For a number of reasons lately, I've been looking into the Zettelkasten method of knowledge management, which I'll talk about at length in a future post.
One thing I want to highlight before I even get there, though, is just how daunting it is to get started.
It's not even that the process of turning more temporary notes into your own synthesized ideas is that difficult to understand. It's that a key step in the process, linking new ideas to previous ones, is frightening when you're staring at a blank page.
Does everything have to be bottom up from new material? I do have some ideas floating around in my head, can I scaffold those first? Do I need to flag them to come back to later?
My inclination so far is to do the crappiest thing possible, and fix it later if I have to. Perfection in PKM is far more the problem than never creating and toying with ideas at all.
So here's to diving into imperfection! After all, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.
First, it's absolutely amazing to me how fast development is going with the Obsidian space. The number of things that are 1-2 weeks old that radically alter my workflow are just mind boggling.
I wrote that less than a week ago, and now that script is a proper plugin. It's so hot off the press it isn't in the Obsidian UI yet, but I'm looking forward to when it is (which will hopefully resolve some weirdness I had with the script version).
Current Use Cases I'm Investigating for it:
Interstitial Journaling (super helpful thus far)
Changelog at the bottom of any notes files (need to toy with it a bit more)
Both are good for the “capturing a quick thought from anywhere in a timely manner” case.
As I'm working on integrating BASB more and more in my life, I'm noticing that I'm handling the tasks alright, but the deadlines on projects seem artificial and surprising when they come up.
Because I've been stuck on a Chromebook ever since I started the BASB course, mouse-oriented options for any tools have been particularly annoying to me. One place in particular: project management in Todoist.
When I started the BASB course, I had no strong preference for which read-it-later app to use. I'd put stuff in pocket for years (even before it was baked into Firefox), and I still had an old Instapaper account with some articles I'd saved in 2007.
I've ended up bouncing back and forth between them, and I wanted to document why.
I thought I'd start putting some of my BASB experiences back into the wild. I'm aiming for once every two days, since I'm currently trying to interview for a promotion and watch my two year old while staying with my in-laws for an increasingly indefinite period of time.
It's funny how once you start practicing something, you notice it everywhere.
On of the exercises in Building a Second Brain is to keep a list of your 12 most important questions explicitly listed somewhere so they can percolate in your brain as you move through the world.
One of my favorite media professors, Jay Rosen, posted a refresher to his top problems in Pressthink, which I'd forgotten he regularly does.