The power of friendship
Read to the end for a surprising dinosaur fact
Hello everyone and welcome back to Mind the Gap, your weekly newsletter about personal knowledge management.
After finishing a 6-weeks series about how to start your own second brain (the last issue is here with links to all the previous ones), I have to admit, I didn't know where to go from there. It's not that I had nothing else to write about, au contraire! But I was just hesitant in which direction to take you on your journey into personal knowledge management.
So today, let's go on a small tangent. I am going to tell you about something I love to do that surprises a lot of people I meet : I take notes about ... THEM! It often comes as a shock because when we think about PKM, we usually think about collecting ideas and informations. I just go a step further and collect interesting data about my social network.
It started with one big realization : the contact app on my phone is kind of lame. It's way too basic to encompass the richness of my relationships. What do you mean I can only store phone numbers, addresses and emails? What about all these little details that make my friends who they are? Where do I put their tastes in music, or the hobbies they are passionate about?
That's when I decided to create notes about people in my second brain. And for its content, I took inspiration somewhere quite unexpected : I looked into the famous tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. In that game, you play a character with powers and abilities but also things that would influence your decisions like your background story. You keep track of all of that in a character sheet. I took this idea and I now just fill character sheets for people I meet.
And here is what it looks like:
You can see how it is night and day compared to the contact app on your phone. I am particularly fond of the Memories together section. It's always something special when I reread about an adventure we shared. And since these notes live in my digital garden, I can easily link them to other people's notes (that's what the relationship section is mainly for) or even to ideas and projects. Sky is the limit.
One thing you may have noticed in the character sheet is the metadata named last_follow_up and its counterpart follow_up_frequency. I use them to keep in touch with people I have met all over the world. That way, I can deepen our bond even when we are not geographically close. I have a Follow-up page that reminds me when I need to send them a message to catch up. Here a little extract from it:
Like you can see, I am a bit late on catching up (Sorry for those among my friends who read this newsletter, I promise, I'll get to it) but it's super useful. And that's how I kind of ditched my contact app and make notes about my social network in my digital garden. Hopefully, it will inspire you to do something similar.
See you next week!
PS. here is a surprising dinosaur fact