5 mins to read this newsletter would take 213 days there

Read to the end for an antique little toy

Hello everyone. I am Anh Tuan and this is Mind the Gap, your newsletter about personal knowledge management.

This is week 3 of a series about how to build your own second brain. If you missed any of the previous issues, you can get up to speed here:

This week is all about the next crucial step : how to organize the informations you captured? There are actually many ways to solve this problem. Let me tell you about how my solution evolved with time.

Like a lot of people, I started with no organization whatsoever. My second brain was totally flat, one big folder that contained everything but it was on purpose. By having everything in one folder, I was seeing a note about linux servers next to a note about japanese monks running an ultramarathon (look it up, it's called Kaihōgyō and it's absolutely crazy) . With all these notes put together in a primordial soup of ideas, I could make surprising connections without any preconception.

My second brain looked like this for a while :

.
├── 1-inbox
└── 2-digital-garden

It was so easy. No friction, no mental load about where to put a note. After processing, they all just migrate from the inbox folder into the giant digital garden. It was great for a while but after a few years, I started noticing problems. For example, I captured the same idea many times because I kept forgetting I already made a note about it a long time ago. It was just sitting there, doing nothing.

My second brain was growing more like an antique collection, something I was proud of. It didn't really have a significant impact on my life. The final straw was when I presented it at a productivity meetup in Chiang Mai last December. People said it was intriguing, beautiful even. But someone asked me what I was doing with it and I didn't really know what to answer. Hum... I look at it? Without noticing, I had become a data hoarder.

That's when I decided to reorganize the whole thing for action. No more idling, half-forgotten notes captured just to be pretty on a graph view. So my new folder structure looks like this now:

.
├── 1-inbox
├── 2-projects
│   ├── 0-ongoing
│   ├── 1-completed
│   ├── 2-abandoned
│   └── mindthegap
├── 3-digital-garden
└── 4-references
    ├── book
    ├── game
    ├── letter
    ├── movie
    ├── music
    ├── people
    ├── tvshow
    └── web

(Yes, as you may have noticed, I also take notes about people I know but this will be the subject of another newsletter)

By simply adding that project folder between my inbox and my digital garden, I forced myself to consider how useful a note would be to my current projects. And it worked! In a few months, I produced more writing thanks to my second brain than in the last 4 years combined. It has completely switched the narrative of my second brain. It's not just beautiful anymore, it is also really useful. It helps me move my goals forward.

The key is to organize information into projects. A project is something I am working on at the moment, a short-term effort with a certain goal. My most public project at the moment is this newsletter you are reading. Every week, I create a folder for my new post and I comb through my digital garden for notes that would be relevant to it. When I find one, I just move it to the folder and once I get everything I need, I start writing (here, I am simplifying things a little bit. You can accomplish the same result without moving anything, by linking to notes in your digital garden and using tags. But that's a bit more advanced and you really don't need that to start. You can just move it into the relevant project folder for now)

Once completed, some of these projects will get published and/or go into my digital garden. But in the process of completing them, I get to put my whole personal knowledge management system to use. With the search function, I look for relevant info. I also reread notes I took a long time ago. Working on a few projects, I rediscovered some notes deep into my digital garden that became the spark for new projects. This is the kind of virtuous cycle I wanted.

Like I said at the beginning of this newsletter, organizing your notes is a very important step. I postponed it for way too long but I am happy I started implementing it. And you should too! Most of us get stuck at the capturing phase. Now you know how to go further

Next week, we will learn how to tend to our digital garden and make the informations it contained as personal and useful to us as possible

P.S here is an antique little toy (Instagram post)

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