36 reactions on “100 Days in Obsidian, Pt. 1”

1. How to deal with the green elephant in the room?
   After I quit using Gmail earlier this year, Evernote has become my biggest silo and single point of failure in my workflow. I have been using it since October 2010 with a premium account, and maintain some 4500 notes, about 25GB total in size. With my move away from Gmail, my use of Evernote has actually increased as well. Part of my e-mail triage process now is forwarding receipts etc to Evernote, before removing them from my mail box.
   As with leaving Gmail, there are no immediately visible alternatives to Evernote, that cater to all convenient affordances I have become accustomed to. This was already apparant when I quit Gmail, when Peter Rukavina and I exchanged some thoughts about it. So in order to make the first steps towards ditching Evernote, I will follow the recipe I derived from leaving Gmail, as I presented it at the Koppelting conference in August.
   Why do I want to leave?

   It’s a single point of failure for both private and work related material
   It’s on US servers, and I would like my own cloud instead
   It’s not exportable in a general format

   What I don’t like about Evernote

   No easy way to get an overview or visualisation of my notes (although notes are easy to link, those links are not visible as a network)
   No easy way to mine the total of notes, aside from regular search for specific notes
   No way to let Evernote use my own cloud / server for storage
   No reliable way to share with others who are not Evernote users themselves

   What I like about Evernote

   Really everything can be a note
   It’s cross device (I consult material on my phone, and store e.g. boarding passes there during travel)
   It has good webclippers for most browsers (allowing choosing the destination notebook, tags, and add remarks)
   I can easily share to Evernote from most apps on my phone
   I can e-mail material to it, while indicating destination notebook and adding tags
   I can automate Evernote stuff with Applescript (I e.g. integrate Evernote with my other core tools Things (todo lists) and Tinderbox (mindmapping)
   It makes handwritten stuff, images, and scans searchable (even if it doesn’t convert everything to text)

   Next steps will be coming up with viable solutions and alternatives for each of those points, and see if I can then integrate those into a coherent whole again. Terry Frazier pointed me to The Brain again today on FB. The Brain is a tool I heavily used from 18 to 13 years ago. It turns out this mindmapping/note taking tool is still around. It currently works cross-device and has Android and iOS apps, and allows attaching files and navigating links in a visual way. It comes at a hefty price though, and still looks like it really is from 1998. Will explore a bit if it might fit my needs enough to give it another try.
   [UPDATE 2021-02-27: I have left Evernote. Stopped using it in September 2020 in favor of Obsidian, and exported all the archives in February 2021.]

2. This Article was mentioned on cdevroe.com

3. @ton great post… my post http://cdevroe.com/2020/10/22/obsidian-didnt-stick-for-me/
   

   Obsidian didn’t stick, for me – Published by Colin Devroe on October 22, 2020

4. Could you give more clear figure? Which software drew it? Thanks!

   • Sure! If you right-click the images an choose ‘view image’ you’ll get a larger version you can zoom in on.
     The images were made with Tinderbox (eastgate.com).

5. Interessant stuk. Ik test Obsidian ook al een tijdje. Na Keep, papier, Notion, Standard notes, Notable, eigen MD files en nu Obsidian (met sync naar verschillende machines via git). Die laatste 5 in de afgelopen 12 maanden. Lastig (gekmakend zelfs) dat ik niet tot iets kom dat blijft. Waar ik met projecten / taken al jaren tevreden en trouw ben aan Todoist. Obsidian heeft wel mix van sterke features.

   Uiteindelijk zijn Zettelkasten en Day logs gewoon md bestanden. In welke zin moet je er bepaalde links in zetten?

   • Het gaat me bij die plugins Zettelkasten en Day logs vooral er om dat ze aannames doen over hoe ik een titel wil vormgeven. Dat bepaal ik liever geheel zelf. Daarnaast heb ik in die bestanden ook een (zich evoluerende) standaard inhoud.
     Links die ik in Day logs (en weeklogs, week reviews, maandmaps) bijvoorbeeld vast opneem zijn een link naar de vorige en volgende dag. Zowel in day logs en in Zettelkasten-achtige notes voeg ik ook automatisch tijdgebaseerde tags toe (in de vorm van #2020- #2020-10 #2020-1024 Dit maakt dat ik alle notes ook in een tijdslijn, flow, manier kan terugvinden).

6. A pretty regular week, in which I had a harder time getting up early. But, that is now fixed thanks to daylight saving time having ended: I woke up at 5:30 this morning.
   This week I

   Some bookkeeping as a variety of VAT and annual tax returns are due by the end of next week
   Renewed my Tinderbox license, so I could upgrade to version 8, which allows me to dynamically incorporate Obsidian notes into Tinderbox maps
   Worked on digital transformation issues for a client, ao preparing an assessment for a department
   Had a (remote obviously) breakfast meeting with my business partners
   Had the weekly meetings with clients
   Prepared and delivered my Ethics as a Practice remarks as part of our company’s informal event for Global Ethics Day.
   Did an extensive team evaluation with a client for a microsubsidies for energy poverty project we did last year
   Did a weekly review again, something I restarted last week. This second one was already much smoother than last week’s when there was a bit of backlog of things to get into the reviewing mode again
   Met payroll for the company. It feels good that we are doing well as a company and team in these times
   Made small bits of progress on trying to make my own IndieWeb compliant theme, that might turn this site into ‘neither a blog nor a wiki’.
   Spent some time watching and reading GitLabs material on managing remote teams.
   Started reviewing my experience using Obsidian for note takig in the past 3+ months

   Spent quite a bit of time outside with our 4yo daughter in the pleasant fall weather. The park around the corner has many fly agarics popping up right now. We used the phone camera to have a look underneath.
   

