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.

#BASB #Zettelkasten #ToolsForThought #PKM

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.

https://write.as/ftwynn/interstitial-journaling-in-obsidian-with-a-stripped-down-quickadd

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:

1. Interstitial Journaling (super helpful thus far)
2. 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.

#Obsidian #ToolsForThought #PKM #BASB

As such, I think I'm going to shake up the TODO tracking into a more Kanban flow, focusing on a firmer Work In Progress limit, forcing some prioritization. We'll see if the projects take care of themselves beyond that.

I was going to jump to a real Kanban tool to do this, but Todoist already has all my tasks and is almost set up for this anyway, so I'm trying that implementation this week.

New setup

1. Tasks are in Todoist in various projects
2. A filter brings in the things scheduled for today (and limits my daily tasks to the ones coming up within 3 hours)
3. I use a CSS trick to hide everything in this list past the 5th item, so I'm only focusing on those things (which should be the due and high priority items)

Current Today Filter:

((overdue | due before: +3 hours) & (#Daily Habits | #Repeated Tasks)) | ((overdue | due today) & ! (#Daily Habits | #Repeated Tasks) )

Interpreted left to right:

Give me anything in my Daily Habits or Repeated Tasks lists that's overdue or coming up in 3 hours, and give me anything due today or earlier that's not in those projects.

CSS Trick for Work in Progress Limit

.task_list_item:nth-of-type(1n+6) { display: none !important; }

It's a weird notation in CSS. You need to change the 6 to 1+whatever limit number you want.

#BASB

Why? A quick review:

The Project Management Hierarchy in Todoist

To start, I'm ignoring tags for this analysis. It's possible (and some do recommend) to make a tag based hierarchy for project management, but I find that not a good use case for tags, which are character limited with no spaces.

There are four hierarchical levels of project management in Todoist:

1. Projects
2. Sub-projects
3. Sections
4. Sub-tasks

Projects are obviously the intended abstraction, given that they show up in the UI in various searches and layouts. Sub-projects also do this, with the only difference being the nesting in the project list (and thus making them not totally re-orderable).

The main drawback with Projects is that there is no keyboard interface for making/editing them. There is the ability to make a new one in the Quick Add bar with #, but then you're limited to no spaces and have to go into the UI to change the color anyway. The enhanced shortcut extension is no help here, I imagine suffering from a lack of any element to plug into.

Sections are interesting alternatives. They are fairly easy to create with the keyboard, and allow for moving around groups of tasks to different projects. However, they have similar no-keyboard drawbacks, and aside from expanding/collapsing they don't provide much else in the UI that's helpful.

Sub-tasks are nested tasks. You can expand/collapse them as well, and are otherwise exactly like normal tasks.

How I've Been Making Do So Far

So far, I've been using Projects as intended, but the workflow of BASB implies that there should be lots of movement around projects. I noticed that once I built them, I was reluctant to edit them as I probably should have. Using the trackpad and scrolling felt clunky.

I did like my approach to due dates, which was to add a non-checkbox task (end a task with a colon) at the top of every project with the outcome as text and a scheduled due date. That let me set up a separate filter just to see project outcomes and due dates, which was functionally a way to view them all at once.

It wasn't perfect... outcomes aren't project names, which is what I really wanted to see, and the priority still matters for ordering, though it's hidden on non-checkbox tasks, which is annoying... but it was good enough.

What I'm Experimenting with This Week

This week I'm going to toy with making tasks projects, and sub-tasks the main area of focus. This should give a lot of the keyboard flexibility, allow for clear project name viewing in the overview, and more or less keep all the previous functionality.

An interesting think to consider is: what do Projects actually become under this model? There could just be a single Project with all the others in it, allowing for moving around. They could turn into areas. Or they could stay as meta-project containers. I'll experiment with it and see how it goes.

#BASB

I've ended up bouncing back and forth between them, and I wanted to document why.

Recommendations First: Instapaper

Before I'd even switched from org mode to Evernote, I saw Instapaper was the blessed default in the example library. So... sure?

