A Mental Model For Personal Organization (Part IV)
By: Cameron Flint'S Blog
Tags: Organization, Information Management, Productivity, Process, Knowledge Management

In this fourth article in my series about how to design a universal mental model for personal organization, productivity, and sanity, I will revisit the original mental model from part I and reveal how it has evolved since the time that I embarked on writing this series. I’ll attempt to be candid about what has worked and what hasn’t.

If you are new to my blog then this will be a great place to jump in, because I’ll be making some adjustments to the earlier model, as well as providing plenty of back-references to those parts of the previous articles that are still relevant. If on the other hand you’ve been keeping up with my series from the beginning, rest assured that part IV represents an evolution, not a revolution, of the concepts gathered up to this point.

Problems with the first model

The original model consisted of 9* components: Intake, Compass, Studio, Areas, Interests, Collections, Reference, Storage, and Vault. Each are described at length with examples in part I.

The first model.

There are three main problems with the original model:

The most common piece of feedback that I received was that the distinction between Areas and Interests is not sufficiently clear. Dividing one’s system in this manner does so in a cross-cutting manner that doesn’t solve many practical organizational problems; for example, where to write down that project-related idea you just had, or how to take notes at work. The Collection concept is too broad of a category, since technically any “kind” of item can form its own collection, and that is not sufficiently meaningful or helpful. Do outlines and drafts really form their own collection, or are they artifacts primarily associated with a project? Do all PDFs need to be stored together? If I take a screenshot that will soon be incorporated into a blog article I’m writing (like this one!), does that screenshot need to go into a collection? How about digital scans? Even though the Storage and Vault pair can and do sometimes involve different techniques and solutions, for the most part there is not much advantage in drawing such a course-grained dividing line between them.

(A reminder here, especially to new readers: these shortcomings of the first model notwithstanding, there are still many nuggets to glean from part I. In particular, the use cases and requirements sections are still relevant. From part II, the center of gravity principle may be helpful. And in part III, the thorough examination of tools and systems remains very much active.)

The V2 model

The second version of the Universal Model has five major divisions: Intake, Control, Studio, Library, and Storage. Within the major divisions are three minor divisions each, for a total of 15 unique areas within the system.

The V2 model has 5 major divisions.

Briefly, here are descriptions of each of the 15 areas.

Intake

Prefilter & Aggregation: Narrow, select, and converge the many rivers and streams of information into personalized, high-quality, high-signal feeds. (Covered below.) Capture & Arrivals: A landing zone for anything that comes out of my head or falls into my hands from the outside world. (Covered below.) Sorting & Holding: Group and sort potential action items into lanes, playlists, work queues, etc. that I can pull from. (Covered below.)

Control

Planning, Scheduling, & Tracking: Make plans and set goals, build schedules and daily agendas. Prioritize and allocate time, energy, and resources. Set timers and reminders to stay on track. Observation & Logging: Record everyday notes, observations, interactions, events, experiences, achievements, habits, etc. Keep them mostly in raw form, labeled by only essential metadata like date, topic, and people, etc. Review, Interpretation, & Alignment: Distill the everyday stuff that happens into concise summaries. Periodically review and rewrite the highlights. Make adjustments and course-corrections as needed. Think longer and farther out than the daily grind.

Studio

Ideation & Sense-Making: A free-form space to freely explore and experiment with new ideas and concepts, make connections, and extract meaning. Productivity & Output: A workspace to support goal-oriented activity (i.e., “cranking widgets”) in any context: studying, writing, coding, teaching, managing, etc. This is where rough drafts, outlines, documents, and other in-progress artifacts live. Leisure, Play, & Consumption: A dedicated space that’s arranged to promote relaxation, mind expansion, fun, play, and imagination. It’s the flip side of the Productivity & Output coin.

Library

Collection & Curation: A place to gather artifacts that relate to dynamic & creative interests, activities, and pursuits. Organized into lists, pinboards, galleries, portfolios, swipe files, scrapbooks, etc. Think of the expression, “steal like an artist!” Lookup & Reference: A utilitarian and highly-structured collection of information including dictionaries, documentation, contact books, directories, and databases. Tool & Supply: A warehouse of sorts where one outfits and stockpiles assets, materials, products, configuration, settings, etc.

Storage

Filing & Record-Keeping: A cabinet to store boring-but-important “adult” files and records for the off-chance that they need to be pulled off the shelf someday. Tax records, medical records, business forms and legal documents, intellectual property, etc. Storage & Archival: Backups, physical copies, old projects, old logs, old collections, etc. Anything from the other areas that is “closed” or “inactive” but that you don’t wish to refer to, stumble across in search results, or otherwise clutter your system. Protection & Preservation: Protect and preserve valuables, keepsakes, and other treasures, such as photo albums, mementos, or other particularly valuable (and fairly static) collection.

Intake V2, in depth

The Intake division.

Note: most of the tools that I mention in this section have already been described in depth in part III, which you may wish to refer to for more examples. I focus here on filling in the gaps and presenting some new techniques and methods that I’m experimenting with, in smorgasbord style.

Intake: Prefilter & Aggregation

The Prefilter & Aggregation area.

I use Mailbrew to subscribe to feeds from Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, Hacker News, The Verge, Cooperpress, and more. Product blogs, company blogs, podcast feeds, and any other information source that provides an RSS feed or email subscription service gets hooked up to one of my handful of “brews” that are sent on various daily or weekly cadences. Each brew is completely custom and fashioned according to my interests: “Systems & Organization,” “Productivity,” “Apps & Software,” and “Software Development.”

It only took an hour or two of experimentation to set up these custom newsletters in Mailbrew. However the time that it saves me now is immense because I will automatically receive a digest of all that’s happened since the last issue, allowing me to catch up with the topics I follow at my leisure (and theoretically preventing me from sinking too much time into the black hole of social media feeds).

Intake: Capture & Arrivals

The Capture & Arrivals area.

It happens that I am frequently struck by random thoughts, new ideas for writing or coding, reminders to do something important, sudden questions and curiosities, or insights about a problem that my subconscious has been quietly working on in the background. These shower thoughts and forget-me-nots can occur anywhere, anytime, including during inconvenient moments when I’m in the car or when I’m in the middle of another task. If I don’t write the ideas down immediately, they will quickly vanish and may never resurface. The same goes for little nuggets of knowledge I glean from a podcast, or during a conversation with a coworker in the hallway, and in many other scenarios. The use cases and examples of these types of quick capture go on endlessly.

It’s imperative that I have a well-oiled system to rapidly capture such sparks of thought, etc. The most effective tools for capture that I’ve found are: Trello (using the Email Me app for iOS/watchOS, configured to send dictations to my private Trello email-to-board address); TickTick (for tasks, memos, and action items); DayOne (for journal and diary entries); or Drafts (for any kind of text). Of these Drafts seems to be the most popular, but because my ideation hub lives in Trello, I find it most convenient to send my thoughts directly there. I toss quick-capture items onto a board that I’m sure to review on a frequent basis. In fact, very few items that come from my head should go directly into my innermost system without first passing through the capture area.