7. In part 1 I explained how Obsidian is a tool I use in support of the methods I employ that make up my system to process incoming information as well as track and do my work.
   I started using Obsidian to make better notes (Notions as I call them), and link them together where I see relevance. This is a networked type of use. For my daily work and for logging that daily activity I use a folder structure, which is a hierarchical approach. My personal knowledge management system is based on the interplay of those networked and hierarchical perspectives, which allows emergent insights and putting those insights to action or keep them until they can be used.
   Folder hierarchy
   To kick-off my more detailed description of using Obsidian, I will start with that hierarchical perspective: the folder structure. I will also explain how I make daily and week logs, as well as what I call ‘month maps’
   Obsidian allows you to use multiple ‘Vaults’. A vault is a folder tree structure that is perceived as a single collection of notes by Obsidian. The tool tracks connections between only those mark down files in that folder tree. I currently have only a single vault, as I want to be able to link between notes from all my areas of activity. I can imagine you might use separate vaults if one of them is meant to be published, or for instance if one is a team effort. As there is no such division for me, I am building a personal system, I have a single vault.
   Within that vault I have a folder structure that currently looks like this:
   Main folder structue in my Obsidian vault
   That list of main folders is a mix of folders for each of the areas I’m active in, some folders that I use to manage my own work, or that I have/had as Notebook in Evernote to keep their contents apart from other things, and the folders that contain the notes and notions that led me to start using Obsidian.
   Areas (a component in the GTD method) are things like my company (4TGL), family and health, home, my voluntary board positions, and websites/automation. Within each area there are projects, specific things I’m working on. Projects all have their own folder in an Area. Some of the projects may have subfolders for (sub)projects taking place within the context of a client assignment for instance.
   Examples of folders for managing my work are 1GTD12WY which contains things related to my longer term goals and 3 month planning cycle (combining elements from Getting Things Done and the 12 Week Year methods), and the 2Daglogs folder which contains day and week logs, and month maps.
   Evernote notebooks like travel related material (bookings, itineraries) en digital tickler files (also part of the GTD method), and Network (where I keep contextual notes about people, as LinkedIn etc e.g. stores nothing about how you met someone) also have their own top level folder at the moment.
   The actual folders for notes are Notes (for notes made from information coming in) and 0GardenofForkingPaths (why that title?), which contains my Notions, the conceptual Zettelkasten-style notes. Those two folders internally take a networked perspective and have no subfolders.
   Some folder names start with a number to ensure them being shown at the top end of the list. One folder Z-Templates contains, well, templates, and is called Z so it is always last. Templates can be copied into new notes for those notes where you want to keep a specific structure.
   Whenever I start a new project I run an Applescript that after asking me the project name, the area it belongs to, the description and project tag, creates the right folders and in them the right notes I need to start a project (albeit a client project, an internal one, or something else). That script used to create those structure, tasks and notes for me in Evernote and Things, but now creates them in the filesystem within my Obsidian folder. Each project e.g. has a ‘main’ note stating the projects planned results, to which goal(s) it contributes, main stakeholders, budget and rough timeline.
   Day and week logs, month maps
   Within the folder 2Daglogs I keep day logs, week logs, and month maps. Day logs are ordered in monthly folders, all weeks in a year are in one folder, as are all month maps. Day and week logs are for the now and looking back (they’re logs), month maps I use to look forward to the month ahead, at the start of each month (they’re surveying the coming weeks).
   Folder structure that keeps day/week/month files
   The first thing I do in the morning, is start the Day log. I do this by clicking the ‘tomorrow’ link in the day log of the day before (after glancing at what I did yesterday). Then in the new note I hit the keyboard short cut /dnow which (through Alfred) adds date tags (like #2020- #2020-10 #2020-1025) and links to the day logs of yesterday and the (as yet not existing) one for tomorrow. See the screenshot below. During the day I add activities to the log as I’m doing them. I also mention thoughts or concerns, how I think the day goes etc. I link/mention the notes corresponding to activities, e.g. things I wrote down in a project meeting. I started keeping day logs last April, and they are useful to help me see on days that seem unfocused what I actually did do, even if it felt I didn’t do much. That helps spot patterns as well.
   Example of a day log with the links to other days shown, beneath a bullet list of things I mention during the day
   Week logs are notes that collate the day logs of a week. (Since I restarted doing weekly reviews, a week log is accompanied with a note that contains review notes.) Collating is done by transcluding 7 day logs into one note. I add links to the previous and next week on top. I use the week logs in my weekly review on Friday, to write hours in my timesheets at the end of the week, and to write my Week Notes blogpost on Sunday.
   A week log is a list of transcluded day logs. Above in edit mode, below in preview mode

   Monthmaps are something I make at the start of each month, they are a mindmap of the coming month, hence the name (the Dutch word for month, ‘maand’ sounds a bit like the English mind in mindmap). It’s a habit I started 4 years ago. I list every area (see folder structure above), and within those areas I list every project where I see I might hit a snag, where I have concerns or urgencies are likely to pop up, or where activities are in store I know I usually try to evade or postpone. I add easy actions I can think of that will help me deal with such barriers. It’s a way to confront underlying hesitations or anxieties and prevent negative consequences from them. I refer to it during the week, to see if barriers indeed popped up, or what I had planned to deal with them when they do. I go through it during weekly reviews as well.
   In the next part I’ll take a look at how I’ve replaced my todo-list app Things with simple markdown files in Obsidian.

8. I have used Cultured Code’s todo-application Things a long time, since the end of 2008. I attended a presentation then where Cultured Code explained how they translated their intentions and values into the design of the app, and used their software ever since. It is a beautiful software tool and it has been very useful to me for almost 12 years. And then, since the end of August, I have not used it at all. Before 2008 and Things, I used my employer’s tools (Outlook mostly) and privately used text files. Back in the late 1980’s and in the 1990s I only used text files to keep track of tasks. And that is what I’m doing now again, using Obsidian to create markdown text files.
   Important elements to me in using text files for tasks effectively are:

   being able to link between text files both directly and through tags
   being able to quickly switch between the task list and the resources needed for a task
   having the task lists as part of my overall system, not an island
   Things is good at using tags for tasks (allowing me to e.g. filter tasks on context or needed amount of focus through tasks). I was also able do some linking between Things tasks and e.g. Evernote notes, links that I manually copied between the two, and copied into Tinderbox which I use as a dashboard map for various things. I also used a script at the start of project to create the right first tasks, and corresponding notes in those applications. That way there is consistency between how areas, projects and project tags are used across those applications. It worked but it meant a lot of switching between applications during the day. In my set-up of Things/Evernote and now in Obsidian, I roughly follow the Getting Things Done method (areas, projects, inbox, and marking things as someday or waiting etc.)
   As a side note: I do not use my mobile to look at or add tasks, or mark them completed. I basically always work laptop-first. This means that the availability of my tasks lists on mobile, and the capability to edit them there, is not important to me. In fact, Things is an Apple-only product, and I use an Android phone, so I never have been able to use Things on mobile (I did have Things on my 1st gen iPad back in 2010, but tablets are another thing that never really found a niche in my workflow). In that sense using text files are an improvement: I can read them and edit them, because I synchronise my Obsidian notes to my Nextcloud instance, which my mobile can access (there’s no mobile Obsidian app, and there’s no need for it either, any plain text editor will do after all.)
   As I mentioned in earlier posts, going back to text files feels very comfortable to me. Obsidians features make it rather frictionless even, with transclusion, tagging and with linking.
   The task management set-up
   As described in my previous post on my use of Obsidian, I have a hierarchical folder structure of areas of activity, with project folders within them.
   Each project folder contains a file titled ‘0 [project name] things to do’, where I keep the list of actions currently relevant for that project. If there are sub projects, then each of those has a similar own list of tasks, which are transcluded into the general project list.
   In the 1GTD12WY folder, where I keep the general material w.r.t. future goals and my 3 month planning cycle, I also have two general tasklists. One is the root of all tasklists (called ‘0 root list things to do’), the other is a list of general tasks for the current month (‘0 this month things to do’). The leading zero ensures that tasklist are always the first file in a (project) folder.
   The root and month task list in the general ‘getting things done’ folder.
   The ‘this month’ list is filled at the start of each month, from whatever is in the ticklerfile for that month (it might be quarterly recurrent things like, ‘file VAT returns by the 30th’, or ‘check out the book that is scheduled to be published the 21st [link]’), and from general things not tied to any particular project that came up while making my month map (see previous posting).
   The root list contains all the areas of activity, and for each project within an area the project’s task lists is transcluded. Every project task list links to the root list, so even when I forget to add it to the root list, it will show up as a backlink. As projects in turn may have sub projects with their own tasklist, you get multilevel transclusion. Obsidian allows you to go 5 layers deep so that is more than enough for my set-up. This way a task is only ever in one single list.
   I use tags like #waiting and #urgent to mark task status.
   My root task list with the month list and a project list embedded through transclusion
   At the start of each project I run a script that creates all the necessities for a project. This includes automatically making the task list for a new project, adding a handful of common tasks to it, and adding the link to the root list.
   Task management process
   Daily
   On a daily basis I work with the task lists, in multiple ways.
   I browse through the task root list at the start of the day, and specifically the projects I will be spending time on that day. I look at what is marked #urgent. Both the root task list and the #urgent search filter I have pinned as starred searches, so I can directly go to them from the Obsidian interface. I do not add existing daily habits onto my task list, I might add them for habits I’m trying to develop.
   Above: a project task list, in a project folder. Below: the starred searches to quickly switch between e.g. the root list, the month list, the monthly map and urgent tasks

