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The evolution

The seed for this system was planted in my effort to faithfully implement The Bullet Journal Method. I followed the methodology as prescribed before eventually adapting it and making it my own. If you are not familiar, The Bullet Journal Method is an analog approach. Naturally, I ran into all the limitations of a non-digital system:
  • Information can only be organized in one way.
  • There is no search mechanism beyond flipping through pages.
  • Notebooks take up space.
  • Pages are not easily shared with others.
  • Traveling meant leaving the bulk of my notes behind.
So while I appreciated the handwritten nature of the method, the lack of digital distractions, and a reason to feed my affinity for nice pens and notebooks – I ended my brief experiment as a luddite. The concepts within its pages, however, were sound: rapid logging, collections, a modular approach to notes. Elements worth keeping – just not on paper. Enter the reMarkable, an e-ink tablet. Once again, I followed the method but with digital notebooks instead of Moleskines. This solved the storage and transportation issues – my entire collection of notes took up minimal space and could travel wherever I went. But I was still bumping up against the same limitations around organization and search. Thus began research into note-taking apps. At this point I had worked with all the usual suspects – Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and OneNote, along with Evernote, Apple Notes, Todoist, Asana, and plain text files. (A couple of years later I would build out a knowledge management system for a company using Confluence.) Outside of plain text files and Apple Notes, none of them worked the way I wanted them to. Then I stumbled upon Notion. People raved about it, so I gave it a try. Funny enough, it didn’t immediately click. So I set it aside. But in time I revisited it to create a database for organizing my recipe collection. That’s when I had my AHA moment. I created my first set of Notion pages on June 14, 2021. And I’ve been using Notion ever since. I share this to say: this system was not planned. It is built on what others have shared and gradually evolved into what it is today. It’s been stable and in use long enough that I can now articulate how it’s structured – and all the value I derive from it. That is, how it ultimately helps me spend my resources (time, money, and energy) wisely and think clearly. → I did give Obsidian a try as well. You can read my thoughts on it here. → I highly recommend reading The Bullet Journal Method if you haven’t already. If you have, you’ll see its influence throughout these pages.

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The value

Points to keep in mind as you read through the following sections:
  • Some of what follows applies regardless of what tool you use. Some is specific to Notion.
  • The value compounds with use – both in volume and over time.
  • The proposed collections are self-contained but interact with and influence one another. The sum is greater than its parts.
  • As with most personal knowledge management systems, the gains here tend to be qualitative rather than quantitative.
  • Some of it won’t fully click until you’ve read through the collections and started implementing them. If something doesn’t immediately resonate, try the system anyway. It becomes more apparent with use.

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A space to offload thoughts so you can focus

Modern humans deal with an astonishing amount of information. Consider all the thoughts and pieces of information that come your way in a typical day:
  • You encounter a person or concept while reading that you want to know more about.
  • You think of a project you’d like to pursue while on a walk.
  • You’re in the middle of a work task when you reach for a sticky note, realize you’re low, and need to order more.
  • A friend mentions an album in conversation that you’d like to listen to.
  • Someone posts photos of a quaint little town on social media that you’d like to visit.
  • While trying to relax on the porch you think about how you really need to get into the routine of cleaning the oven and dusting the ceiling fans every month.
Our brains were not designed to hold the quantity of information we encounter on a regular basis. The result: we get distracted as our minds try to hold onto a thought, or we forget – permanently or temporarily. This system gives you a single space to write it all down so that nothing is lost and everything can be referenced later. That simple act of writing something down in a trusted system relieves pressure from your mind so you can return your focus to what is in front of you – whether that’s a task or simply enjoying the day. In a nutshell, the system frees up working memory. But writing things down, while necessary, is not alone sufficient.

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An organizational system for your information that travels with you

A place for everything and everything in its place. Just as we benefit from organizational systems in the physical world, we benefit from them in the digital world too. Imagine a scenario where each time you have a thought you’d like to keep, you write it on a dedicated index card or note it in a plain text file, then dump it in a box. You’ve preserved the thought – but it quickly becomes a pile that isn’t particularly helpful, because you won’t be able to find what you need when you need it, nor see related bits of information side by side. You need a system to keep like with like: so you know where to store information, where to find it, and how to prioritize it. In this system, Notion databases and metadata are used to organize your extended mind system by information type. You can read more about Notion databases and metadata here. And because Notion has an excellent iOS app, your notes are always with you as long as your phone is in your pocket. You have all your notes – everywhere you go.

