Ryan Holiday the author uses the notecard system to store and curate his notes. Eventually, the index cards in his commonplace book get turned into published bestsellers. That creative magic happens through him going through the index cards, finding patterns between wisdom, and connecting them.
Napkin is the closest digital version of that system. Napkin lets us collect atomic-sized notes and thoughts. Tags are auto-generated and suggested based on the card content. We can either go with the suggestions or add our tags or discard the suggestions.
The cards are connected based on the tags, and clicking on a card will resurface other might be relevant cards. This will help to make the mental connections faster and to cultivate new ideas.
Instead of one Sunday waking up and wondering what to cook in a silo and hoping for the inspiration to strike. It would have been far easier to have collected fresh produces throughout the weekdays and stored them in the fridge. If that had been done, you will have a fridge filled with fresh produces. Now, all that you have to do is to go through the fridge, connect the dots and pick out the produces that go with each other, and curate them. And magic happens, there you have the ingredients for creating your perfect dish.
And that’s how writing or any form of content creation should be. You should not be waking up one Sunday expecting the ideas to flow towards you. Napkin is your fridge, all the bursts of ideas, random quote from the internet, and highlights from the book you read, are your fresh produces. Store them up in the atomic cards. When you are about to create your content, don’t sit in a silo, go through the atomic cards in your fridge. Let Napkin make the connections and give you a few surprises. Play with the ideas, curate them, find patterns, and connect them. And That’s how the magic of creation happens.
Through Stacks, Napkin makes it easier to make the connections between the thoughts and compose new creations out of them.