   Whenever I am in a meeting on a project, I have the existing corresponding task list in front of me, right next to the notes I am making during the meeting. After, or during a meeting I update the tasklist, through adding, splitting, deleting or rephrasing.
   When I add a task to a list, I also add links to notes that are relevant to it, e.g. the meeting notes where the task originates, or the note that contains the rough notes and current status of a task. I link/mention the things I need for the task. This lowers the threshold to start doing a task.
   While adding a task I may add tags that help me select which ones are fitting for the current context (e.g. level of energy/focus likely needed, or specific context in which to do them). As I’m only working from home due to the pandemic I currently don’t use contextual tasks yet (in Things I’d tag things with #train e.g. if it something I can well do while commuting to a client’s office).
   When a task is done, I copy and delete it from the task list, and paste it into the day log (see previous post). That way the day log contains all the things I’ve completed that day, plus anything else that came along and wasn’t on the task lists. (I use the day log for time sheets and the weekly review).
   Weekly
   During my weekly review, for each ongoing project I remove no longer relevant or finished tasks, add things I realise will be needed in the coming week(s), and scan the horizon for anything that will become #urgent in the next 3 weeks to mark them as such. I also review the #waiting things to see if anything has slipped my mind.
   Monthly
   Each month I check if any new projects need to be added, or which ones to close down and remove from the root list. While making my month map I add the resulting tasks to the relevant project list, and I add the tasks resulting from things in next month’s tickler file to the task list for this month.

9. Thank you for mentioning the James Burke and Connections in your week notes Thomas! And using it as a metaphor for your Obsidian usage. Some timely serendipity while working out some notes related to theories of change in my own Obsidian vault.
   Btw, I’ve been documenting some of my Obsidian experiences in the past week or so, the first of which describes my pkm system, and how Obsidian supports parts of it.

10. @ton_zylstra thank you for posting your “100 days in Obsidian” posts
    zylstra.org/blog/2020/10/1…

    Loving the system overview angle & how you’ve combined GTD + PKM

    I’m working on a generic architecture and had just added GTD & FileSystem stubs this past week
    miro.com/app/board/o9J_…

11. Ik heb met veel interesse de blogposts van Ton gelezen hoe hij na 100 dagen Obsidian gebruikt als zijn Personal Knowledge Management instrument. Na een hoog over introductie over zijn eigen werk- en projectprincipes (enorm interessant!) duikt hij in twee posts de diepte in, hoe hij Obsidian inricht om dagelijkse notities te maken, gevolgd door wekelijkse reviews en maandlogs. Daarnaast is Ton in de zomer overgestapt van Things naar Obsidian om zijn taken te beheren. Let wel, na 12 jaar gebruik van een taakmanagement-tool, stapt hij nu over op Obsidian. Ik ken Ton langer dan vandaag, dan zit er toch echt iets in Obsidian wat de moeite waard is.

    Deze zoektocht van Ton begon al langer geleden, na een besluit om afscheid te nemen van Evernote. Het frappante is dat ik Ton daardoor weer op het spoor kwam. We kennen elkaar al zeker 15 jaar uit de Nederlandse blogosfeer, maar de laatste jaren was ik hem wat uit het oog verloren. In 2016 kwamen we elkaar online weer tegen via zijn blogpost How to Leave Evernote en sindsdien vinden we elkaar geregeld op diverse onderwerpen, van Indieweb tot networked agency en knowledge management. Ton’s inzichten en zijn manier om uit verschillende bronnen en onderwerpen nieuwe kennis te vergaren waardeer ik enorm en is iets waar ik nog altijd veel van leer. Zo ook in zijn overstap naar Obsidian, waar ik al eerder over schreef.

    Ik neem zelf ook afscheid van Evernote. Ik ben bezig om notitieboeken uit het verleden kritisch te beoordelen of ik ze nog onder mijn vingertoppen wil hebben in een app, of ze als archief op een harde schijf opsla “voor ooit”. Zoals het nu loopt ben ik op 1 januari 2021 weg bij Evernote. Dat is nogal wat, als ik nu een oude blogpost teruglees uit 2005 waar ik al tegen dezelfde problemen liep als nu. Maar waar ik juist een eerste beta van Evernote besluit te gaan gebruiken. Ik dacht dat ik Evernote pas later ben gaan gebruiken, maar mijn blog bewijst anders. Hoe dan ook, het is de evolutie van software en mijn eigen voorkeuren. Tijd voor iets anders na 15 jaar…

    Ik heb al een paar van Ton’s tips overgenomen. Zoals de dagelijkse notitie om bij te houden wat er die dag gebeurt. De laatste vijf dagen in Obsidian ging vrij goed, al heb ik het nog niet in mijn gewoonte om na een bepaalde actie dat even in een zin op te schrijven. Dat zit niet in de tool, het automatisme of het proces. Dat heeft alles te maken met mijn mentaliteit dat ik van de ene naar de andere taak overspring. Ik neem weinig ruimte voor de reflectie en een stap terug te zetten wat er is gebeurd, wat het betekent en er een korte notitie van te maken.Ik gebruik wel een iets ander proces dan Ton. Ik ben ook fan van Alfred, maar voor het maken van de dagelijkse notitie gebruik ik een automatisch script in Keyboard Maestro. Deze maakt elke ochtend om 8:34 (ik hou wel van random tijdstippen) een nieuw bestand in mijn daglog aan. Hetzelfde wil ik nog doen voor het Weeklog en Maandlog.

    Ja, mijn Vault in Obsidian heet Frankopedia!

    Ik ben met Obsidian gestart vanuit Roam Research. De export van Roam heb ik in Obsidian gedumpt. Dat betekent dat ik veel random notities heb, lege bestanden van gelinkte woorden uit notities en een vrij ongestructureerde structuur. De folders van Ton brengen me wel op een idee om dit anders in te richten.

