Table of contents

What is a Single Source of Truth

A Single Source of Truth is a central location where you aggregate data or metadata about specific information.

The core idea is to have one reliable source to go to when you need to find or store something. If you have a single source of truth for your pictures, then you only need to check there to find what you need. If you have a single source of truth for your invoices, then it’s easy to file those.

A single source of truth makes it easy to locate what you are looking for (i.e., helps with findability), and it makes it a breeze to file new things.

Why you need a single source of truth for everything

In a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and even in a larger Personal Organization system, having a single source of truth for each type of information and each project is of the utmost importance.

When there are multiple input sources for a certain type of information, it’s critical to decide where you want to store that information. It may be okay to store it at multiple locations (either with or without duplicates), but you need to have a single source of truth. If you don’t, then you’ll keep wasting time, wondering where to store your information.

Once you have created a single source of truth, then everything becomes easier:

• finding information
• storing new information
• backing up, restoring or migrating your data
• explaining
• sharing
• …

Approaches to create a Single Source of Truth

There are two ways to create a single source of truth:

• Put all the data (e.g., all your pictures) in a single location
• Create a reliable index for all the data
  • For instance, if you have pictures stored on a NAS, on Google Photos, on different offline hard disks, etc then the single source of truth might be a wiki page where you list where each part of your collection is stored