River Not a Bucket

This is the documentation for the River Not a Bucket template — get it for free on the Notion Marketplace:

River Not a Bucket

Collect what inspires without creating clutter.

https://www.notion.com/templates/river-not-a-bucket

Intro

COLLECT your thoughts, clippings, and anything else here.

MAKE PEACE with the idea that you'll never get to everything you put in here.

PICK what calls out to you and dive deeper.

Let the rest DRIFT PAST.

RESIST the urge to re-organise and delete things when you have "completed" them.

USE FOR things such as:

★ Ideas ★ Articles ★ Notes ★ Drawings ★ Drafts

COMBINE with my Commonplace Book template to curate what you care deeply about.

Basics

Adding Entries

To add a new note, click the + New Entry button on the main dashboard:

Adding Topics

Use Topics to organise your notes. To create a new topic, simply click the + New Topic button from the Topics panel on the right-hand side of the dashboard:

On mobile, the Topics panel will appear at the bottom of the page. If you have a lot of entries, it might be inconvenient to scroll all the way to the bottom.

So we have added a Topics button at the top of the dashboard to quickly get to your Topics:

You can create a new topic by clicking on the Topics button, which will open up the Topics page in Center Peek View. Click the New button to create a new topic:

Categorizing Entries into Topics

You can group related notes together under one topic. Here are the steps to categorize your note into a topic:

Click on the note you would like to categorize

The note will open in Center Peak view. Under the heading, you will see a “Topic” property, that has the word “Empty” underneath it. Click on “Empty”.

From the drop-down menu, choose the Topic you want to categorise this note into.

You can move your note into whichever Topics you like, and can add as many topics as you want.

Mastery

CAPTURE FASTER with tools such as: Notion Web-Clipper

Or capture handwritten notes:

Capture Handwritten Notes

Automate with AI Auto Relation

You can use AI to automatically assign topics to your entries.

My husband has built a tool for this, which you can install for free from

AI Auto Relation - Notion Integrations

Here is a detailed, step-by-step guide for how to set it up:

AI Automation for River Not a Bucket Notion Template