Develop your second brain

In many note management software it is possible to have a personal list of referenceable objects. Each object referring to a concept, an idea, etc.

And then within the text content of the notes, it is possible to reference these objects with links. A bit like Wikipedia pages.

And the pages can link to other pages, etc.

That's great.

But the problem is that in most software, there is only one way to reference these personal pages.

No matter the content and the reason of what you want to reference, it will be referenced in the same way.

And that's a big limit.

Because for example sometimes we want to reference something important relating to an object, and sometimes we want to reference something that is not important relating to the same object.

And if there is only one way to reference the object, well the important and non-important references to this object will be mixed together.

And so structurally the system of notes will tend towards mess and chaos.

Whereas we want a system of notes which structurally tends towards order.

And for that it is, in my opinion, very important to be able to distinguish what I call strong references from weak references. (At the minimum. But actually you need even more.)

Weak references are the equivalent of tags or mentions. This is when you want to create a link to something so that you can come across it via this mention or this tag. This is very common in social networks, exchange and communication platforms.

These are a bit like email addresses, but towards objects/concepts, creating decentralized mailboxes which receive all the posts which address these objects/concepts. In the sense that each mention and each tag allows access to a list of corresponding messages and posts.

The main role of these references is to basically offer a bridge.

While what I call strong references, their main role is to provide relevant content to what is referenced.

Typically in your notes you can reference a person, and have notes that directly relate to that person, their story, etc. So there you need strong references.

But you can also have notes that mention this person, for example if they were cited in an article, if they are present in a video, etc. And there you need weak references.

It's not at all the same thing.

And you want your system to allow you to quickly find the content of strong references, without having to sort through the pile of weak references.

Because if you have to sort your notes in order to find specific notes, well subconsciously it will encourage you to enter a lot fewer references to avoid having to do this sorting.

So ideally, you don't want the strong references and the weak references to be mixed together, because it becomes a mess very quickly, and the references are no longer usable because there is too much sorting to do to find specific notes.

While as I will explain to you in a later video, what matters is not storing information, but being able to access it efficiently. Indexing.

Once again, notes software without multiple reference types is software where it's a mess by default, you have to sort behind it, there's friction.

While software with multiple reference types is software where by default there is a minimum of sorting and ordering.

Because as soon as you enter a reference, the type of this reference means that there is a classification, an organization, which makes things tidy by default.

So yes in some software there are tags to make weak references, but it is very poorly designed and poorly integrated. It is a system completely separate from other references, which means that you have to duplicate the referenced objects and manage two different systems.

It's really not ideal, and what's more, anyway it only offers two types of references.

While with LifeJournal you can go well beyond two types of references and create a whole system of reference types adjusted to your personal needs.

And starting from the principle that each reference type is associated with a specific role/function, this makes it possible to create very useful functions. For example, creating reference types to organize your tasks...

What makes this system particularly suitable for task management is that the type of each reference is dynamic: it is possible to easily change a reference from one type to another. Which will actually move it from one list/classification to another.

To better understand what the atomicity of notes is, we can take the metaphor of Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging platform. What distinguishes micro-blogging from simple “blogging” is that the posts are very short. If you want to create a longer post on Twitter, you need to make a “thread” which includes several short posts one after the other.

In the same way, when you do a search on Twitter, it builds a feed with all the corresponding micro-posts.

And so in LifeJournal, the principle is somewhat the same. The notes are made to be short, and to reference a few objects. The references to the objects then make it possible to dynamically construct “pages”, which are assemblies of notes corresponding to the desired references.

The notes in LifeJournal are therefore designed to be "holons": parts which are themselves wholes.

The structural advantage of these micro-notes is that it is very easy to add a note anywhere. There is no friction.

Also, this allows you to generate search results that only include what you are looking for.

But it is above all the synergy between the multiplicity of reference types and the organization in micro-notes which is interesting, and allows complexity to be managed much better.