Edition no.5 - February 23rd, 2023

Airports don't exist without a Control Tower.

Control towers make sure everything is organized. They are aware of every airborne vehicle flying around, where they come from, and where they're headed.

Similarly, your Second Brain should have a Control Tower: The Meta Design.

Of course… You will not be organizing flight schedules, but instead, areas of your life and what knowledge you want to save.

This is the place where you design and control your system:

• Roles in life

• Apps you use

• Use cases for PKM

• Hubs in your Note-taking app

For top-down thinkers, it's the place to design everything, and for bottom-up thinkers, it's a place to document how you work.

Either way, you want to save it for reference.

It's a place to design the Design of your apps.

Hence, Meta Design.

💬 4 Quotes

Quote 1

A solid plan with clear details on HOW you will execute something is a powerful source of clarity and direction.

"Something" here could be your day or your knowledge management process.

The important thing to keep in mind is that plans are powerful. A plan gives you clarity and constraints.

Clarity provides peace and motivation, while constraints provide order and creativity.

It's important to plan your digital home.

Quote 2

You only 'truly' understand your thoughts when you give them form.

If your plan is only inside your head, you'll never truly understand what you're trying to do.

This is a strong reason why "a section in your note-taking app dedicated to designing the note-taking app itself” is very powerful.

You're getting the desired structure of your note-taking app outside of your mind into concrete form.

This allows you to better understand it and make specific changes to it.

Quote 3

Another powerful objective of Meta Design is control.

(Hence the analogy with a Control Tower.)

This section is a source of surveillance. It's a place where you have a clear overview of everything.

Even if you're not always looking at it, it's always there to provide you with any information you want.

The 'section/workspace' dedicated to Meta Design will act as a map, where you have an overview of your apps and use cases.

In this map, you can rapidly identify what may be missing or going wrong, as well as the roles of each app and workspaces inside apps.

It's a place for troubleshooting.

Quote 4

We're talking about knowledge management, right?

Well, there is something more important than knowledge, (at least according to Einstein.) And that is Imagination.

A Meta Design section is a place for imagination.

It's where you'll imagine that your life is totally under control because everything that's important to you is being taken care of.

It's a place to imagine new sections to take your life to higher levels of joy and fulfillment.

Maybe a new section to create content, to take care of your health, journal your thoughts, or summarize the books you've read.

A place to collect ideas, to let imagination run free.

📄 3 Notes

1. Instructions for your Meta Design Hub

I call the "sections" in my Note-takin apps "Hubs". Some people call them "Workspaces”. From now on, I'll refer to them as Hubs or Sections, interchangeably.

The instructions to create a Meta Design Hub are simple. The execution, though, takes time and should be done in multiple sessions of work, especially the "ongoing instructions".

The objective of a Meta Design Hub is twofold: 1st, to design your new and better Second Brain. 2nd, to document the structure of your Second Brain.

Instructions (in no particular order after no.1):

1. Create a new Hub called Meta Design

Create a new "Meta" section to organize all other sections in your app.

Of course, you can choose any name you wish!

This Hub goes on the top hierarchy of your Note-taking app. (On Networked tools, pin it to the sidebar.)

Here in the Meta Design Hub, create 3 sections, for the next instruction items: Apps, Hubs, and Roles.

All other instructions happen inside the new Meta Design Hub ↓ 

2. List all Digital Apps you currently use.

Simply list all the apps you use.

This should bring an enormous sense of clarity.

You can even separate them into Core tools vs. Support tools. Core tools would be the essential ones, and support tools are the ones you use sometimes, or want to start using.

A couple of categories to consider when listing your tools:

• Email

• Calendar

• Read-Later

• Note-taking

• Task management

• Highlights management

• Planning - Goal Setting

• Project Management

• Weekly Reviews

• Idea Capture

• Design

• Code

3. List all current Hubs/Sections in your app.

This step is straightforward. It’s an honest overview of the Hubs you have now.

