There are four universal ways to organise anything:
- Space
- Time
- Importance
- Relatedness
Time
Daily notes start out organised by time, what’s recent is weighted as more important in our minds, but that importance cannot be relied upon long term. It’ll always get covered up by more recent things.
Relatedness
The key is to connect the thing (spark, idea, piece of information) to a related thing. Using relatedness taps into the human need for understanding social dynamics. (Though here instead of social dynamics between people we analyse dynamics between ideas).
You may link laterally to another idea of similar size, or link to a note with a lot of gravity. (Like a Map of Content or MOC). It becomes a digital space you can rely on since you don’t have to remember 20 ideas linked within, just the map.
Space
In physical notebooks jotting down information organises it by space — and in short-term, importance, due to the time-related effect of the Recency Bias. You say “it’s in that notebook somewhere”. The problem starts when the thing you wrote becomes lost on a previous page that you’ll likely not visit. This is how information gets buried.
Once it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind.
Tip
The key is to make it easy to digitize only the bits that you want to continue working with. Why digitize? So you can work with it, not in isolation, but in harmony with your other ideas. Now you can connect that tiny bit of analog inspiration with your growing wealth of digital ideas. This digital connection leverages the power of relatedness.