    Ik blijf echter gereserveerd over een tekst gerichte tool als Obsidian. Ik heb altijd al een voorkeur gehad voor apps die naast functionaliteit ook enige esthetica met zich meebrengen. Een app die goed is ontworpen, waar is nagedacht over zaken als iconen, fonts, kleurgebruik en toetsenbord shortcuts. Evernote was zo’n app. Obsidian is niet lelijk, maar in een app als bijvoorbeeld Notion heb ik net wat meer vrijheid en mogelijkheden om het nog meer eigen te maken. Ja dat zijn frivole kraaltjes en spiegeltjes als emoji als pagina-icoon, eigen pagina-headers, meer visuele mogelijkheden met (taken-)lijsten, kolommen, databases en bookmarks. Het voegt niets functioneels toe aan het proces, maar ik vind het prettig om in te werken. Het maakt Notion wel langzamer, de zoekmogelijkheden zijn nog onderontwikkeld en je kunt de weg kwijtraken als je databases probeert te linken. Trust me, I’ve been there…

    Een voorbeeldpagina in Notion

    Daarnaast gebruik ik dagelijks Drafts op zowel laptop als iPhone om links op te slaan voor mijn nieuwsbrief en om wat korte notities te maken. Of langere blogposts. De eerste draft voor deze blogpost komt uit… Drafts. Ik kreeg recent ook de tip om Ulysses weer op te pakken. Ik heb deze Markdown editor in mijn Setapp abonnement en ik gebruik het geregeld om langere artikelen te schrijven voor mijn werk. Met name artikelen die voortkomen uit interviews, die ik opneem en laat transcriberen. In Ulysses kan ik dan goed met blokken tekst schuiven en annotaties en notities maken bij de tekst. Maar als centrum voor al mijn notities en logboeken? Dat weet ik nog niet.

    De jury is er nog niet uit. Ik heb het geluk dat mijn werkprojecten de komende weken redelijk overzichtelijk zijn en ik eenvoudig kan switchen tussen Notion en Obsidian. Zonder dat het effect heeft op werkgerelateerde taken en projecten. Ondertussen lees en leer ik met veel interesse wat Ton en vele anderen doen op dit gebied. Ik heb mijn eigen dagelijkse Notion nieuwsbrief die automatisch wordt gevuld uit Reddit, Twitter en Youtube. Je kunt je er gratis op abonneren als je net als ik geïnteresseerd bent in de materie. Of je kiest voor de Obsidian nieuwsbrief als die je voorkeur heeft!

    Uiteindelijk komt het neer op twee besluiten: Kíes een systematiek en maak de mentale switch om het te blijven gebruiken. Met name dat laatste blijft een lastige voor me. Omdat ik constant dat gevoel heb dat het beter, slimmer, sneller of efficiënter kan. Dus blijf ik na 15 jaar puzzelen op dit soort systemen. Wat stiekem ook gewoon leuk is om te doen. Vind ik dan.
    <!–

    –>

12. In this next part looking at my use of Obsidian I want to describe in more detail what notes I take and how I take them.
    Taking better notes is the actual reason I started using Obsidian. Using Obsidian for my work, day logs, and task management came later, and that covers the hierarchical part of my PKM system. The note taking part is the networked part of it. The system works for me because it combines those two things and has them interact: My internal dialogue is all about connected ideas and factoids, whereas doing activities and completing projects is more hierarchical in structure.
    I make four types of notes: Notions, Notes, Ideas and work notes.
    That last type, work notes, are the project and task related notes. Things I write down during meetings, notes from interviews, or ideas on how to move forward in a project. These live in the hierarchical structure I described in Pt 2. They can be linked to Ideas, Notes or Notions, or may give rise to them, but they serve a purpose firmly rooted in ongoing work. They are always placed within the context, and folder, of a specific project. This post isn’t about those notes.
    The other notes live in the non-hierarchical, networked part of my system. They are added as I go along based on things I think about and information I come across. They become part of the system and get context not by the folder they are placed in (as is the case with work notes in a project folder), they become part of the system because they get linked to existing notes that I associate them with. They are never not linked to at least one other note. The links over time form patterns, and emergent patterns lead to new insights. Those new insights get expressed in additional links and in new notes.
    These networked type notes come in three shapes, Notions, Notes, and Ideas. Each has their own folder to keep them separated from other material.
    The folders are named Garden of the Forking Paths (for Notions), Notes (which I may yet rename), and the Ideas-greenhouse. I will discuss them one by one.
    Ideas-greenhouse
    The ideas-greenhouse holds ideas I have, ideas that seem like something that can be put to action more or less quickly. They may be connected to notes in the other two folders, or to notes in the project folders. An example would be, that I jotted down the idea of making a digital garden for my company two months ago, triggered by a posting on how a community should have its governance documented in combination with having reread the communication handbook of Basecamp while thinking about remote working. It has since morphed into building a collective memory, and turned into a budding internal website documenting the first few things. This is useful when we are onboarding new people, and as a reference for all of us, so colleagues feel better equiped to decide something on their own or ask better questions if they do need someone else’s advice on a decision. So the ideas greenhouse contains ideas that can be acted upon after some tweaks. They may be refined over time, before such action, or connected to and recombined with other ideas in the greenhouse.
    Notes
    Notes, things I come across that strike me as interesting (filtered by my current favourite topics, but not exclusive to it, to aid serendipity), which I jot down while adding why I find it of interest. They’re more like general resources, in which I can keep/find examples, quotes or pointers, extended with some notes on what I think of them. Notes are things that may result from work notes (something someone said in a meeting, an example held up), or from feed reading (pointers to things, perspectives found in someone else’s blog), regular browsing and reading, or questions that I come up with. It’s a mix of stuff, and that’s why it still is called simply ‘Notes’. I may yet come up with a different name for them. An example would be a note I made last week, called SensRnet. SensRnet is the attempt at creating a national database of sensors placed in publice spaces, by local and national government entities. It came up in a meeting with a client. I jotted it down, adding a few links to its source code on GitHub published by the Dutch Cadastre, and links to articles written by some local governments about it. I also mention the outcome of a project my colleague Marc did a few years ago writing local regulations governing the placement of such sensors in public spaces, and doing an analysis from the legal viewpoint. That’s how a Note starts. I may copy some text into at some point, and summarise it over time, or add other context in which I encountered the same thing again. Notes are ‘factoid’ like, resources written down with the context added of how I found them and why I was interested. That’s different from Notions which are already at creation more about the future use it may have.
    Notions and proto-notions
    Notions are conceptual notes taken from my own work and experience mostly, and give my own perspective on these concepts. Most of the current well over 500 come directly in my own words from my blogposts of the past 18 years and presentations I gave during that time.
    As they are more conceptual than factual I started calling them Notions to distinguish them from the other more general resource Notes. I keep these Notions in a folder called Garden of the Forking Paths (see the name explained)
    Each Notion links to at least one other Notion, and while I write them I think about how what I am writing connects to other things already in the Garden of the Forking Paths (GotFP). I may also add additional links or tags, as I come across a Notion while pursuing something else.
    Usually while writing a Notion, I show the graph of how it connects to other Notions/Notes alongside it. I set the graph to show not only the 1st level links, as that only shows the links already apparent from the text I have in front of me. I set it to show 3 steps out at the start, and reduce to two steps when there are more links. That way you see the entire vicinity of a Notion, and it may trigger additional perspectives and associations. It’s a way to leverage the ‘weak ties’ between Notions, which is the place where new information generally comes from.
    Below you see two graphs for a Notion called ‘3D to navigate information’, gleaned from a 2006 blogpost I wrote. The first image is the graph for direct links, showing two links. The second image is the graph for a distance of 2 (links of links), and it shows a much wider picture. It may well be that seeing that graph being created alongside a Notion while I am writing it, leads to adding in another link.
    The Notion ‘3D to navigate information’ is linked to two others, one on how the physical and information landscape overlap and correlate, and one about what I think would be useful functionality for social software tools.