You may have PARA as your structure, or you may have other combinations.

List all the Hubs you have so that it's possible to add information about them later; this could be a table in Notion, several headings in Obsidian, or an outline in Roam Research.

4. List all the Roles you play in life.

List all the ongoing responsibilities (roles) you have in life.

Roles are the "Areas" in PARA.

The definition for "Areas" is: "the standards you maintain in life". They don't have an end date, but rather are always being taken care of.

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Ongoing Instructions:

Now you have the raw material to work with your Meta Design Hub.

The next steps are to identify Hubs that may be missing in your system and then organize what knowledge will belong in each Hub.

5. Create a new list of Hubs in your Meta Design Hub

Define the new list of Hubs that you will use.

This will be the new design of your note-taking app.

You do this inside a "Design” Hub because you're just playing around for now. You are thinking and using your imagination. It's a risk-free way to change the structure.

Fill in the gaps with:

• Outputs you want to create.

• Important Roles in life that can be upgraded to a Hub.

• Any inspiration you can find from my Hubs list:

6. Describe how each Hub will work

The final step is to describe the functions and structure of the Hubs you'll have.

For each Hub, you can add information such as:

• Reason for this Hub

• Structure of the Hub

• Tags related to it

• Templates used in it

There is no single way to do this. Add information that is important to you.

The idea here is to document your usage of the app you use.

This should provide you with insane levels of clarity so you can better organize your knowledge.

2. SMARTS Framework

My friend Roy, known as Elite Digitalist, shared with me a very interesting framework to guide the Meta Design Hub.

It's called the SMARTS framework:

• Systems

• Maps

• Apps

• Reviews

• Templates

• Shortcuts

Each of these categories is a relevant source of something worth tracking.

Consider these 6 types of knowledge when documenting your Second Brain.

All of them are worth tracking somehow.

3. Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Meta Design

Meta Design is totally different when you work top-down or bottom-up.

Last week's letter mentioned the difference between Architects and Gardners, an analogy first introduced by George R.R. Martin.

The main distinction between the two categories is exactly the difference between top-down and bottom-up.

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Top-down thinkers (the Architects) are used to creating a structure before they start working. Their minds work following a blueprint.

Meta Design is absolutely critical for top-down thinkers.

It's where everything will make sense, the place to plan your system before you start creating it!

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Bottom-up thinkers (the Gardners) are used to starting to work and then seeing where it goes. Their minds roam freely, and a pre-defined structure is a burden.

Meta Design is a fantastic companion for bottom-up thinkers.

It's where huge insights will be recorded, the place to document your journey after you know what works!

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As with everything in life, you're not 100% one or the other. There's a spectrum.

To make the most of Meta Design, use the 2 approaches in harmony!

🔗 2 Links

Link 1: Hubs and Subsystems, by RJ Nestor

In this edition of his newsletter, RJ Nestor talks about using Hubs and Subsystems.

He provides an interesting dive into what this looks like for a task management Hub with several support Subsystems.

His ideas, however, are related to using multiple Hubs to organize things by separating them into subsystems and looking at the Big Picture.

Link 2: Michel Foucault's Panopticon, by FS

This short article by Franam Street explains Michel Foucault's opinion on the fascinating concept of the Panopticon by Jeremy Bentham.

Foucault talks about the Panopticon (the ideal Prison structure) in terms of visibility and order.

For me, there is a strong parallel between the design of a Prison and the design of your Digital Systems.

Prisoners auto-regulate themselves with a Panopticon because 1. they can be seen at any moment, 2. without knowing, at any given time, if they are indeed being watched.

My belief is that a Meta Design acting as a Control Tower has a similar effect:

Your digital systems will auto-regulate themselves because of this overview you have of the entire system, where you can look at a specific section at any given time, for surveillance.

That's it. Thank you for reading!

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See you next week, my friend!

Cheers,

Fis