Information filing

When taking notes or brainstorming you typically write down words or phrases, one after another. At first, you have a simple list of items, but as the number of ideas grows this kind of list becomes impractical. If you start thinking about the items, you can find similarities and differences between them. Based on your analysis, you can group and organize the items under common labels, your categories. This is not unlike the work of a librarian who has a thousand books and tries to put a label on each noting which section of the library the book belongs to. The same filing process happens at a larger scale too. Say you have a hundred maps, and you have to decide in which one of these a specific piece of information should be stored.

We’ll come back the problem of an optimal storage location more a bit later with the principle of locality. Basically it comes down to two things: the speed of adding items into your maps and the speed of finding them again later. It often makes sense to do the collection and organization of information separately. If you are in a situation where you need to take notes quickly, you don’t want to spend too much time finding the right place for each note. It is more important to just write everything down, and you can then organize then better later. On the other hand, if you do have some extra time, you might want to spend some of it just reorganizing your existing notes and maps, so that you’ll find what you need from them faster in the future.