A CODE for your digital sanity
The free filing system for balancing life / work / play in 2024+
Without having some sort of digital filing system, I will forget 99% of what I learn today.
That’s a tough stat to swallow, but it's the reality without effective personal knowledge management. So, if you do nothing else for yourself today, do this 👇
A year ago, Alex Lieberman dropped a podcast about a course he'd taken called Building A Second Brain (a course by Tiago Forte)–the episode is only 20 minutes. It's a must-listen.
In this episode he covers this concept of CODE – your supply chain of information, like an assembly line that gets you from raw materials all the way to finished product.
C stands for Capture. It first starts with having a mindset to always be capturing relevant information with whatever app works best for you. I originally consumed this episode just after it had been published so I’ve been following this process for a year now, and it might be the foundation of my digital sanity these days. I started bookmarking all of the articles, posts, podcasts, etc. that I want to read/listen to through Instapaper (it’s free and has a great web + mobile app so no excuses across devices), and then later going through and storing anything relevant that will help me later in Notion.
O stands for Organize. This is how you break down all the information from your life that you've stored digitally, and organizing it through bolding, highlighting, summarizing, and titling your notes so they're easily retrievable, and skimmable in the future.
A few recommended ways of organizing include:
- Project - something specific with a finite start/end date
- Area of responsibility - things like health, fitness, diet
- Resource - for me this includes things like book recos, podcast snippets, articles
- Archive - a place to move inactive items from the previous categories
D stands for Distill. This is where you extract the pieces of knowledge that are most relevant and helpful in your current landscape. A strong foundation for this step is compression – meaning it's not helpful for you to move through life with the mindset of being a digital hoarder. Only save the shit you actually need.
E stands for Express. This step is all about taking the valuable knowledge you've put into your second brain, and drawing from it and combining it in a way that you can use it to create new things in your work and your personal life.
Full transparency, I’m now a year into moving through life with CODE top of mind and I feel digitally lighter, more process oriented, and I can now recall and pull down information and its source far more efficiently. Before, I would typically move through my day with 50+ tabs open across multiple windows and struggle to find the balance between relevant information I found while on my phone vs laptop—always in tab paralysis.
Hope this helps someone organize their digital footprint as well ✨
Til next time,
Kaylee