This is the fifth entry in a series on my Notion architecture for various life management systems. To see the full series, please visit the home page, Productivity In Notion
In the course of researching Notion, one thing I came across is the concept of a "Second Brain" popularized by Tiago Forte. Put simply, the idea is that we can use our digital environments as an synthetic add-on to our biological brain.
In fact, we all already do this. Our phones act as a natural extension, and their omnipresence means our brain treats content in a phone as an extension of it. We've naturally adapted to rapidly think "I don't need to know how to get to Fred's house, I just click on the map icon and get it to tell me the route."
Since our digital world acts in this way, it is important to a) think about how to organize it, and b) spend time developing it!
It is in that vein that I decided to include several ways to keep track of memories in various areas of life. While this runs the risk of overloading on nostalgia, I also believe that being introspective and retrospective is important for both good times and bad.
This system consists of a few parts, but core to it is the Year Database. This contains one row for each calendar year. By itself, this doesn't contain too much information yet, but everything else I'll mention here does connect to it.
A view of the first few years of my life, with not too many memories unsurprisingly!
Here are four things that connect directly: