Monday, May 3, 2021

How to organize my notes? Why I keep my notes public?

I have a long term history of document flow. How to manage all my notes and thoughts? Business entities have so-called "ERP" systems to account all the financial and manufacturing transactions. Sometimes a human can feel himself like a messed up business without proper organizing of his brains flows.

In the middle school, I had a simple paper diary - a paper notepad. At that time, I already had a feeling that it is not enough. Not only it was small to manage my school homework. I needed to place my drawings, thoughts, tasks etc to somewhere more spacious.

With the mobile phone era, calendar became electronic. I could see my tasks in the mobile phone screen and in the computer monitor. Google really made document much more convenient. Unlike old style Microsoft, the synchronization of service among all the Google devices is the best invention for self organizing ever. I can see my calendar, notes and email from the phone, from my personal computer, or from any of the computers I work at. And it still keeps my stuff private.

In Gmail and Keep products, Google allows another simple but still genius option: tags. We don't need to think about proper organizing of every next thought. Just assign a consequent tag to the note. Our brain might work similarly - that is something called associative thinking. We link and combine our thoughts via tags.

Nevertheless, another problem was not solved yet. Overwhelming of thoughts results in overwhelming of notes. I have megabytes of notes that I have never read. I just write them and never come back to them again. Senseless. Such thing as blogging comes to help there.

Another Google product Blogger allows to .. write a blog obviously. Similarly to Google Keep, it maintains a great option of combining posts into tags. Instead of writing to Google Keep, I can now post all the thoughts to public via Blogger. Even if I don't come back to the post again, it might still be useful for someone on the Internet.

Popular blogs are professional, unique and looking nice (with pictures, clear grammar, good style etc). Authors make a lot of efforts to create a great blog product. I do not. I just post thoughts from my head. Some of them are original. Some of them are not. Some are just useful knowledge that I got from some other place. Some of my notes are absolutely useless.

E. g. somebody recommended me a good TV series, so I need to make a note about what to watch on the next weekend. Why don't make such a note public? I have an idea to purchase new inverter for my car. Why don't make this note public? Even if it is useless, it is still harmless. Something is better than nothing. At least I don't feel that all my notes are buried under the ground and nobody ever read them.. If I commit suicide, psychiatrist could diagnose the root cause based on my blog lol.

Of course, some of my notes are still private. Though I could share them later. At some moment of time when it doesn't matter.

I have some abbreviates for my tags. Every tag consists of 2 parts divided by a colon. E. g. N: Document flow. Left part is a capital letter, it is a short form of the head category (in this example it is letter "N"). Right part is a subcategory, the tag name per se. My head categories are as follows:

A: Activities, day-to-day stuff to do. Answers the question "how can I proceed with this note?". E. g. "Watch" (like on YouTube), "At street" (go for a walk and find it), "At home" (to do at home) etc.

N: Informational notes. Some references, useful stuff to know and to remember.

P: Projects. Some stuff belonging to the certain project I am engaged in. "Coney Island" is the name for the mobile app startup project I hope I will complete one day.

T: Tasks. That differs from the Activities (A:) category. This includes such stuff as "Later", "Maybe", "Pending" etc. I don't know how to certainly define this category. It is kind of method of prioritizing notes and tasks, something like that..

When I need to edit or update my note, I update the post per se instead of making a new post. 


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