Newton's Notebook Strategy: Why Archiving Notes Creates Future Breakthroughs.
Do you feel your notes need cleaning up, restructuring or deleting altogether so you can start again? Before you do, consider this.
One of the best reasons to keep ideas, thoughts, webpages and other stuff in a digital notes app is the library of ideas you collect. Five years ago, you may have been interested in wheelbarrows; today, your interest may be in horses because your daughter wants to learn to ride.
While you may think there is no possible connection between horses and wheelbarrows, anyone who has looked after a horse for any length of time will know that wheelbarrows and horses go together like Laurel and Hardy.
During the Renaissance, paper (or parchment) was expensive, so artists, scientists, and thinkers used every square inch of the page to collect their thoughts and ideas.
Over time, many random thoughts were scattered throughout these notebooks. These thoughts, ideas, and sketches led to innovations and breakthroughs nobody had ever thought of before.
This is why you should not discard your old notes. Buried inside your notes are hundreds of connections waiting for you to uncover. To uncover these connections, though, you will need to look through your notes from time to time. And it is here where there may be an interesting solution.
If your notes app allows you to group notebooks/folders, create a group and call it “archive”. Then, inside that group, create notebooks/folders for each year. For example: Archive 2019, Archive 2020, Archive 2021, etc.
In OneNote, you would create a Notebook called “Archive” and then make sections for each year. Evernote, you would create a stack called “Archive” and add notebooks for each year. In Apple Notes, you can create sub-folders underneath an “ Archive “ parent folder.
When you clean up your notes, instead of deleting old ideas and thoughts, place them into one of your archive folders in the year you created them. For example, notes on wheelbarrows would go into your Archive 2019 folder.
You are creating a resource of random ideas and interests that are easy to read and reminisce about. You can pick a year and browse through the notebook. It will be here where you make some incredible connections, tapping into the same methods people like Galileo, Copernicus, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Isaac Newton used to bring their world-changing art, science, and discoveries to life.
If you want to learn more about organising your notes, I have a few videos on my GAPRA system (Goals, Areas, Projects, Resources and Archive) here.
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