Foreword

After 10+ years of writing, writing over thousands of articles, and experiencing nearly 10 note-taking apps, I realized that there’re some criteria, wishing someone told me earlier, that allow people to maximize the benefits of note-taking.

TL;DR

If note-taking under the criteria introduced in this article, it'd work like an auxiliary system — a bridge that shortcuts the path to move new info to our memory.

Disclaimer

In this blog series, I'm not gonna show something very common on the internet — sharing personal favorite naming of folder/section in Notion (like, "Goals", "Todos", "Projects", ..., I dunno, they're just many).

Believe it or not, all these kinds of suggestions are not gonna work for organizing tons of notes; they're basically useless, from my opinion and experience. So if you like to see that sort of thing, maybe the articles here is not suitable for you.

Anyway, I'll show part of the implementation based on the criteria in the later articles.

There's a metaphor for the criteria, but is in a software engineering sense; The five criteria here are like the SOLID principle, which helps programmers to write better code.

Introduction

I’ve been writing since I became a Software Engineer. I felt that I’m pretty good at note-taking, but in fact, it bit me for a long time. e.g.

• hard to find a certain note I wrote
• not quite understand a certain note I wrote (say, a few months ago)
• not sure where I should put a note I just wrote
• …

Those problems had disappeared since I started to follow the criteria: Retrievable, Recallable, Indexable, Condensable, and Scalable — stands for the RRICS principle. And when I followed them, the way I use Notion is like materializing the mechanism — how our brain works in an efficient way.

Below I’ll talk about the broader concepts of each criterion(more details will be in the follow-up articles) and show why we need to frame our usage of Notion from a high-level perspective.

Retrievable

A retrievable note is the note that we can retrieve from Notion within a short time (the shorter the better).

We all have been to the occasion of learning something in a snap. That’s because we put it in the right place, so that it has connections with some of our experiences in the brain. The more connections, the more potential the new knowledge can be placed in the long-term memory.

Connections are like clues, which help us retrieve the target info by the relevant info. In contrast, we’ll have a hard time figuring out where our socks are if we put them in the refrigerator — because refrigerator and socks are not related. So it matters that we store every note in Notion around the relevant things.

Recallable

A recallable note is A retrievable note that we can understand within a short time (the shorter the better)

It’s highly possible that a certain note we wrote will be reviewed again somehow someday. It’d be a good note if we can fully understand within a short time when we look at a retrieved note from somewhere in Notion.

So far, the introduced criteria can be thought of as different steps, retrieve and recall, for processing the info. When we’re not familiar with some concepts, we will retrieve and study on the relevant notes. The more times we practice through those steps, the deeper we can memorize the new knowledge, and ultimately we can just come up with the knowledge immediately without using Notion — They're in our long-term memory.

Condensable

A recallable note must be a condensable note, which has concise content.

When we write a note as a blog post, it can’t have concise content, so it’s not a condensable note. Because the blog post is public, we human beings tend to write it down in an attractive way to try to get more views or whatsoever. We can’t help but use many unnecessary words (e.g. interjection), phrases, … as part of the content.

Unless we make the post private, our minds would still be affected, even when we try to force ourselves to only focus on maximizing our learning efficiency without thinking about the number of views.

Many people only make some articles public, while keep writing notes under the hood. The main goal of private notes is for learning, whereas the main purpose of public notes(or posts, precisely speaking) is for marketing.

Indexable

If a retrievable note is also an indexable note, you can retrieve it way faster.

If we organized the notes well enough, it’s easy for us to index the target note instantly — we type some keywords, and we can see the target note from the first few items in the returning result. It’s like we turn Notion into a search engine, just like Google, but only as our personal database.

Scalable

A scalable strategy is a strategy that can efficiently handle a massive amount of notes as if there were a few notes.

People only have problems with organizing large numbers of notes, so if we want to know whether someone’s strategy for organizing notes is efficient, one of the way is implementing it on a system which has massive notes, then measure whether it still works.

Learning Medium

We human beings invented mediums on the computer to simulate the system we want to learn. For instance, mechanical engineers can simulate the deformation of an object (e.g. a chair); musicians can simulate music from different sources of instruments. The mediums, in this case, are dedicated softwares.

Notion is a special medium; it's even more special when we apply the RRICS principle. It becomes a medium that helps us learn how to learn everything. So the core idea here is to make Notion a learning medium through the RRICS principle, not just a note-taking (or project management whatsoever) tool.

Put it another way, the RRICS principle is created because we try to frame our usage with Notion more like how we efficiently interact with our brain. Think about it, if our brain never complains about how to organize an inordinate amount of info, then we shouldn't struggle with it in Notion either.

Summary 🎉

Retrievable, Recallable, Indexable, Condensable, and Scalable are components of the RRICS principle that work as a framework to approach our interaction with Notion as a learning medium, which would augment our learning efficiency.

Next, we’ll look at two criteria in depth — Condensable and Recallable.