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Quickly find what you are looking for

Even with the best organizational system, search is extremely helpful. And Notion’s search capabilities are excellent. There are scenarios where search is particularly useful:
  • You want to surface themes across databases. Perhaps you have entries on a topic stored across your knowledge bank, civic docs, places, and life log – and you want to see the full list in one place.
  • You forgot where you put a page. A personal example: my Notion space has existed for years, and the underlying organizational structure has changed over time. Older pages sometimes live in a place I wouldn’t keep them today. Search closes that gap.
Notion also supports semantic search through Notion AI – meaning you can describe what you’re looking for in plain language, and it can surface relevant items even if you don’t know the exact title or keywords.

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A streamlined tech stack

A consistent point of praise for Notion – from individual users and organizations alike – is that it allows them to consolidate. Because Notion can hold and organize the vast majority of information you need to store, there’s no need for external apps to handle journaling, task tracking, project management, contact lists, shopping lists, and so on. I don’t even open a word processor these days unless I’m writing a formal document. And when you eliminate an app, you also eliminate its login and password and, potentially, a subscription charge. All of which reduces your digital footprint. Cal Newport, put it well in his book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
Principle #1 of Digital Minimalism: Clutter is costly. Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.

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A hub for the tools that remain

Notion can help you eliminate a lot, but not everything. You may still keep documents and files in Google Drive or a similar service. Notion supports this – so even when the information itself doesn’t live in Notion, you can often link to it, embed it, or reference it, allowing Notion to serve as a hub for the rest of your stack.

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Reduce cognitive load and increase efficiency

Take all the benefits listed above: a single digital space to store, organize, and search your information, that reduces the need for external apps while serving as a hub for the ones that remain – and you have a recipe for meaningfully reducing cognitive load. When the majority of your information is housed in Notion, a few things happen. Reduce decisions. Life is full of decisions – what project to tackle next, what to cook for dinner, how to spend the weekend. Every one of those decisions takes time and energy. The more you can eliminate or automate, the better. When you build an extended mind system in Notion, you eliminate the recurring question of what to do with a piece of information, where to store it, or where to find it. The decision has already been made, and it’s the same every time. You navigate to the right database, log the information, and you’re done. Less deciding. More doing. Minimize context switching. Every time you switch tasks or apps, you’re draining a small amount of energy. If the bulk of your notes live in one space rather than ten, you’ll reduce how many apps you need to access – which also supports maintaining focus. Cut the amount of time spent on reconstructing details. It’s frustrating when you know you had a piece of information at some point – a contact, a link, the perfect quote – but can’t locate it when you need it. In the absence of a system, you end up spending more time than necessary retracing your steps. Case in point: I once had to complete a background check for an employer that required providing living locations for the prior ten years. I had moved across three states and lived in multiple locations in each. It took me an entire afternoon – digging through physical and digital files, booting up an old MacBook – to track down not just the addresses but the move-in and move-out dates for each residence. After that, I created a page with all the information and have kept it up to date ever since. When I had to complete a second background check for another employer, I pulled up the page and finished the residence history in about ten minutes. An entire afternoon versus ten minutes. My past self saved my future self a significant amount of pain by spending five extra minutes to note and save the details. The system makes you more efficient by assigning Notion as your primary repository – so the question of “where does this go” or “where can I find this” gets answered once, and answered the same way every time.

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Make the intangible, tangible

