Start simple

Read to the end for an Imagine Dragon fan, maybe?

Hello everyone, this is Mind the Gap, your newsletter about personal knowledge management. And it's Halloween! Time for pumpkin carving and trick or treat in the neighborhood. What more apropos for Halloween than to talk about fears. More precisely, the fear of starting a second brain.

Ok, maybe the word "fear" is a bit strong. Let's say that after reading my series on the CODE framework, some of you told me you felt overwhelmed and still didn't really know how to start. And this is my fault. I didn't remember but it was also quite hard for me at the beginning.

So today, we are going to make it ultrasimple and boil it down to the one single fundamental thing you need to build your digital garden. Forget any framework, any method. The only thing you need is : Trust. That's it. You need to find (or more accurately build) a space you trust to save what you put in it. That's all it takes to start. And to make it trustworthy, it only has to match two criteras : it should be easily accessible and you should be able to retrieve information later on.

If it's not accessible, you just created friction and you end up not using it. That's when you start to distrust your system. Same problem arises if you can't find that specific note you made a few weeks ago. The trust will be gone.

And that's all you need, really. Of course, you can whip out a specialized software like Notion or Obsidian but you don't need to go that far in the beginning. A Google doc? Easily accessible, easily searchable, perfect to start. A small notebook with a pen tucked in your pocket? Works too (if you are afraid you won't find anything you wrote, you can create an index. Librarians have done that with great success for centuries). Heck, I even met someone who send herself an email everytime she wants to capture something and it's absolutely genius, bonus points for originality.

You only need to start so start simple. From that simplicity, complexity will emerge later, after weeks, months or maybe years of use. A misconception I see often is that people think a personal knowledge management system is a productivity tool. It can be but it's actually more than that. It's really a possibility tool.

Take my own system for example, I started by writing IT notes to keep track of my work. I followed with concepts and ideas I learned from books and movies because I saw that on a forum and I found it cool. I then added notes about people to track everyone I met during my travels. And one day, I decided to transfer all of my journaling in my digital garden without knowing it would become a big part of my system. All of this happened organically, little by little, after learning more about it and about myself. But it was only possible because I started.

So I hope this newsletter encourages to do just that, to start. Make it exist first and you can make it perfect (for you) later. See you next week and happy Halloween!

PS. here is an Imagine Dragon fan, maybe?