Augmented Mind | Notion Knowledge Base
Are you a researcher or non-fiction writer struggling to keep your sprawling insights and sources organized? Would your creative work improve if you could see more of the latent relationships across disparate fields of knowledge?
This is a simple-yet-powerful Notion template of the knowledge base that I've used for my research and writing for many years. I think of it as a flexible framework for structuring insights into a network that allows me to easily explore the relationships between them and ultimately synthesize them into new ideas or a better understanding of the world.
It features structured many-to-many bi-directional links between 5 classes of information:
Minds: This is a table of individuals who have generated important knowledge. It may include authors, but also practitioners, speakers, or particularly insightful friends.
Resources: This is a table of books, blog posts, podcasts, videos, images and more that serve as primary resources for my note-taking. The Notion web clipper can default to dumping content from the internet into this table.
Insights: This is a table of distilled insights (anything that gives an "aha!" moment). It may be a statistic, a historical fact, an explanation of a useful concept, an aphorism, a provocative question, a scientific or philosophical theory, whatever. It's a unit of knowledge or wisdom, and the block usually contains an expansion on the insight.
Synthesis: This is a table for in-progress writing. It's where insights come together to form new perspectives.
Tags: This is a table of topics/subjects, e.g. "Augmented Reality", "Complexity Theory", "Cities".
You can read more about the design of the knowledge base here: