PKM can do more than organise and link ideas: it can help you engineer the context in which you make decisions. In my own burnout recovery, the turning point wasn’t a “better system”, but making my lived experience observable: energy drainers and rechargers, sensory preferences, thought patterns and reflections that captured what was actually true for me over time.

In this session, I'll introduce a practical definition of personal context engineering: turning these kinds of inside insights into sustainable external action. Along the way, I'll build on three ideas from the PKM community – observability (Nicole van der Hoeven), personal ontology (Martijn Aslander) and discernment (Nick Milo) – to show how a PKM can become an inside-outside network that supports better decisions and creates the conditions for Al support that that reflects your constraints and values.

We’ll do a short guided exercise mid-session to identify a (type of) personal insight that’s currently hard to retrieve, and map one small ‘findability’ upgrade so it reliably shows up when it matters – as the kind of context your future self (and AI) can actually use. You’ll leave with a personal context-engineering map and one retrieval upgrade you can reuse.