Mem Tutorial: Best Practices for Using Your Notes

If you’ve been using Mem for a while, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a lot of overlap between capturing, organizing, and using your notes. That’s because knowledge management in Mem is a circular process, and you’ll often find yourself doing all three of these activities simultaneously. In this blog post, we’ll look at some best practices for using your notes in Mem, such as distilling content to its essence, writing smart notes, curating resources, and planning projects.

If you want to be able to use your notes, you need to make them discoverable and usable. There are two main ways to increase the usability of your notes.

This means taking a note and breaking it down into its most important points. One way to do this is with progressive summarization, a method described in Tiago Forte’s bookBuilding a Second Brain. To illustrate this, let’s look at two examples of book notes.

The first example is a note that hasn’t been distilled down to its essence. As you can see, it’s just a giant blob of text, and if you wanted to use something from this note, you’d have to sift through the text and it would take a long time to find something useful. 

The second example is a literature note, which has been distilled down to its essence. This note has a title that makes sense, and you can get the gist of the note without even reading it. It has also been rewritten in the author’s own words and linked back to the original source.

Writing smart notes is another way to enhance the usability of your notes. This means rewriting an idea in your own words and linking back to the source. This not only helps you better understand the idea, but it also makes it easier to connect that note to other notes in your database.

For example, let’s say you’re working on a project and you come across an article related to it. You can link it to that project and also rewrite the idea in your own words. This way, you can easily connect what you learned to what you already know.

Resource curation involves collecting and organizing the resources you need to complete a project. It involves creating a list of all the resources you need and organizing them in a way that makes it easy to access them. This could include books, articles, websites, podcasts, videos, and more. Keeping track of the resources you use can be especially beneficial if you need to go back and reference them later. It can also help you keep track of which resources were most helpful and which ones you may need to revisit.

Resource curation can also be beneficial for creating a reference library. You can use it to keep track of the resources you come across while researching a project, and it can also be a great way to create a reference library of resources that you can refer back to in the future. This can help you save time by quickly finding the resources you need when you need them. Additionally, it can help you keep track of which resources were most helpful, so you can easily access them again in the future.

There are a couple different ways you want to think about using units when it comes to combining them. One is doing exactly what we're doing here, which is combining them all into a blog post. But then you can see here, even within those notes, we've embedded links inside of sentences, making each of our notes more usable than they would be if they were just a blob or block of text without any real context. This allows us to quickly reference any note we've taken and make sure that we're providing the most up-to-date and accurate information in our posts. And that's the beauty of using notes to create content.

When you plan a project with Mem, you can easily gather all your resources in one place and quickly put together a plan. To start, you'll want to look at the notes you already have related to the project. Make sure those notes have titles that clearly communicate the content of the note so that you can easily find them in the future.

You can also use Mem's Spotlight feature to quickly search for and bring in related notes. For example, if you're planning a seminar on AI, you can bring in notes related to AI, such as the AI Second Brain, and promo blog posts that have ideas related to AI.

Once you have all the notes you need, you can use them to create a sequence of action steps and tasks. This will help you create a plan for the project in just a few minutes. This is a great way to make use of the notes you've taken and turn them into actionable tasks.

So to recap, the best way to use your notes is to capture, organize, and distill them into their most important points. Then, use progressive summarization to rewrite the ideas in your own words, link back to the original source, and make sure that your titles clearly communicate the content of the note. Finally, use your notes to conduct research, curate resources, write blog posts, and plan projects. By taking this approach to using your notes, you can easily access the knowledge you need and quickly create content.