, thinking and writing. My work is using that to connect the output with people and ideas. Setting things in motion is what I see as the core of my work.
I don't like email and its effect on society. It's communication and information in the same channel. Recipe for disaster like Cal Newport and Mark Vletter put down in words very well.
As a founder of the digital fitness movement I see most of the deskworkers struggling with computers and smartphones. Dealing with email is one of the biggest frustrators in nowadays work. And it really doesn't have to be that way.
PKM is the 4th pillar of our digital fitness movement, and for me the most fun and elemental. In 2024 I envisioned the PKM Summit and after consulting with my co-founder Mark Meinema I asked Lykle de Vries, an old friend who hosts the PKM podcast to team up with me to make it happen. With Kim van den Berg added for planning and organising it, we suddenly had a dream team!
I never organise just one event when I start something new, its better and easier to create two. So we invested in a website and high-quality design to show that we truly mean it — and that we take the Summit very seriously. Renting out the entire venue for two full days was a big risk, but we went for it.
Luckily, we’re good friends with the owner, who has seen what we’re capable of many times before — so there was a solid foundation of trust. Even then, I already knew that next year’s edition would take place at their amazing new location just around the corner.
Seats2Meet Utrecht, as the venue is called, has been the central hub for many of my activities over the past 15 years. It’s located just five minutes from the most central train station in the Netherlands, in the beautiful city of Utrecht.
But this is more than just another meeting space. Seats2Meet truly understands the power of asynchronous reciprocity and the role of social capital in moving society forward.
To me, social capital and information capital are deeply intertwined. I see PKM as the essential practice for managing my most valuable asset: information capital. I strongly believe in servant leadership and helping others — not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it fosters trust and cultivates social capital.
The simplest way to build social capital is by giving away your information capital (I learned that from the brilliant book ❤️ Love is the Killer App). But to do that effectively, your information needs to be instantly accessible — I call that information liquidity.
Of course, this only works if you have a certain level of digital awareness, digital hygiene, and digital skills to keep things running smoothly.
Our conference is communal by heart. So all the speakers are also participants. This creates togetherness and a much higher exchange of knowledge and ideas. And a great and warm atmosphere.
We are still in the early days of PKM. In a fun way, you can see the terrific book The Notebook of Roland Allen as the Old Testament of the soon to be written PKM Bible, while our community is busy working on the New Testament with chapters like Revelations 🤣
Roland will open next year’s Summit with a historical perspective on what we’re doing 🎉
The term PKM may be relatively new, but for thousands of years people have been trying to capture knowledge and ideas. Thanks to pioneers like the ones in our community, we’ve entered a new chapter in the evolution of how we understand and improve that process.
Beyond all my writing, thinking, and projects, I also share a lot on stage. In the Netherlands, I’m a seasoned public speaker with over 2,500 stage appearances. Since I love to travel, I’ve also given talks in various parts of the world — quite a few in South Africa, and even in Tehran and Karachi. (Would love to do more, by the way.)
But not at the Summit.
On the Summit, we have a very keen audience. Together they know more than the people on stage. This is why we don't focus on big keynotes but on a rich exchange between all of the attendees.
The common denominator in the PKM Summit crowd is that they all score highly on six elements:
This is incredible important to have when you're building communities. Just be nice and open to other perspectives. With new and personal stuff, give people the benefit of the doubt and asume for the best.
The best approach as a founder on an event, is to welcome everyone at the door, try to remember every name (and don't mind failing to do so) and to be the last one to eat.
I like this anology:
Two hikers and a bear. While they’re out walking, a bear spots them and starts sniffing the air curiously. Slowly, it begins to move in their direction. Alarmed, the two hikers start backing away. At some point, the bear picks up speed.
Suddenly, one of the hikers stops, opens his backpack, and calmly puts on a pair of running shoes.
The other hiker looks at him in disbelief and says: “Seriously? You really think those shoes will help you outrun a bear?” To which the first hiker replies: “I don’t need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you.”
If you can find and access information faster than others, you will gain huge advantage.
An average desk worker wastes around 240 hours per year searching for information they once had — and another 320 hours making up for the fact that they couldn’t find it. On top of that, a lack of digital skills leads to an additional 500 hours of wasted time annually.
That was not the promise when we started using computers!
The relationship between people and technology needs to be drastically improved. PKM visitor Mark Vletter wrote a great piece about this.
I wanted to do something about it and created Digitale Fitheid and Digital Fitness together with Mark Meinema.
Our problem with the words digital and digital transformation is that they’ve become hollow catchphrases — often used by authors, speakers, and consultants to stir up a ruckus and make money, without actually helping the people doing the real work. Too often, this kind of talk makes relationships between people worse, not better.
At Digital Fitness, we bring clarity to the different aspects of what digital really means — in a way that’s practical, meaningful, and human. We help people move beyond hesitation and fear with a hands-on, no-nonsense approach. We think these five elements form the basics of what people that work with tech should know and be aware about:
Digital Awareness Digital Hygene Digital Skills Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) Digital Wellbeing and personal growth
My personal relation with computers is ambiguous. I don't like sitting and be in a building all day and my weapon of choice in interacting with others is the undervalued phonecall.
I got my first Commodore 64 when is was 12 and started to create simple pieces of code in BASIC, its programming language, like lists of stuff that matter to me. I never got really good at programming, I must say.
But from that moment on I relied on tech to store all the interesting stuff that I encountered. As soon as the first Palm Pilot came out I needed to have one, and suddenly I had this information power in my hands!
In 2004 I started to fall in love with the Mac platform that is way more suitable to do my kind of work than PC's ever did.
Not long after that, the combination of the iPad and the Evernote app was a big one. Suddenly I had all of my information, my ideas, my official docs and everything in Evernote that can be retrieved rapidly because of the superb OCR capabilities of the app.
Not long after that I changed the Apple logo in my Mac with the Evernote logo.
I mastered and promoted Evernote everywhere which got me invited to the Evernote developers conference to explain to the developers what kind of problems powerusers could face in the upcoming years.
But Evernote let me down. The app became to slow to use for me (as an archive its still excellent) and I started to look around en discovered the hidden powers of Workflowy.
It made me fall in love with blazing-fast, simple text files that can be linked together. I started giving talks about it and gradually built an entire PKM system using it — with tags, daily notes, and templates. I even used it in several projects to collaborate with others. Since it was accessible via a browser, most of the people I worked with in the police force could use it too.
Then COVID hit — and suddenly I was out of work.
I began giving webinars about Workflowy from home and added a donation button to the show notes I shared afterwards. The way I used Workflowy’s potential earned me a nickname: “The ‘Will It Blend?’ guy of apps.” Just like with Evernote, I became a full-on power user.
Somehow, I always seem to find a way to stretch the limits of an app — often ending up in conversations with the developers, suggesting new buttons or features based on my persistent, patient requests.
Suddenly, people started donating enough money to help me make it through the COVID period. The value of what I shared — in both form and workflow — turned out to be more than worthwhile.
Since I couldn’t travel or perform, I ended up reading more than ever before. That’s when I discovered the work of Tiago Forte and Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I learned that PKM was actually the name for the stuff I’d been doing since I was 12. And that’s how Digitale Fitheid and Digital Fitness were born.
After experimenting with RoamResearch, Miro, Notion, and Freeform, I eventually landed on Obsidian — thanks to a dazzling presentation by Quantified Self Europe co-founder Joost Plattel. I soon realized that Obsidian’s learning curve was much less steep than it first appeared.
In no time, it became clear that the logic I’d applied to working with Workflowy also worked beautifully in Obsidian. The combination of lightning-fast Markdown, hotkeys, YAML properties, templates, a few powerful plugins, and even Python-scripts is truly astonishing. Although I don't really understand Python-code, I can do quite a lot with it with the help of all the AI-tools that seem to understand what code I need.
For the first time in my life, I feel like I'm in control of my own data and truly understand what's happening deep in my system. I can fiddle with everything and adjust it as I wish. And it is also local and very future-proof because of the awesome Markdown format. This combined with AI gives me superpowers.
And having access to a great community of geeks and skilled people gives me easy access to a lot of help since I'm really not shy to ask for help.
Since I take my information-capital pretty seriously, I want to have that capital stored in the safest way, at a bank with the highest interest-rate. And being able to withdraw that capital from that account extremely fast en effortless at any time. Right now, that means Obsidian!
On trying to win two Nobel prizes: I just love ridiculous ideas and impossible missions. About 20 years ago, I came up with the idea to dedicate my life to trying to win two Nobel prizes: one for peace and also one for economics. Although the odds are incredibly small, I think it is worth the try. Figuring out the dynamics of information and social capital besides monetary capital might get me the one for economics one day. And if those insights are being implemented successfully in our society, maybe one day it would also get me the Nobel Prize for Peace. For most people, this seems ridiculous, of course. But it helps me focus and work tirelessly on the things that I believe in. And it saves me hours of talking with a coach about how to move my career. It's not about the price, of course. It's about making a big bet on stuff that matters.
I consider Malik to be a key figure in the success of the Summit. It was actually his very first blog post about what we were trying to accomplish that gave us confidence in our efforts:
“Something becomes truly official when a group of dedicated enthusiasts decides to pay to congregate in the same room to geek out. For European Personal Knowledge Management, that time has come.”
So I’m incredibly thankful for his early contributions — and even more grateful that he’s stepping into a new role at the heart of the summit team as curator for next year’s edition 🙏
If you’d like to dive deeper into what happened at the Summit, here’s a curated collection of blog posts and videos from last year — highly recommended!
That's all folks, hope to see you at next years summit! Martijn
About Martijn Aslander
Technologie-filosoof | Auteur | Spreker | Verbinder | Oprichter van vele initiatieven
