Introduction

If we can split note-taking into sub-processes, it’d be writing, storing, finding, and reading. We’ve discussed writing and reading in Part 2; they're about the quality of content.

Storing and finding are like surfaces on a coin. Bad storing causes bad finding. They depend on each other somehow, which is hard to explain independently in some cases. Nevertheless, in this article, we’ll try to determine the quality of two implementations of storing and finding by using criteria — Retrievable & Indexable.

TL;DR

Only implementing a strategy of note-storing and -finding that scale.

A massive amount of notes

Maintainability issues only emerge when one needs to manage tons of notes in Notion. That is to say, the solutions for handling a small numbers of notes will fail on a large scale.

The reason is simple; those solutions are not scalable. Indeed, such issues are similar to the ones in the world of software engineering — an engineer needs to propose a scalable solution to make sure the software still works, no matter the number of servers under the hood.

Extreme Solution — Infinite Folders

One of the incredible features Notion offer is infinite folders. But ironically, no one can just use this feature to arrange tons of info while still keeping efficient on storing and finding. It’s more the same idea that no engineer can use the method of managing a single server on an inordinate amount of servers without getting any issues.

Interestingly, some people share how they organize info by showing their favorite first few levels of folders/sections in Notion (often just the first level as well as the titles), but such “solutions” still don’t solve the problem about scaling.

Extreme Solution — No Folder

There is a software called MyMind, appeared in the market in recent years, which is said to offer a way to build a search engine, but only for personal knowledge (e.g. a note, photo, video, … etc).

Because its idea is a bit like Google, there is no such thing as a folder. To review stuff we stored before, unless we frequently review them (so I guess MyMind will arrange that in the first few items on the screen without us using the search bar), the only way to retrieve them is via MyMind's search bar.

This is an extreme solution because, for storing, without needing to think about where it will be stored, we can just simply put the data in (with some tags for categorizing purposes if you like). For finding, we can only do that by using a search bar (sure that we can try to retrieve certain info by browsing all data from top to bottom of the page via scrolling, but usually no one will do that).

Note that, MyMind may change its features that do not align with the description above.

There are also several search bars in Notion, so implementing “personal google” is totally possible by ourselves with some thoughtful preparations in Notion.

Unfortunately, “no folder” is not a scalable solution, because such method depends on how well we remember relevant keywords (and tags) about the searching target. Usually, to find a note stored a long time ago (say, 2 months), we only get a fuzzy idea about the possible keywords, which is hard to locate the note precisely.

Judgment on Extreme Solutions

If the solution domain is like a spectrum, its extreme sides are the two solutions shown above. Both sides do give users some sweet spots for a period of time, but none of them is a scalable solution.

For “No Folder”, some notes, especially the notes we wrote a long time ago (it can be just 1 week ago, depending on personal memory) will become bad on the Retrievable metric, because we simply can’t remember the precise keywords. Using the search bar to find these notes are useless.

For “Infinite Folders”, this is not better than “No Folder”, because we just have too many folders, and people usually mess things up by only using folders (and relevant ideas) as a solution to organize mega info, so this solution is still bad in terms of Retrievable.

They're not scalable when the numbers of notes rocket up. Because both sides are not ideal, obviously, the proper solution is somewhere in the middle on the spectrum.

Summary 🎉

It’s almost impossible to not use any folder-like idea to manage info, because of that, the solution domain for maintaining mega notes should have a concept of folders; and we extend the concept to the extreme, which forms a solution spectrum that covers “No Folder” and “Infinite Folders” on each side.

Then we prove why the two extremes are bad, and mentioned where the right solution could be on the spectrum, which is the topic we will go through in the next article by introducing the final criterion in depth — Scalable.

We can’t express Retrievable and Indexable in more detail or examples without talking about Scalable, and that’s why we only show the bad solutions in this article, and leave the rest in the next.