4 Frameworks for Organizing Your Dev Log’s Topic Notes

Today I’ll share four framework options you have for organizing all of the topic notes that you’re creating in your dev log.

By now, you’ve started keeping dedicated topic notes on your projects and collaborators. Depending on the tool you’re using, these may be piling up in a single folder with no structure. The folder may have grown so large that you need a way to bring order to the chaos.

Fortunately, there are several frameworks from which you can choose to tidy up your dev log.

None of these frameworks are better than the others in all possible ways, and they each have their pros and cons. And fortunately, you don’t have to choose, because you can combine elements of each into your custom system.

Here are the four I’ve experimented with:

Emergent

Emergent is a fancy name for the D.I.Y. system.

Embrace your pile. Over time, you’ll come up with a hack or two. You’ll employ your editor’s tagging capability to keep track of a few items. You might toss all of your people notes into a single folder. You could invent a mini-taxonomy system. Eventually, the design will emerge from the chaos.

Zettlekasten

Zettlekasten is German for “slip box,” and describes a system pioneered by Niklas Luhmann.

Zettlekasten is the only graph-based system on the list. It consists of atomic notes consisting of one standalone unit of knowledge. These atomic notes are joined into a hyper-textual graph of related thoughts and concepts, normally using the wiki-linking capabilities of your editor. The emphasis is less on an intentional organization than on linking related thoughts and discovering structure.

Johnny.Decimal

Johnny Noble invented this hierarchical coordinate system.

Divide your notes into at most ten large buckets - your areas (e.g. Frameworks). Repeat for each area - your categories (e.g. Spring). Assign ten numbers to each area, one per category. When you file a note, assign it a Johnny.Decimal number: the two-digit category number, “dot,” the next-available two-digit number not already assigned to a note. The coordinate system lends itself well to fast storage and retrieval.

P.A.R.A.

P.A.R.A. stands for Projects - Actions - Resources - Archives.

Tiago Forte of Forte Labs developed P.A.R.A., and he teaches it as part of his Building a Second Brain course. P.A.R.A. emphasizes an organizational spectrum from most (Projects) to least (Archives) actionable and deadline-oriented (Projects). It encourages you to file a note where it will be useful the soonest.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, you don’t have a choice: ==pick a method and get started today!==