The Difference Between Information and Knowledge

24 April, 2023

And there is a difference between the two.

What you chuck into your note-taking application, personal knowledge management tool, collection of text files, repository, or whatever isn’t knowledge. All that is just bits of data. Facts. Figures. Thoughts. Ideas. Quotes. Links. Notes. Scribbling. Snippets.

All of that information only becomes knowledge when you give it context. When you shape it into a form that you can easily use or share. Like an article, a blog post, a paper, an essay, a book chapter, a set of instructions. Something another human can read and use and learn from. Something that you can read and use and learn from.

And, no, the tools don’t do that work for you. You need to put in the hard graft to transform the information that you’ve collected into knowledge. Until you do, that information isn’t as valuable or useful as you think it is.

Scott Nesbitt