- 20200518 - Structuring zk thoughts.
- Ways to structure digital notes
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there are many ways to structure your notes, some good, some less good
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what are the common methods
- dated notes - now with the new-ish ability to rapidly use wiki-links to link between notes, daily notes adds temporal context
- structure notes
- categories
- any categories you can think of
- common categories
- for the person with varied interests: The Dewey Decimal System
- for the personal development person
- some variation of physical, mental, emotional, social, etc
- for the student
- the curriculum
- tags
- good first step for categorizing a note, but after a while, clicking a tag that gives you 100+ notes starts to provide a diminishing value (the solution is creating structure notes)
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why you should probably use more than one type of structure
- future-proofs your notes
- improves ability to retrieve the info you added long ago
- improves understanding of material
- future-proofs your notes
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Figuring out what structures will work best for you—both for now and for your Future Self
- what problems are you trying to solve?
- this is about use cases
- student
- researcher
- life learner
- collaborator
- content creator
- this is about use cases
- what problems are you trying to solve?
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So put on your damn glasses
- sometimes you have 20/20 vision and find exactly what you’re looking for
- sometimes it’s bright outside and everything is blown out, so you throw on some shades and now you can see more
- sometimes it’s too dark so you turn on a flashlight to see more
- in none of these cases did the contents of the environment change,. It was only that you improved your ability to find the contents, by enhancing your ability to see based on the conditions
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- Ways to structure digital notes
Used elsewhere: - I’ve heard hierarchies and structure are bad? - this is the correct argument that a note shouldn’t have to be buried in folder upon folder upon folder. A note should be able to live freely and connect freely to as many notes as necessary without restriction. - So let’s clarify: folders act to limit a notes availability. This is usually bad (unless maybe you wan to keep private info separate from other info) - But Structure Notes are the ultimate. They add context to your notes, but if don’t want to use it, you don’t have to. They exist in parallel with all your other notes. They don’t limit access; they curate it. It’s like having the ability to turn on an augmented overlay on top of your existing notes. - This is revelatory (at least for me). For more on this topic, check out Fluid Taxonomies