The Mind Forest is my place for Evergreen notes. Other resources, articles and resonance pieces are kept in my ‣.
The Mind Forest should be based around How to take good notes.
Notes in the Forest should be Atomic notes and should show good links across notes. They should use The best sort of note titles so that note titles act as another way to guide my thinking - which is the reason I use Notion over #RemNote, despite the many debates I have had with myself around that issue RemNote vs. Notion
The simplest systems are usually the most robust . The more energy we put into creating a system, the less energy we have for the things the system processes.
I use a filter system to allow Resurfacing notes. This means that my notes are arranged into a queue based on retention rating and when they were last edited. I work through this queue - not trying to clear it, but merely using it as an order in which to revisit and revise notes.
When I visit a note, it isn't merely to see if I can remember it (like simple spaced repetition systems), but to see if I can grow that idea with links or further content or highlighting or 'callout' annotations. I normally boost the retention rating by one star, if I'm comfortable with the content.
The point is that the forest isn't static. It should be growing.
There are times when I filter these notes based on specific tags, so I can work on growing one particular element of my understanding or gather resources for writing - but most of the time I let things emerge organically and I don't try to control the growth. If I'm not interested in a particular note on one day then I won't add much to it or I'll just ignore it until it resurfaces again the following month.
I wander through the forest several times a week like this. I try to spend a bit longer there when I do my weekly review - which is also when I work through my Highlight Library and see if I can find any new seeds for the forest.
I try to enjoy it and I stop when I lose interest. Not point doing anything like this if it isn't enjoyable.
It's nice to see ideas change over time. Slow growth is strong growth
The point of having a Mind Forest is so that I can track down my ideas and follow them through a course of logic. I can revisit them and change them over time, but they should act as a map for my thinking. They are not a record of things I have read, but a path of my own ideas about things. I should reference, but not copy the ideas I save to Pocket ( Using a 'read-it-later' service effectively) or to ‣.
I am creating the Mind Forest to build up and grow my ideas, not to memorise things, which is suited to things like Anki .