I took a few courses and read several books on taking notes, including Linking Your Thinking, Mental Models, Academic Note-Taking, Zettelkasten, etc.
And each of them sounded reasonable and useful. Until I tried to implement those practices in my life. Something was always off. I mean, each of them provided me with valuable information and (hopefully) tiny useful habits. But the system didn’t work. The system was always too complex, too heavy to lift it. So after some time I regressed to my previous chaotic system of not having a system.
Eventually, two months ago, during my 20,000 steps a day challenge, while walking on a treadmill I came across a video with Tiago Forte. Oh, okay, another guy telling me about how to take notes. I watched an interview with him: nothing very new or surprising. Though I looked for his books on Amazon and bought both existed: Building a Second Brain and PARA.
Actually, I finished only first of them, but it has enough details about PARA to start adopting it.
And you know, PARA (the system to organize your digital environment) is great: it is simple and, hence, powerful.
Whatever you try to organize, notes in the app or files in the cloud, you create a space for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. Inside them, you have folders for your notes (or other files) grouped by a specific project, area or resource. The system doesn’t add pressure on you while working with it. Use folders if it is what you like, or use tags if you are a fan of this kind of structuring things. You don’t have special routines to process incoming notes or expressing important pieces of information like other systems do. Here, most of the work is done while working on your projects or thinking about your plans. I mean, you do that anyway, but here it adds more value for your Second Brain.
If you badly want to have a system, but no single one feels suitable for you, check out PARA.