🗄️ How to organize large sets of notes

At Reflect we believe in an append-only philosophy of note-taking. When new information comes along, we should append to existing notes, rather than replace content in existing notes. This process mirrors the way our memory works.

It also makes our notes much easier to manage because we can keep adding new notes and new pieces of information without having to worry about much clutter.

In today's email we are going to walk through the systems that make this possible so you can scale your note-taking system infinitely.

Start with a collection space

Each time you want to save something (a thought, idea, article… anything!), it needs to go somewhere. Most people try to set up individual folders to save these things into. The problem is that each time you want to save something, you have to then consider where it should go this dramatically increases friction and thought capture.

The easiest solution to this is to have a home base where you collect everything day to day. This is what daily notes are for. When you have a dedicated note for every single day going forward and backwards into eternity, you never have to worry about where to save something, just put it in the current day's daily note.

The concept of the daily note is not new. Humans have been recording information in a daily format for thousands of years. It's a tried and true method made even more useful in the digital age.

I could go on and on about the benefits of using a daily note taking format. For new note takers it will help establish the habit. It acts as a calendar and reminder system for information and it associates everything with a time period by default, it's like having a digital time capsule of your day to day life.

Backlink entities

The next step towards infinite organization is using backlinks. Backlinks associate two notes with each other by linking them together. Our memory works through similar associations. If you mirror these associations when note-taking then you're creating extra hooks for later recall.

Essentially you can link notes together in much the same way that web pages are linked together. You should backlink all entities. People, places, things, projects… anything that’s a proper noun. In general, a good rule of thumb is that if it starts with a capital letter, you should backlink it.

The applications of using backlinks for organization become more clear as you use them. You can see all of the notes linking to a particular note. For example, if you're looking at a contact note. You'll be able to see every time you mention that person. If you backlink a location will be able to see every time you visited or referred to it.

Unlike folders, a note can be backlinked to an infinite number of other notes instead of existing in a single folder. All “networked note-taking” tools allow for backlinks. In Reflect, you can backlink text using the double brackets [[like this]].

Tag collections of notes

Folders are great for one thing and that's saving collections of notes. For this you can use tags. You can add a tag to any note and it will associate that note with that category. This way you can pull up a list of your books, contacts, article ideas, or anything else you create a tag for.

Tags are useful in conjunction with backlinks. Let's say you are a writer and write articles for multiple topics. You want to capture an article idea but also need to associate it with a project. Use a tag for the article idea and a backlink for the project.

For example:

Do I need to clean out my notes?

Inevitably you'll accidentally create a useless note or tag. You can delete the note or tag if you want to, but it's important to understand that you really don't have to or need to, especially when it comes to notes.

Especially with AI built-in, your search should be able to quickly find you the correct notes. You should never be scrolling through a list of hundreds of notes looking for the right one this is where having many many notes becomes challenging.

This is the freedom you obtain when you embrace append-only note taking. It's not a garden that you must work to clean and maintain. it's a digital brain of knowledge that you want to keep adding to.