Note Variations

While using ACE organization with my linked notes in folders, I discovered that I had accidentally created notes as several different variations on similar topics without realizing it.

Ideation

At first, I had several notes that I had created that captured my thoughts about folders. However, they seemed to grow larger as I tried to explain different points. So then there was too much content in each note, and it definitely needed to be refactored and split into smaller notes that were more atomic that each focused on a single idea.

Divergence

Also, I want persistent reusable content to be located in the pages of my website, rather than being buried in temporal blog posts. So I created many new notes using the Note Refactor plugin that helped me extract sections into new notes that were linked to the original one.

When I did this for several different notes, I discovered that I was recreated similar thoughts that were sometimes expressed slightly differently in various places. Then after refactoring those notes, they also created more clusters of notes.

Graphs

So I began a process that used the outline and local graph views to examine the outgoing links in these main notes to analyze the note cluster. Although I wanted in incorporate links from the original notes, this exercise made it very clear that there were definitely too many links.

This would make it difficult to navigate the notes because it wouldn't be obvious which paths visitors should take through the web of notes.

Groups

Then I gathered groups of these notes into smaller clusters that then were linked to the main note. This simplifies navigation significantly, and also provides intermediate notes as waypoints for those groups that would be useful.

Convergence

After doing this for my main notes about folders, it became obvious that I had a lot of redundancy across these various clusters that needed to be consolidated and merged. So I went through each cluster, which improved the situation quite a bit and this set of related outputs made much more sense.

Writing

When I returned to the main notes, it was extremely clear why there was so much redundancy. I had several different (but slightly similar) notes about folders that I had created from various perspectives, such as ACE Folders, ACE Organization, PKM Folders, and PKM Vaults. Finally, I tackled them and began merging content.

Emergence

Ideation and writing is a process that involves both bottom-up (gardener) and top-down (architect) methods and techniques. Using maps definitely helps to discover, untangle, and reorganize related notes. This is is a key tool in creating outputs from your efforts.