Lesson 2: Organize your notes

Organizing content is frictionless at best and a burden at worst. Organize your content with the long-term in mind. Organizing for the short-term will only make your notes into an unmanageable mess.

Inspired by the PARA method created by Tiago Forte, Organizedly is designed to organize your content in the following way:

  • Projects - a collection of notes and tasks for something that has to be accomplished before a deadline
  • Areas - notes by categories
  • Resources - topics of ongoing interest
  • Archives - completed projects and notes that might be useful but currently not part of your current interests

Work with projects

Making too broad projects such as "Work" or "School" can be a bad habit in the long term. After a while, these collections would become too large and hard to maintain. We recommend working with projects. A project can be defined as something that will be completed by a certain date, such as writing a book, creating an MVP, raising funding, or arranging a wedding.

Once a project is completed, archive it. This gives you more clarity and a better focus on ongoing projects. A clear workspace leads to a clear mind. If you need to get back to your archived project, you can always do. so. A good rule of thumb is to limit the number of active projects to 3-5, the magic number is 4. This is also the number of things we can have in our working memory. Don't be everywhere, rather, focus on what is relevant.

In Organizedly, projects consist of notes and tasks, both needed for understanding and completing a project.

Action: create projects in Organizedly for your ongoing projects.

Areas using tags

The projects feature is great for managing projects with a deadline. What are tags for? Again, think long-term. Tags make it easy to find information by categorizing your notes into areas. Combined with our saved searches, where you can search based on multiple tags using includes and excludes, information will be manageable.

Examples of tags:

#person

#meeting

#book

#company

#customer

#research

#marketing

#development

#product

Tags work best when used without thinking about them. For example, when you write some notes about a book, you can use the tag #book anywhere within a block. Form a habit of typing categories using tags as part of your natural writing process

Action: start using tags for areas as part of your natural writing. Once you have formed a solid base of tagged notes, you can create advanced saved searches that find your notes based on tags they include and exclude.

Resource collections

In contrast to projects, resource collections consist of only notes. Treat the notes in your resource collections as permanent notes that you can refer to. Write them with great care like you’re writing for someone else. Try to be as precise, clear, and brief as possible. Use tags and connect to other notes.

You can start your writing process from daily notes and move blocks and notes to resource collections. Do this as part of a daily reflection routine.

Resource collections are the bottom layer of your second brain ready to be utilized.

Action: create resource collections for broader topics than projects. For example, if you have a project called "Write article X" you could have a resource collection called "Writing articles". Once the project Write article X is completed, move relevant notes that might be useful for to the "Writing articles" resource collection.

Archives

Archived notes will not show up in the note list or in searches. Once a project is completed, archive the projects and notes that are specific to that project that will not provide value to current projects or work. You can and should unarchive notes if they are needed in the future.

How to get started

  1. Create projects in Organizedly for your ongoing projects. Try to keep the number of active projects at 3-5.
  2. Organize information in areas by using tags while writing notes
  3. Archive completed projects. This will free up space and allow you to focus on your key projects. Please note that your notes are not automatically archived. This allows you to create connections to old projects.