Welcome back!

This series explores the idea of Building a Second Brain - a digital workspace that acts as an extension of your mind.

📌 Last week, we covered the first step in building a 'second brain' - capture. If you missed that one, you can catch up HERE.

This week, we move to the second step, organizing your information within this virtual workspace.

📂 Using Folders

The default option when organizing our digital notes is folders based on the topic. And the folder "topic" can cover a lot of ground. Think about your current folder setup - quite a few are likely theory or clinical courses. Some are ideas you have had, aspirations, or research around an area of interest. I am confident you have folders on your computer desktop, in your email inbox, and in Word or Google Docs. There may be subfolders within these large folders and even more folders in your subfolders.

While this "works," it is not the most efficient. It can be challenging to remember where things were saved, what you labeled them, or to attach any other identifying properties to them.

🪴 Consider how much time you spend organizing and curating your physical space—and with good reason! Our physical space profoundly impacts our mental state. Research has found that physical space can affect everything from our ability to connect with others to how many snacks we eat and whether we make impulsive decisions. But what about our virtual spaces?

Maintaining an organized digital workspace can be a challenge. It can become cluttered, overflow with old documents, and lack the virtual containers to limit what we see to only the information we need. But with the right tools and strategies, overcoming these challenges and creating a clean, organized, and efficient virtual workspace that supports your work as a nurse educator is possible.

Learn More about the Nurse Educator Operating System

Maybe you feel like:

🫨 things feel like they are falling through the cracks.

💻 there are too many different tools to manage your files, such as Google Drive, Word, Excel, Dropbox, etc.

📝 you don't have a consistent system for tracking your notes

😵‍💫 teaching is overwhelming because so many plates are spinning at one time.

The Nurse Educator Operating System can help you create a clean, organized, welcoming virtual workspace. It will upgrade your current file system and allow you to manage, filter, tag, and search your entire workspace to create a positive, calm, predictable workflow.

This is a view of the Educator Dashboard (one dashboard in the Nurse Educator OS). It allows you to quickly see your tasks, meetings, projects and courses in one clean view.

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Join the Waitlist

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Having a Notion setup has changed how I work and how I feel about managing all of my projects. I will absolutely return to active learning techniques, but I enjoy using this sytem so much that I want to share it with this community.

If you are interested, I am sharing a peek inside the Nurse Educator Operating System on Thursdays before it is available at the end of the month. You can get on the list by clicking here.

🦄 Re-Imagine the Folder System

To create an enjoyable and efficient virtual workspace, reimagine your folder strategy. Creating a folder system based on "areas" (as opposed to topics or types) can quickly organize digital spaces and facilitate workflows.

Avoid using folder "types"

In the book Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte describes how setting up your kitchen according to "types" is not functional or efficient. It would be chaos if you grouped all the fruit together (frozen, fresh, and canned). Instead, you organize a kitchen according to when you will use things. The same goes for your dishes - your everyday plates and cups are front and center, while the seasonal serving dishes are kept farther away from the action.

We can also apply this principle to our virtual workspaces - having our most urgent and commonly used files quickly available. At the same time, references are tucked away but can be accessed when needed.

Group according to folder use

The book describes a four-folder system that spans all aspects of life. Everything must go into one of these four folders:

🎯 Projects - These are short-term efforts with a defined start and end point. These could have a large scope—a theory course is a project—or a smaller scope, such as updating a lesson.

🛞 Areas—Long-term responsibilities that do not have a definitive end date. These include life areas such as scholarship, finances, and home maintenance.

🛟 Resources—Topics of interest or references for the future. This folder includes anything you want to reference, such as an instruction manual for your new dishwasher, a book you read, or notes you took during a presentation.

🗃️ Archives - Everything old, inactive, or rarely referenced. Here, you can store completed projects or ones you put on hold, responsibilities you no longer have, or resources that are no longer useful.

Implementing this type of folder system in your workspace is a practical and effective way to streamline your digital environment. It sets you up for action, allowing for quick reference of what you need at the moment. This keeps your focus on your most creative, ambitious, and current projects while also relieving you of the mental baggage of having old mixed with new. In short, it makes finding what you need easier and helps you stay focused on your priorities.

🔮 Imagine how this four-folder system could work for you. Visualize this setup on the sidebar of your file explorer or your email inbox. It could remove so much clutter and overwhelm.

Next week, we will discuss the third step in the system, distilling and connecting information. As nurse educators, we have immense value in our clinical experience, teaching expertise, and interpersonal skills. So much of our knowledge is interconnected across multiple layers. While these four foundational folders will help, assigning a note to only one folder limits our ability to access and utilize our vast web of knowledge. We will explore ways to make these valuable connections next week!

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