Perfectionist’s Imaginary Mansion

When I first saw the word “personal knowledge system”, I thought of a meticulously organized mansion, where every note and piece of information had its designated room inside the mansion. Every room, stair, and corridor is well designed in order to organize and utilize notes in the most efficient, or, perfect way.

Yes, as a perfectionist, I’ve always wanted a flawless Notion (Notion is where I create and store my notes) workspace to begin with. However, I soon realized that while I spent lots of time trying to construct that perfect system, I spent little or no time on the actual content - my notes and writings. And I won’t know how to design the structure unless I have some content to begin with.

This made me rethink my approach: content should come first, followed by organization.

The Forest Mindset

This approach is what the author in the podcast called the “Forest Mindset”: Content creation is like growing a forest, you plant some trees here and there, without a fixed plan, and let them grow naturally. As a forest creator, I am now relieved from the stress of immediate organization, because messiness is what a forest should have. It allowed me to focus on simply taking notes and gathering knowledge. Just do it before overthinking it.

Towards a Digital Garden

The note-organizing method from the podcast is to spend some time once in a while to organize your note forest, and eventually, it will become a well-organized mansion. Yet the idea of a future-perfect “mansion” still felt a little overwhelming. That’s when I discovered the concept of Digital Gardening.

A digital garden is somewhere between the unstructured wilderness of a forest and the rigid order of a mansion. There are some macro-level structures, but it still has space for entangled growth. Chaos and unexpectedness are allowed, as creativity often blooms from those surprises.

While walking in an organized big mansion, you know exactly where to go and what to see. In a garden, however, one day you might wake up and see a new flower just bloomed out of nowhere. And that seems to be just the perfect place for my notes.