How I Organize Tons of Notes (It Works Regardless of Digital Technology)

Information architecture is the map that makes note-taking knowledge available for consultation

Photo by pure julia on Unsplash

This article comes from comments that a couple of readers (whom I thank!) left on my other article, What Nobody Says about reMarkable: when it comes to accumulating years of notes, something like reMarkable is unreplaceable since you can’t search through tens of Moleskines — they say.

Regardless of the discussion about reMarkable as a solution, the issue raised by fellow readers is important and deserves a deeper look.

In front of years of notes, you can explore them in two ways:

1. Search for a specific content. This is the case when searching for a word or a sentence. For this purpose, the digital brute force is effective.
2. Navigate content starting from an arbitrary page and go through the knowledge journey that your notes provide. This happens when you select a topic and explore what your notes say about it. For this purpose, more than the digital brute force is needed.

If brutal force is a viable solution for way 1 (a text-search engine is more than enough), a much more demanding information architecture is needed for way 2, where your…