⛪A tag system to build flomo your second brain

This article is a practice shared by one of our users: DEPYKUNG

Can flomo become your second brain? My answer is: it already is, though I know it is not perfect. “Second brain is a set of the knowledge management system, which means to save and protect your precious knowledge in a place outside your brain.” This article mainly discusses how flomo becomes my second brain and how to tag my notes in order to capture and create ideas faster.

Love at the first sight

By following Plidezus on Jike App, I found the flomo he developed. Now, I can hardly recall any memory of applying for the beta test, but my first MEMO on flomo can reveal my excitement. On October 19th, 2020, I opened flomo and wrote down my first MEMO. At that time, I believed flomo would meet my demands. Well, it turns out I was right.

Having used flomo for 634 days, I have 629 MEMOs and 126 tags after constantly modifying and organizing my notes. While using flomo, I improve my notes and the structure of my second brain according to the guides on flomo 101.

What do I use flomo?

Why we use a note-taker can be no more than capturing ideas, saving materials, taking reading notes, and project notes. And my notes will cover these four.

Build my tag system

Though I belong to the gardener type while taking notes, I am sometimes the student type who likes collecting and accumulating information. And of course, I would like to keep an organized enough system (not as perfect as the architect type but yeah…). So building an effective tag system is the answer. There are a lot of flomo users sharing their tag systems. Different habits and areas generate various tag systems. I hope mine could be a reference to some of you.

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First of all, the critical part of my tag system is the pinned tags. Making advantage of your pinned tags can accelerate the speed of adding them. There are four groups of my pinned tags: #Areas, #Creations, #Inbox, and #Resources. As for the #Content, I will talk about it later.

• Areas: Under this tag, there is knowledge of the various areas ranging from literature to business in the #Areas tag. I can add corresponding tags to almost all of my notes, which is convenient for me to review notes according to areas.

• Creations: it is mainly for my “creations”, specifically, writing, translation, videos, images, lyrics, and podcasts, which cover most categories of creators. I have a wide range of interests, so I tried them all.

• Inbox: it is mainly for the notes I am uncertain about the tags. Those notes could be tagged later when I review them.

• Resources: now it is a storage for knowledge. Most of the notes under this tag are my reading notes, not excerpts, but my thoughts while reading books. It is a vital step to write down your own thoughts. And under this tag, I also have a few subtags such as #Articles, #Movies, #Podcasts, #Recipes, #Thesis, etc.

What is #Content? When you have lots of tags, it is critical to organize your tags. One way is to pin a few tags. Another way is to categorize the common tags and make content, which is also a great way to improve the efficiency of tagging notes.

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Tag your notes. The following pictures are all the tags after consideration. How cute they are after adding emojis!

So how to add tags to a note? Besides the category, the position of tags should be taken into consideration. The following are three methods of mine. You can make a choice according to your own habits.

• Add tags in the beginning: this method makes it easier to know which area this note belongs to. And its disadvantage is that the tag could be a barrier to your thinking flow. I recommend you to use bold and heading while using this method. It is useful and elegant (better to change a line).

• Add tags at the end: this method allows you to read the content first and add new thoughts and tags to the MEMO later. I also recommend you change a line while using it, which can increase the effectiveness of reviewing notes.

• Insert tags in the sentence: this method means you can add tags in the sentences while taking notes. It is great for divergent thinking but may make notes hard to read while sharing them on other platforms.

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