This system turns thoughts into objects – objects that can be interacted with in a way that simply isn’t possible when they remain only inside your mind. Envision a library and the books that fill its shelves. Every one of those books started as an idea. The physical nature of a library allows us to see the volume of thought and interact with it. You can pull books on related topics, spread them out on a table, flip through the pages, bookmark, highlight, annotate. Take cookbooks as an example. You decide you want to make dumplings. You pull a handful of cookbooks and open each to the relevant recipe so you can compare ingredients, equipment, steps, and photos. You find three approaches you’d like to try. You note which one you started with, make your own adjustments, photograph the result, and link the recipe to an article about the region it came from. Eventually, the region itself becomes interesting enough that you plan a trip. All of this – from a recipe to a travel plan – because you were able to spread ideas out, examine them side by side, and follow the thread. Your Notion space works the same way. Once thoughts are externalized – they can be examined, modified, updated, rearranged, connected, or discarded. The system makes what was invisible, visible. And that visibility is what allows you to:
  • Spot patterns and themes
  • Link your thinking (build a knowledge graph of your own mind)
  • Examine who you are through what you’ve chosen to capture
  • Build an artifact you can share with others
You can also watch your thinking grow in real time. A project that starts as a single sentence becomes a full plan. Research that begins with one article expands into a linked set of sources, notes, and conclusions. The thought evolves on the page – and so does the page itself, over time. Information gets dripped to us over time. We come across bits and pieces that may not be helpful today, in this specific moment, but could be extremely helpful in the future. For example, I keep a Notion database for home notes. As I come across little elements and features I see in homes that I like, I jot them down. I’ve been doing this for years. Each note represents a small thread that, collectively, forms a whole. A nice register cover. An architectural light switch. A whole-house surge protector installed at the electrical panel. A construction technique. These ideas get mentioned in passing – a conversation, a social media post, a magazine article. The kind of thing you think you’ll remember, and mostly don’t. By keeping this database, I now have a dedicated space for ideas related to this specific topic. When I sit down to build a home someday, I can pull up the notes and have them ready. The method of collecting as you go saves time in the long run and produces a better result than trying to research everything in one compressed sprint. Your Notion space is the primary container. Databases hold collections. Pages hold related details. And the individual entries – the blocks – are the smallest unit. The thread. You add them to the appropriate container as you go, and in time they accumulate until they reach critical mass: patterns emerge, themes appear, gaps surface. Think of how a bird’s nest gets built. A piece of string here. A twig there. Some fur, some moss. Little bits and pieces that add up to form something useful. That’s what your extended mind system does for you. And it’s bidirectional. In addition to revealing what’s there, you’ll begin to see what isn’t. A topic you keep circling but haven’t committed to. A category of thinking that’s thin compared to others. Gaps that you may want to fill – or that tell you something about where your attention actually lives versus where you thought it did. Lastly, pages and databases can be linked to one another, building out a knowledge graph of your mind. You can navigate your Notion space both forward and back via those links – identify where your thinking is dense, where it’s sparse, and begin to synthesize across domains in ways you couldn’t do if the information were scattered or still only in your head.

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A tool for self-examination

As you read through the proposed collections, you’ll notice this system goes far beyond tracking a grocery list or writing down a project plan. It becomes a space to document your:
  • Identity and values
  • Priorities
  • Routines
  • Daily plans
  • Life notes and personal history
  • Thinking style
  • Ideas about what it means to live well
All of it – the administrative alongside the aspirational, the immediate tasks alongside the longer view – lives in one place. And the space is alive. Elements get added as you go. It evolves. Collectively, those elements add up to a representation of who you are. An inventory you can step back and examine:
  • Who do I want to be?
  • Does reality match my aspirations?
  • Where do my resources actually go?
You can ask the bigger questions and have data to reference in response. Or recognize you don’t have enough data yet – and know what you need to think through.

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Prioritize

Our resources – time, money, attention, energy – are limited. If we want to spend them well, we have to choose how they’re allocated. Your extended mind system helps with this because you can now reference the inventory. You can look at everything noted in the previous section and decide: where do I want to focus today? This week? This month? You’ve defined your values and priorities. Noted your routines. Those give you both the compass and the available time to pursue what matters. The goal is to avoid living on autopilot. The moment you do, others will decide what is important and dictate where your resources go – and they will be serving their interests, not yours. Managing yourself requires making intentional decisions about where your most finite resource – time – goes.
“If you seek tranquility, do less.” Or (more accurately) do what’s essential – what the logos of a social being requires, and in the requisite way. Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better. Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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Data points for better decision-making

Prioritization tells you what matters. Data tells you whether reality matches your intentions. Most people make decisions about their time, money, and attention based on how things feel – and feelings are unreliable narrators. You think you read often; your reading log tells you it’s been six weeks. You think you’re making progress on a project; your log shows you haven’t touched it in a month. You think you’re spending conservatively; your notes from the last few months tell a different story. Your extended mind system becomes a record of your actual behavior over time – not a curated version, not what you intended, but what happened. And that record is useful in ways that memory alone isn’t:
  • You can look back across months or years and see where your time and energy actually went.
  • You can identify recurring patterns – the projects that stall at the same point, the decisions you keep revisiting, the areas where you consistently over- or underestimate yourself.
  • You can make comparisons over time. How does this year compare to last year? How have your priorities actually shifted?
  • You can catch drift early – the slow slide away from something that matters – rather than waking up to it after the fact.
This is why the system extends beyond task lists and project notes into things like the Life Log and Daily Planner. Those aren’t just for planning. They’re the data layer. They’re how you stop guessing about your own life and start being able to look at it clearly. The benefit here is not just efficiency. It’s accuracy – how you want to be, how you are, and whether the two are aligned.

