Optemization was founded and built on a need for digital operations. It was born in March 2020 and grew from 1 to 13 by the end of 2021. We are spread across timezones and work mostly asynchronously. This immediately led to a problem – sharing knowledge. How would we gather, distill, and create knowledge in a way that it would not only be accessible by our team but scale infinitely? We decided to use atomic note-taking as a foundation.
What is atomic note taking? Small, hyper-focused, files that can be linked and built upon. This is not a new idea but has been extremely hard to do at scale, within a team, until the inception of modern tools.
This idea was originally created by Niklas Luhmann and deployed via his Zettelkasten method. His method was using thousands of slips of paper with details about a single idea on each. He then used reference IDs to link each note. While this analog method worked well for him it is clunky and slow and does not scale for digital teams.
We took this concept and augmented it with Notion, while also removing some of the rigidity of Zettelkasten. We mix up a lot of concepts, including the popular PARA method. It has gone through multiple internal variations. We have deployed it to clients, who have used it at scale. While we are still building bespoke solutions for clients, we also found a need to create an out-of-the-box solution for teams and individuals that need something powerful, simple, and agile. This is the HiveMind. A collective consciousness, built upon atomic files. Start small and scale.