    If you look at the same graph with distance 2, the layer of additionally visible nodes show how my new Notion might be connected to things like online identity, using the environment to store memory and layered access to information. This triggers additional thoughts during the writing process.

    I spin out notes and potential Notions from my project notes, as I encounter things in my work where some idea or thought jumps out. Those potential Notions I put in a folder called proto notions, inside my GotFP.
    Processing notes and proto-notions
    Both the notes and proto-notions I touch upon every now and then, further summarising them or adding explanation and perspective, rewording them, linking them to other notes (this is what Tiago Forte calls progressive summarising). Proto-notions may yet become Notes and not evolve into Notions. Some of what starts as a Note may become a Notion in the GotFP, but most will always remain notes. Most ‘factoids’, even if reworded and put into the context of why I find them interesting will always be Notes. Notions usually are about concepts pertaining to vision, values and practices. Linking them is a key part of those concepts, as it binds them into my network of concepts and thoughts, it puts them as atoms into the constellations that make up my perspective of things. Notes can be specific examples of Notions.
    I previously described how I use certain tags and referencing and naming conventions for Notes and Notions.
    Using Notions and Notes
    I use Notions and Notes in my work directly, pulling them into project notes, by transclusion, or e.g. when writing project proposals. I regularly call them up in conversations when something related gets being discussed, so I can re-use parts of them.
    I also use Notions to create new blogposts and presentations. Last month I gave two presentations which were entirely created from collating a few Notions and adding a line or two to have them flow over into each other. One was on government core (base) registers, the other on Ethics as a Practice. Two months ago I blogged about how I see the role of cities, and that too was constructed from Notions.
    Next to actual output, I pull together Notions, and sometimes Notes in what I call ’emergent outlines’ (Söhnke Ahrens in his book about Zettelkasten calls them speculative outlines, I like emergence better than speculation as a term). These are brief lists to which I add Notions that I think together flow into a story. As I use transclusion I can read them using the underlying Notions. Emergent outlines are a lightweight and bottom-up way to write more, that has a much lower threshold than thinking up a writing project and sitting down trying to write it out.
    Feedreading and Notes / Notions
    Feedreading is a source for Notes, sporadically for Notions. I notice a rising need with myself for higher quality material as input. Blog reading is conversational to me, and for a long time I’ve been content with that conversation as it is. Now I more often want to look into things more deeply. A blog conversation is no longer mostly the endpoint and more frequently the starting point for an exploration, leading me down a trail of links deeper into a topic. In the past three months I’ve read more scientific articles than in the past 3 years I think. Scientific articles and other documents I keep in Zotero, and from my notes I reference the Zotero entry. This difference in how I perceive my feed reading will likely shift my focus to how to read those feeds much more ‘inside-out’, i.e. starting from a question or topic, and checking what specific people in my blogroll say about them. This is funcionality more or less missing from feed readers, so it may lead me to want to tinker some more.
    This concludes the 4th part of describing how I use Obsidian. There’s one more coming, which is all about Obsidian’s functionality as a viewer on my markdown files: the use of workspaces.

13. Wednesday it was 18 years ago that I first posted in this space. The pace of writing has varied over the years, obviously intensively at the start, and in the past 3 years I have been blogging much more frequently again (with a correlated drop off in my Facebook activity to 0), more than at the start even.
    This year is of course different, with most of the people I know globally living much more hyper local lives due to pandemic lockdowns. This past year of blogging turned out more introspective as a consequence. In the past few years I took the anniversary of this blog to reflect on how to raise awareness for grasping your own agency and autonomy online, and reading last year‘s it’s so full of activity from our current perspective, organising events, going places. None of that was possible really this year. I returned home from the French Alps late February and since then haven’t seen much more than my work space at home, and the changing of the seasons in the park around the corner, punctuated only with a half dozen brief visits to Amsterdam and two or three to Utrecht in the past 8 months. A habit of travel has morphed into having the world expedited to our doorstep, in cardboard packaging in the back of delivery vans.
    Likewise my ongoing efforts and thinking concerning networked agency, distributed digital transformation and ethics as a practice has had a more inward looking character.
    Early in the year we completed the shift of my company’s internal systems to self-hosted Nextcloud and Rocket.chat. When the pandemic started we added our own Jitsi server for video conferencing, although in practice with larger groups we use Zoom mostly, next to the systems our clients rolled out (MS Teams mostly). Similarly I will soon have completed the move of the Dutch Creative Commons chapter, where I’m a board member, to Nextcloud as well. That way the tools we use align better with our stated mission and values.
    I spent considerable time renovating my PKM system, and the tools supporting it, with Obsidian the biggest change in tooling underneath that system since a decade or so. It means I am now finally getting away from using Evernote. Although I haven’t figured out yet what to do, if anything, with what I stored in Evernote in the 10 years I’ve been using it daily.
    This spring I left Facebook and Whatsapp completely (I’ve never used Instagram), not wanting to have anything to do anymore with the Facebook company. I departed from my original FB account 3 years ago, which led to me blogging much more again, but created a new account after a while to maintain a link to some. That new account slowly but steadily crept back into the ‘dull’ moments of the day, and when the pandemic increased the noise and hysterics levels aided by FB’s algorithmic amplification outrage machine, I decided enough was enough. A 2.5 year process! It more or less shows how high the, mostly misplaced, sense of cost of leaving can be. And it was also surprising how some take such a step as an act of personal rejection.
    I also see my Twitter usage reducing, in favour of interacting more on my personal Mastodon instance, through e-mail (yay for e-mail) and LinkedIn (where your interaction is tied to your professional reputation so much less of a ragefest). Even though I never dip into the actual Twitter stream, as I only check Twitter using Tweetdeck to keep track of specific topics, groups and interests. This summer I from close-up saw how the trolls came for a colleague that moved to a position in national media. Even if the trolling and vitriol was perhaps mild by e.g. US standards, it made me realise again how there was an ocean of toxic interaction just a single click away from where I usually am on Twitter.
    On the IndieWeb side of things, I of course did not get to organise new IndieWebCamps like last year in Amsterdam and Utrecht. I’ve thought about doing some online events, but my energy flowed elsewhere. I’ve looked more inwardly here as well. I’ve been bringing my presentation slides ‘home’, closing my Slideshare account, and removing my company from Scribd as well. This is a still ongoing process. The solution is now clear and functional, but moving over the few hundred documents is something that will take a bit of time. I don’t want to move over the bulk of 14 years of shared slide decks, but want to curate the collection down to those that are relevant still, and those that were published in my blog posts at the time.
    I am tinkering with a version of this site that isn’t ‘stream’ (blogposts in reverse chronological order), and isn’t predominantly ‘garden’ (wiki-style pseudo-static content), but a mix of it. I’ve been treating different types of content here differently for some time already. A lot never is shown on the front page. Some posts are never distributed through RSS, while some others are only distributed through RSS and unlisted on the site (my week notes for instance). Now I am working on removing what is so clearly a weblog interface from the front page. The content will still be there of course, the RSS feeds will keep feeding, all the URLs will keep working, but the front of this site I think should morph into something that is much more a mix of daily changes and highlighted fixtures. Reflecting my current spectrum of interests more broadly, and providing a sense of exploration, as well as the daily observations and occurrences.
    Making such a change to the site is also to introduce a bit of friction, of a need to spend time to be able to get to know the perspectives I share here if you newly arrive here. I think that there should be increased friction with increased social distance. You’ll know me better if you spend time here. The Twitter trolling example above is a case of unwanted assymmetry in my eyes: it’s incredibly easy for total strangers to lob emotion-grenades at someone, low cost for them, potentially high-impact for the receiver. Getting within ‘striking distance’ of someone should carry a cost and risk for the other party as well. A mutuality, to phrase it more constructively.
    Here’s to another year of blogging and such mutuality. My feed reader brings me daily input from so many of you, around the world, and I’m looking forward to many more distributed conversations based on that. Thank you for reading!

14. Having described my overall system and how I use Obsidian in more detail for daily work, task management and networked note writing, in this posting I turn to how I arrange for low friction flow in Obsidian.
    An important functionality of Obsidian is that you can arrange different panes in which you can show files or other things. This is useful in various basic ways, e.g. to have a note you are editing open twice, once to edit, once seeing the preview. Or, as in the image below, to have a note open, with search results, a graph of connected ideas, and an overview of backlinks.
    Basic pane layout in Obsidian, search results, a file, a network graph and backlinks
    Every pane can be split horizontally and/or vertically, and again, up to the point it fills your entire screen. This allows me to for instance in a client conversation have my task list for that project, notes from our previous conversation as well as in-depth notes about the work, all in one overview, next to the file in which I’m taking notes from the ongoing meeting itself. While in parallel to all that I still have the ability to pull all kinds of other information or conceptual description during the meeting. This allows me to quickly bring up things in high detail, and easily switch between high-level and low-level things, organisational aspects and the topic at hand etc.
    Where this functionality comes into its own is where you can save specific pane / screen set-ups and switch between them as different workspaces. Since recently there is a workspaces plugin that does this. You can also do it by hand or scripted in the background. The current set-up is always stored in a file called workspace in the Obsidian folder in your vault. It’s a JSON file describing the screen lay-out. If you copy and rename that, you have saved your workspace. If you put it back and reload Obsidian you have reinstated that workspace. The plugin does the same thing but smoothly from within Obsidian itself.
    This means I can switch between workspaces at will, such as:

    The daily start workspace (which includes today’s daylog, yesterday’s daylog, the root task list and month map, the quarterly goals and an #urgent search)
    The weekly review workspace (quarterly goal list, weeklog, review template, root tasklist, monthmap)
    The month map workspace (#urgent, root tasklist, last month map, this month map, quarterly goals)
    The conference call workspace (Project main note, project task list, last call’s notes, new notes, project details)
    Note writing (search, graph, pane with relevant other note(s), note being written)
    The workspace I use at the start of the day: #urgent things on the left, today’s log and yesterday’s log in the middle, full taks list, quarterly goals, and month map on the right.
    This list of handy workspaces may still grow over time I suspect for different aspects of my work.
    There’s one more posting on my use of Obsidian left. It will be more of a summary, on what makes Obsidian work well for me, and why it fits my preferences.

15. Over the past few weeks I have described how my usage of Obsidian has evolved since I first used in early July. This is the final post in the series. Where the previous posts described my personal knowledge management system, and how I use it for daily project work, task management, note taking, and flow using workspaces in this final post I want to mention a few more general points.
    These points concern first my overall attitude towards using Obsidian as a tool, second its current functionality and third its future development of functionality.
    First, what is most important to me is that Obsidian is a capable viewer on my filesystem. It lets me work in plain text files. That is my ‘natural’ environment as I was used to doing everything in text files ever since I started using computers. It’s a return of sorts. What Obsidian as a viewer views is the top folder you point it to. The data I create in that folder remains independent from Obsidian. I can interact with that data (mark down text files) through other means than just Obsidian. And I do, I use the filesystem directly to see what are the most recent notes I made. I add images by downloading or copying them directly into a folder within the Obsidian vault. I use Applescript to create new notes and write content to them, without Obsidian playing any role.
    Next is that Obsidian allows me to rearrange how I see notes in different workspaces and lets me save both workspaces and searches, which means it can represent different queries on my files. In short Obsidian at this moment satisfies 3 important conditions for decentralised software: I own my own data, the app is a view, interfaces are queries. Had any one of those 3 but especially the first been missing, I would be exchanging one silo (Evernote) for the next. Obsidian after all is not open source. A similar tool Foam is. Foam is currently not far enough along their path of development to my taste, but will get there, and I will certainly explore making the switch.
    When it comes to current functionality I am ensuring that I use Obsidian only in the ways that fit with those three conditions. There is some functionality I therefore refuse to use, some I likely won’t use, and some I intend to start using.
    I refuse to use any functionality that creates functionality lock-in, and makes me dependent on that particular feature while compromising the 3 key conditions mentioned above. Basically this covers any functionality that determines what my data looks like, and how it is created (naming conventions, automatic lay-outs etc). Functionality that doesn’t stick to being a viewer, but actively shapes the way data looks is a no go.
    There are other functions I won’t use because they do not fit my system. For instance it is possible to publish your Obsidian vault publicly online (at publish.obsidian.md, here’s a random example), and some do. To me that is unthinkable: my notes are an extension of my thinking and a personal tool. They are part of my inner space. Publishing is a very different thing, meant for a different audience (you, not me), more product than internal process. At most I can imagine having separate public versions of internal notes, but really anything I publish in a public digital garden is an output of my internal digital garden. Obviously I’d want to publish those through my own site, not through an Obsidian controlled domain.
    Other functionality I am interested in exploring to use. For instance Obsidian supports using Mermaid diagrams, a mark-down style language. This is a way to use diagrams that can port to another viewer as well, and doesn’t get in the way if a viewer does not support them.

    Mermaid is a way to describe a diagram, and then render it. Seen here both from within Obsidian.
    Future functionality I will explore is functionality that increases the capabilities of Obsidian as a viewer. Anything to more intelligently deal with search results for instance, or showing notes on a time line or some other aspect. Being able to store graph settings in a workspace (graphs now all revert to the default when reloading a workspace). And using the API that is forthcoming, which presumably means I can have my scripts talk directly to Obsidian as well as the filesystem.
    I’ve now been using Obsidian for 122 days, and it will likely stay that way for some time.