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Build an artifact for yourself, others, and AI

Everything not saved will be lost. Data that isn’t turned into a digital or physical artifact cannot be preserved. – Steph Ango, CEO of Obsidian
An extended mind system isn’t only there for your own reference. Should you choose, it can become a reference for others – and now, for AI. It’s the closest thing to a hard copy of the contents of your mind. And that makes it context – for anyone you hand it to. Imagine if people you admired had kept extended mind systems and gave you full access. Just as a book can be a shortcut for obtaining knowledge that took someone years to accumulate, so is a well-documented personal system. I guarantee there is someone – probably more than one – who would benefit from reading through yours. Especially relatives. How many of us enter a genealogy phase wanting to know more about who we are and where we come from? Imagine if each person in your family tree had kept detailed records of their lives and thinking – and you could access them. And then there’s AI. Your Notion space becomes infrastructure and a context layer for any AI you work with. It provides the information that makes assistance actually useful – because context is what separates a generic response from a relevant one. Those who have a single, organized layer of context for themselves and their AI tools will have a meaningful advantage over those who don’t. We’re at the beginning of this era. The sooner you get started, the sooner your system reaches the critical mass where it becomes genuinely powerful. As they say – the best time was yesterday. The second best time is today.

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Learn a transferable skill

The skills you build here – note-taking, digital organization, working with Notion databases – extend well beyond personal use. They can be applied in community settings like a church group or a sports league, or in professional settings whether you’re a solopreneur or working inside an organization. What you build in your extended mind system can be scaled and adapted to much broader contexts when you’re ready. I’ve believed Notion would move from niche to mainstream since around 2022. That was before AI really took off. Now I’m more confident than ever. If you want to develop a practical skill with real staying power, building an extended mind system in Notion is a solid foundation for that learning.

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Common pitfalls

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The information hoarding phase

Some people go through a phase where there’s a compulsion to capture every little detail. Just as you can’t do everything, you can’t capture everything. Avoid saving information for the sake of saving it – it should tie back to something of genuine interest or use to you. You may notice an interesting feedback loop develop over time. You go to write something down and pause: is this actually worth saving? That pause is the point. You’ll get better at catching yourself and deciding in the moment whether a piece of information is worth keeping. You’ll find the signal in the noise of your own thinking.

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Writing something down ≠ commitment

Writing things down is meant to relieve your mind of a thought and place it in a trusted location so it’s not lost. What it is not is a commitment to act on it. As I write this, I have 134 projects in my idea bank. There are 20 pages waiting in my knowledge bank to be filled in. I have book titles in my Books collection – some sitting on the shelf – that I’ll likely never get to. And that’s okay. This is why we prioritize. Get comfortable looking at items in your system that you’ll never actually pursue. That’s part of the process. In a way, some of your Notion space becomes an anti-library – a reminder that there is more worth knowing than any one person can ever get to. That’s not a failure. It’s a good way to stay humble. Step one is to lay out the options. Step two is to decide what gets your attention.

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Trying to build the perfect system from day one

The perfect system is the one that works for you and gets you the results you need. What I present here is a starting point – I encourage you to use only the parts that speak to you and to adapt it over time. Keep in mind the right system for you may also change. What you needed in college is different from what you need in young adulthood, which is different again from what you need when you’re running a business or raising a family. Notion supports this – the underlying data is there regardless of how you reorganize the surface. So don’t spend cycles trying to get it perfect from day one. Use it, and iterate as you go. Only make changes when you have a real need for them.

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The system becoming a job in itself

The system is there to support you – not become another item on your to-do list. It should sit in the background, ready to catch anything worth catching. It should not require hours of weekly administration or constant tinkering with setup. If you find yourself spending more time managing the system than using it, that’s a sign something is off.

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Usage ebbs and flows

There’s no rule that you need to use the system every day or on any set frequency. You may have periods where you rely on it heavily, and periods where it sits idle. Neither is a problem. The only question worth asking during a quiet stretch is whether the system is idle because you’re busy living life – or because you’ve been drifting away from what matters to you. That distinction is itself a useful form of self-reflection.

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A prized possession slowly built over time

After years of use, my Notion space has become one of my most valuable assets. If I lost it, I would feel it – the equivalent of losing all my photos or a treasured family heirloom. The pain point isn’t just that I couldn’t replicate the contents. It’s that I couldn’t replicate the time and energy spent researching, thinking, deciding, and writing things down. That compound investment is what gives the space its value. Use the system long enough and you’ll cross this threshold too. And that’s one of the AHA moments – the point where you say, okay, I get it now. This is also why backups are critical. Commit to backing up your space regularly – at least once a month, ideally every two weeks or after any significant period of activity. How to back up your Notion space.
Last update: 2026.04.17