Introduction
During my last Year Review, I focused on this upcoming year (and decade) since I will be 80 this month. Our lives offer opportunities for learning, reflection, and growth in a PKM system as a "second brain" with thoughts, feelings, ideas, skills, memories, and experiences.
At this stage in my life, I'm thinking about that personal knowledge needed by my wife and family when I'm not available, whether by illness, injury, dementia, stroke, or death. My primary effort for 2025 is Family Knowledge.
Family Notes
I created a new Family vault in Obsidian with linked notes that will contain (or link to) everything that my family needs to know when my "first brain" no longer functions.
This enables me to transfer my personal knowledge to her so she will then "know" what she needs. It also needs to work for other circumstances like her leaving before me; also, if we both depart at the same time like in an accident, then our sons (and siblings) would need to know what to do also.
Also, I have a Family binder, sometimes called an Emergency or Death binder, with PDF documents of key notes to be kept with other important documents. Of course, I created a Desktop widget with several shortcuts: Family Notes, Document Archive, Access Accounts, or Download Document.
Family Documents
With everything so digital and paperless now with today's technologies, this extends beyond traditional estate planning with wills and trusts, financial and medical powers of attorney, and advance directives with healthcare decisions. Now we also need digital estate plans for our digital assets and online accounts, as well as digital legacy considerations.
Family Reviews
So I created a map with an outline for an initial plan with themes each quarter and focus for each week. In a shared Family calendar with my wife, we scheduled 30 minutes every Sunday at 4:30 pm for a Family Review to review and discuss items for that week.
We have done these weekly meetings for over 6 months so far, and results have been much better than I exceeded. Of course, it has also required some technology topics occasionally such as an initial orientation with a simple overview of macOS, Obsidian, Markdown, apps, etc. Even at the first session, although it's a lot to learn, my wife agreed how important it was to finally get this together now to make things easier for her later.
Summary
This is an important topic to me and my family, and I think it’s something that would be worthwhile to share for others too. I will share this work and my progress here in my blog, website, and newsletter. I hope you find this useful, and maybe it will generate some ideas and motivate you to do something similar for yourself. Everybody needs to address this eventually, and it's much better sooner than later (or never).
