Introducing Sessions: Your Dedicated Databases

Now that you understand the power of a personal database, let's look at how Mind Dump brings this concept to life. In Mind Dump, a personal database is called a Session.

If your Mind Dump workspace is your digital office, think of each Session as a completely separate filing cabinet dedicated to one specific area of your life or work. By creating different Sessions, you prevent your daily grocery list from getting tangled up with your critical business project notes or your web research.

Custom Fields: Shaping Your Information

When you create a brand-new Session, it starts off as a blank slate. To make it useful, you need to define what kind of information belongs inside it. You do this using Custom Fields.

Custom fields allow you to dictate the exact "shape" of the records you are storing. You are not limited to just typing text into a blank box; you can add specific, interactive elements to your database:

• If your Session is for tracking expenses, you might add a Currency field.

• If it is a personal address book, you might add Email, URL, and Date (for birthdays) fields.

• If you are storing passwords or secure PINs, you can add a Secret field, which applies end-to-end encryption to just that specific piece of data.

• If you need to store documents or images, you can add a Gallery field to upload files directly from Google Drive.

By choosing your custom fields, you are essentially building your own bespoke application without writing a single line of code.

Session Types: Adapting to Your Needs

Mind Dump goes a step further than just storing your data; it fundamentally changes how it behaves and displays your information based on the Session Type you choose.

When you set up a Session, you tell Mind Dump how to treat the information inside it:

1. Date-Centric Sessions A "date-centric" session is exactly what it sounds like: a database driven by time. When you use this mode, Mind Dump assumes the items you are entering are actionable tasks or events. It automatically organises your records chronologically, activates due-date badges, and enables urgency flags (like 🔥 Urgent). This is the perfect environment for a daily to-do list, a content publishing calendar, or project management.

2. Knowledge Base (Alphabetical) Sessions: Not all information has a "due date." If you are building a list of your favourite recipes, a glossary of terms for your studies, or a database for your business clients, putting them on a calendar makes no sense. When you designate a session as a "Knowledge Base," Mind Dump turns off the time-driven features and organises your records alphabetically. It changes the visual layout to display your data as clean "folder cards" in the CMS (Content Management System) view, creating a perfect, clutter-free environment for reading and reference.

3. Outline Sessions: Sometimes a project is too massive for a simple list. An Outline Session enables automatic hierarchical numbering (like 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 or A, A.1, A.1.a). This allows you to break down massive tasks into nested parent-and-child steps, keeping complex structures perfectly organised.

4. Web Clipper Sessions: This is a highly specialised database designed specifically to capture information from the outside world. It syncs seamlessly with the Mind Dump browser extension to automatically capture website URLs, page titles, and highlighted text while you browse the internet.

5. Child Sessions (Relational Data) As your databases grow, you may want them to talk to each other. A "Child" session can be linked to a parent Knowledge Base. For example, you might have a parent Knowledge Base of "Clients" and a child session for "Meeting Notes". Mind Dump enables you to permanently link every new meeting note you create to a specific client profile.

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By providing these distinct Session types and flexible Custom Fields, Mind Dump ensures that you always have the perfect structural foundation for your data, whether you are planning your day or building a lifelong reference library.