<aside> 💡 A discussion looking at the merits of Notion as a #personal knowledge management system (PKM)

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Knowledge is only valuable when it leads to taking action on an idea.

<aside> 💡 Knowledge is only valuable when it leads to taking action on an idea.

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“Creating a system of personal knowledge management is a design problem. And like all design problems, it must balance and trade off multiple priorities against each other: the balance between order and serendipity” – Tiago Forte

Notion hammers every point on BASB’s requirements for choosing a Note-taking App:

It’s backed up by the cloud, it’s cross-platform, and accessed via the web I can quickly capture, edit, search, duplicate, and store any type of file such as notes, import text, images, videos, PDFs, embeds, and others It’s effortless to add and move information between pages and databases with copy/paste and drag/drop I’m able to save everything privately in one place and share individual pages for public viewing It is highly visual, flexible, and minimal.

<aside> 💡 I would add that the filtering and sorting system aid systems of discovery and Resurfacing notes

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PROJECTS The best place to start knowing how to best use Notion and start setting up PARA is with the classic GTD Mind Sweep. This is an exercise to capture, group & manage your projects.

In an empty page, turn one of the lines into a checklist and start writing down all the things you want, need and have to do.  Create a toggle at the top of your list with the name of the project for each task. Create a page called PROJECTS and drag and drop your project toggles into this page. Go to the Projects page and turn all your Projects into Pages and arrange them by priority.

AREAS Go back to the main page and create a page called AREAS and drag and drop the toggles that represent the Areas of Responsibilities. Go to the new Areas page and turn all your toggles into pages. Find a layout that works for you. Click here to go to Notion’s Template Gallery for more inspiration.

RESOURCES – Your Second Brain Library In the main page, create a page called RESOURCES and drag all the bookmarks, web clippings, embeds, or anything that you’d categorize as a resource.  Go to your new Resources page and create a Table Database – this will be your Second Brain Library. Rename each column with the type of information you’d like to easily find. Example: Title, Description, Date Added, Summarization Status, URL, Theme, etc.

ARCHIVES In the main page, create a page called ARCHIVES. Create another page called: “ARCHIVE – {Today’s Date} ” and move all the remaining blocks to this page. Move the dated page to the main Archives page.

Just-in-time Management in Notion Progressive Summarization is a technique for designing notes that are easy to find in the future. The best way to prepare your resource collection for retrieval in Notion is by going through the following steps:

Create an Inbox page, a parking spot for random notes. Dump incoming resources in the inbox page. Bold the best parts of the resource you saved. Highlight the best parts of the bolded parts. Write an executive summary at the top of the page, for the most significant and insightful resources. When you start working on your Projects pages make sure you create a Linked Database and filter the resources out so you can only see relevant items, this will help to keep them separated by existing projects or topics.

<aside> 💡 I'm actually pretty sure that the system I have works better than this. I like the use of callouts (like this one) to annotate my thoughts on the page. I know how the whole thing works and I feel it is easily adaptable. I know my way around so well that I don't really use the landing page ‣ anymore. Instead I go straight to the page that I know I need.

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