All my impressions of Instapaper were (and still are) great. It's simple, clean, easy to highlight and take notes on. It's got great colors and the export all highlights in an article function worked well... most of the time.

The big challenge came when I bought a second tablet (a Kindle Fire 10) to read on, because I got supremely frustrated trying to type notes on my Kindle. There is no official app for Instapaper. Fire tablets are a lot easier to sideload these days than they used to be, but even then the app detected the OS wasn't well supported, and the highlighting would occasionally come out with the text all mixed together. Very strange, and immediately on my list to de-friction.

Back to Pocket

So I fired up Pocket, which does have a support app on the Amazon Appstore, and went to town. At first it was nice, but then I noticed a problem...

There appears to be no way to export all the highlights for an article in a sane fashion. You can display them all, but not actually export them. I sent an email to support and confirmed this.

Fortunately, Readwise can do exactly this (even though it's yet another service). So I gave that a shot and it worked perfectly.

.... until I realized Pocket doesn't support notes, only highlights.

Welp, that's a deal breaker. So back to Instapaper.

Back to Instapaper

What I brought with me this time though, was Readwise, which seems to have solved the text problem in whatever fashion they do. So ultimately, I'm getting the best of both worlds now

One Catch

The only catch with this Instapaper + Readwise combo is that Readwise only scrapes Instapaper once or twice a day, and then exports to Evernote once per day. This makes sense, but it would be nice if it was configurable in some fashion.

#BASB

Where was I? Right! BASB!

My first post comes on the last day of the course, because I wanted to document how much my attitude and system changed just over a few weeks.

The Beginning: Org Mode or Die

I started the course fully intending to use org-mode for anything and everything. It's text based, future proof, open source, hackable... it even runs on my Chromebook (which is all I have at my in-laws). What more could you want?

It was easy enough to set up an initial PARA system. Tasshin's blog already had some great ideas I could build on as well. I already had my life organized by Areas a few ways so the transition wasn't too bad.

However...

A few things started to get tough:

• Moving files around the repo (a big part of flexible project planning) turned out to be tricky
• Creating directories and files had slightly different, annoying syntax
• Inserting images was doable, but far from pleasant
• Syncing between work and home machines was going to be a tricky, manual process with git... and not possible at all really on mobile unless I set up a crazy Dropbox mirror thing...
• Just trying to capture notes from a web article created enough friction where I realized, at least while I'm on my Chromebook... this just wouldn't work

Everything was possible but... just so much work.

Moving onto the Defaults

Thus we started with Evernote, and as soon as I'd made that decision 20 other problems I had with org-mode just vanished. So much is already plugged into Evernote, that friction practically vanished, and I found I had a heightened sensitivity to any that remained.

Though I'd been a longtime Pocket user, I dove into Instapaper at Tiago's recommendation... then I went back to Pocket... then back to Instapaper again. I'll detail why in a future post.

Then I set up Readwise, which in my opinion is a couple dollars too expensive... but it's been so invaluable as a seamless glue layer, letting me bounce between Instapaper and Pocket that it's probably worth me staying with them forever. I also just watched a deep dive on their tagging system (which blew my mind), and might be worth shaping my note taking habits around, at least a bit.

My big holes currently are podcasts and YouTube, where I just mark timestamps and links directly in Evernote. If I come across a better solution I'll note it here.

I Re-Platformed and So Can You

I'm sure org-mode is the right choice for many people who absolutely live in emacs and breathe around all its power. As a casual scripter, I found the web to be too varied for its limits, and I turned to tools more specialized in capture.

It took about a day... less time than I expected. Laying out PARA beforehand probably helped a good bit.

In the future, I'm wondering how much readwise will fill the role of randomnote as it grows. It clearly wants to, but it doesn't import notes from Evernote... I'm content to leave it as glue (super glue perhaps) for now.

#BASB

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.

What I'm worried about. That's my new post, "A current list of my top problems in pressthink." https://t.co/JAVLgdWhcf pic.twitter.com/y7aBDdSQzp

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) April 30, 2020

#BASB