16. This page lists some things on Personal Knowledge Management. In 2020 I’m mostly focused on processing material collected through my information strategies.
    For now therefore I’m just listing some of the things I wrote recently about note taking.

    Current description of my system

    Hierarchical folder structure for Areas and Projects, description of day, week and monthlogs
    How I do task management

    Making notes and notions
    How I make ‘notions’ my permanent notes
    My 300th Notion

    Planting the Garden of Forking Paths, a bit more about the note taking process
    Second order notes, Zettelkasten
    Wiki, Blogs, Note taking
    Threading Cards and Zettelkasten
    Threading Cards

17. I’ve been reading through Ton‘s articles on his PKM system. Ton’s PKM. It’s of great interest to me because I really respect Ton’s views, and I’m keen to see where it might help me reflect on my own system. Ton tries to avoid silos and lock-in, and has recently been able to move much of his system to plain-text and Obsidian, and I think many of the methods would translate to org-mode, if I wanted them to. Thanks Ton for sharing it in such detail. https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/10/100-days-in-obsidian-pt-1/

18. It was a very busy week, with dawn to dusk videocalls on several days. I declared videoconferencing moratorium for next week (although I have a handful scheduled), in order to get some things qctually done. This week I

    Got asked to do an extended interview/briefing on the ‘Impact through Connection‘ project I did a few years ago, in order to create a low threshold document for library staff to emulate our work.
    Worked on the data publishing platform for a province
    Discussed how to use data better for governance audits, as well as for politician’s briefings for a client
    Prepared documentation for the Open Nederland general assembly
    Finished my series of 6 blogpostings about using Obsidian (here’s part 1, with links to the other 5)
    Did a number of interviews on sustainable infrastructure development (roads, waterways etc) for a client
    Discussed with the Dutch service provider Good.cloud to move my company’s NextCloud to them
    Indulged myself ordering some books from Shakespeare and Company in Paris, just because
    Unpacked my newly received CZUR Shine Ultra, a scanner/camera that ook some time getting delivered from China due to the pandemic.
    Enjoyed the lovely fall weather this weekend
    Made a list of the non-fiction books on my Nova2, Kindle and windowsill’s ‘to read’ stacks. There wasn’t really a need to order more from Paris, I must admit. I can read my way through multiple additional pandemic waves to be honest. Having the list will however help me actually start on some of those books.
    This week in … 1492*
    A meteorite fell to earth in the Alsace. It was observed and chronicled at the time. A 127kg piece is still on display in the town of Ensisheim.

    (this image I found through Google search. As it’s a straightforward reproduction of public domain material, it is considered public domain as well.
    (* I show an openly licensed image with some Week Notes posting, to showcase more open cultural material. See here why, and how I choose the images for 2020.)

19. Jörg Kantel discusses this posting series.

20. Ton doet even een serie

21. This morning I watched parts of Andy Matuschak’s stream that shows him working on processing his thoughts and notes from a book he read.
    It’s about 100 minutes of seeing him making notes….

    There is much value in getting an insight in how other people actually do their work (the master-apprentice model is important for a reason), and it is not often you get to see how knowledge workers organise and do the things they do. It’s why I e.g. documented the way I currently use Obsidian for my PKM system. As a resource for my future self, and as a way to offer others a glimpse so they may take some part of it that fits with their own practices.
    Andy Matuschak basically took the idea of live streaming your gaming adventures, to live stream a note taking session. And it’s highly fascinating. Because it shows it is actual work that takes time and energy, digesting a book, following lines of thought, doubling back, referencing earlier material, looking things up in the book in question etc. Also of interest is he is focusing on the tensions that what he read causes with other things he knows and has read. He’s not just lifting things out that chime with him, but the things that cause friction. Because in that friction lies the potential of learning.
    I had come across this video earlier already this summer, and then only watched the first few minutes. Then I was expecting something else, that the video would show his set-up. I didn’t have time to watch someone go through their actual process. Now I re-encountered it in a different context and the video made much more sense this time
    Browsing through Andy Matuschak’s public Digital Garden is also interesting to do.

22. Nice!

    I started using Obsidian around August 2020, after about a year of Markdown experience with Azure Data Studio. It was a challenging times for me: new workplace, new tech stack, new team, new culture. I was a bit skeptical initially but then my knowledge graph kept growing and eventually Obsidian became one of my primary tools.

    It is flexible, logical, fast and simple to learn.

23. It’s the end of December. This means it is time for my annual year in review posting, the ‘Tadaa!’ list.
    Ten years ago I started writing end-of-year blogposts listing the things that happened that year that gave me a feeling of accomplishment, that make me say ‘Tadaa!’, so this is the eleventh edition (See the 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010 editions). I tend to move on immediately to the next thing as soon as something is finished, and that often means I forget to celebrate or even acknowledge things during the year. Sometimes I forget things completely (a few years ago I completely forgot I organised a national level conference at the end of a project). My sense of awareness has improved in the past few years, especially since I posted week notes for the past few years. This year was different as well as the pandemic and resulting lock-downs meant a more introspective year than usual. Still it remains a good way to reflect on the past 12 months and list the things that gave me a sense of accomplishment. So, here’s this year’s Tadaa!-list, in no particular order:

    We started the year, as per our tradition, celebrating New Year with dear friends that live in Switzerland. Of course this year we can’t travel to Switzerland, and miss seeing our friends. I’m glad we did go last year. We quarantined ourselves from before Christmas, so we can visit E’s parents around NYE. We haven’t seen them since late August.
    Jamming into the new year 2020 in the Swiss Alps
    Around the start of the first pandemic wave in March I spent a considerable amount of time pushing for still pending signatures on projects and for prompt payments on outstanding invoices. It meant my company entered the lockdown with some confidence. No projects were postponed by clients, no invoices went unpaid. It provided the team with reassurance. We did not need to apply for any economic support measures, leaving them for companies in more need.
    I’ve been working remotely for 16 years, and all of us were accustomed to working in a distributed way, but we had just opened our own office last year in Utrecht. The office served as a safe working spot for one or two people living nearby really needing to get out of the house. We distributed some office chairs to the homes of our team members early on, as we didn’t want them to sit on kitchen table chairs for week, months, a year on end. In the end, due to the many video calls, we saw more of each other and more of us at the same time, not less this year.
    In a distanced line at the bakery, when it was still novel. Showing new cycling skills to grandma on video.
    Our team became much more of an actual team this year, caused by being more visible to each other. We built and depended much more on each other. Each of us struggled mentally at times, working from within the same four walls each day, but the support of the others was there to get through it. In March we let go of our just previously set company goals for 2020, and made team stability our major aim.
    Acknowledging the new reality, as well as our mental response, the team’s reflex was to step on it. With great results. Simply getting on with it resulted in our best year yet, with an 18% increase in turnover compared to 2019, despite having a policy of not setting financial goals, and also letting go of the original 2020 goals we set. There’s a lesson in that. Because we did well, we could extend E’s contract with a year in June, newly hired P in September after the completion of her internship and Master thesis with us, and offered S a fixed contract in October. We brought our colleague J on board as a shareholder and fellow entrepreneur (making him the only one we fired from the company, in January)
    Ethics,not as an abstraction, but as a practice, became a much more central element in our work concerning data, data governance, and responsible data use. I helped facilitate a great workshop with colleagues in the Amsterdam Arena early in the year, we injected ethical discussions in most of our ongoing projects, and created a data-ethics card game as a end-of-year present to clients.
    I don’t ski, E’ does only a little, but we decided to join a group of friends for their skiing trip in the French Alps in February. Enjoying the snow, simply hanging out with friends, playing with Y building snowmen, under a sunny sky was great. It also turned out to be the only trip we made this year, so the memories of that fun week have served us well.
    In the snow in the French Alps, in the Ajax Amsterdam Arena for data ethics
    In May, in the midst of the first lock-down, I turned 50. E had arranged a week of spread out activities, centered around the theme ‘play’. Part of it was an evening of playing Trivial Pursuit with dear friends online, including a question card deck about my own past 50 years. Another part was a treasure hunt with another dear friend through the neighbourhood. All fun yet within social distancing and other guidelines.
    Video conference Trivial Pursuit. We had the board, every participant their own card deck to ask questions from.
    When the pandemic hit, the NGO I chair was in a much different place than my company: various projects got postponed indefinitely, others never materialised. On top of that the director decided to leave and take up a position long on her wishlist, and a key project manager left as well. It left us scrambling during the summer to ensure the organisation’s future, financial stability, find a new director and replace key people all at once. The NGO’s team and the board pulled it off together. Our board is normally very hands-off, but now we jumped into the day-to-day operations. I’m really glad our joint efforts had an impact. We found a new director and two new project leads within weeks, and all could start almost immediately. The renewed team then pulled hard on ensuring stability. This month we approved the 2021 budget, and the NGO is once more financially ok, the team is actually larger than 6 months ago, and we’re on the look-out for one more staff member. The economic support measures were essential to get through the first few months, but the organisation now no longer needs them.
    At the Kröller-Müller museum
    E and I have known for years we can travel very well together. Now we know we can be very well at home together too. Both of us miss not having much or any time for ourselves, especially when Y is at home during school closures, both of us miss being able to go places for inspiration. Both of us struggled at times. We’re tired and didn’t have any real off-time for 9 months. Nevertheless we managed and complemented eachother well I think. We went for walks and visited a museum or two when conditions allowed, we took care of our home and garden to help ensure our wellbeing.
    Enjoying our downstairs terrace at the water. Many walks through our neighbourhood.
    I finally dumped Facebook completely, including Whatsapp. I had left Facebook three years ago, and then created a new more low-profile account. During the first months of the pandemic I realised that both the rationalisation I had for still being on FB (some connections I had only there), and the increasing level of pandemic-inspired conspiracy-stories (don’t ever call them theories!) and related toxicity made my ongoing presence there unbearable. So I left. Because FB as a company isn’t doing anything meaningful to fix the mess of their own creation, I decided I don’t want anything to do with the company as a whole either. So WhatsApp got uninstalled as well. I don’t miss the never ending doomscrolling on manipulated timelines. I sought out more distributed conversations instead (see further down).
    Desinfection is the new sexy. Socially distanced cycling traffic light waiting zone
    Renovated my personal knowledge management (PKM) system. Making notes differently means a very different pace of learning. I wrote some 800 notions, conceptual notes representing the core of my internalised concepts of 20+ years of work. That can now serve as the base of further learning. Addtionally 100 notes geared to more fact-oriented things, which will grow from being connected to my feed reading inputs, and now that my first focus on establishing the main body of concepts is over. And several hundred immediate work related notes, helping me to get things done. Kept a day log since late April, which was helpful to see the work I did also on days the fragmentation of tasks would otherwise obscure it. All in all, my PKM didn’t change fundamentally, but I reduced the friction of sustaining it a lot. It has already paid off in various ways, and I’ll get better at wielding it in the coming months to help me create, write and work better.
    I had two periods where I struggled this year. Towards the summer, when I was struggling in getting the narrative for a report together, and in the volume of fragmented and overly diverse material I had couldn’t find my way out. And a worse period last month, where for a few weeks I felt increasingly awful. From the relentless efforts without time off, the endless video calls, and no longer being able to easily go outside as the days got greyer and wetter. In both instances I am glad I reached out to others about it, and that act alone already improved much. For the coming months I will try and keep my calendar relatively empty.
    I started my days at 6am in the spring, and kept it up after the summer until now. That first hour of the day, before Y wakes up, I use to read and write a bit. A small sliver of my own time.
    A long September weekend hiking in the hills of Limburg, southern Netherlands
    Took a very deep dive into meteorological data and earth observation / environmental data in the EU, as part of the work to write upcoming European legislation on mandatory open data releases in areas of high socio-economic value. It was a long, and at times hard, process, but I’m pleased with the results in both the thematic areas I was responsible for. If even the low end recommendations are adopted it will mean progress unheard of in about 2 decades of discussion in the meteorological field. If it moves above that low end, it will also mean a very logical but still the biggest open data step for the entire INSPIRE program.
    Enjoyed our home a lot, appreciating it even more than before. So glad we’re in the house we’re in. Allowing us to have different in- and outside spaces to use, to avoid feeling caged in. Growing and picking berries, seeing apples grow. Having our own office space to withdraw in. Y having space to leave her toys around, without it getting in the way. Little details help too, like the smooth feeling door handles we bought when we moved in. Now that I’ve grabbed many more door handles at home this year, I’m oddly thankful for them each time.
    A visit to the Amersfoort Kade Museum, and to the Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden
    Still happy I treated myself to a Nova2 e-ink reader, allowing me to read more non-fiction in a way that fits my routines, and have a seamless way of processing the notes I take from that reading.
    Enjoyed the distributed conversations and connections through my blog, now 18 yrs old. Conversations that cross over different topics, through different modes of communication, and different aspects of life. Thank you all who frequented my inboxes this year.
    Finally, it feels good that professionally there is enough lined up already for the better part of next year. It gives quiet confidence, and creates space to deal with the logistical and mental challenges the ongoing pandemic will still pose.

    Internet retail turned from a convenience to a necessity this year. For groceries, and for DIY material, games, pencils etc to entertain Y. I bought several pieces of art as Christmas gifts, and they arrived within days from across the EU. I could support independent stores I like from behind my desk.
    I’ve worked 1646 hours this year according to my timekeeping spreadsheet, which was 100 less than last year. For the first time it is on average near to my nominal 4-day work week, when counted over 52 weeks. However, in reality it was significantly more, definitely. This as when you’re at home you tend to only count the hours you’re ‘really’ working. Normally if you’re at the office or with a client, you count from arrival to departure as work time. I’ve told our team they should allow for that difference by using a multiplication factor of 1,3-1,5, but I did not really take that advice myself.
    It was a year in which our lives took place in a much smaller space. Being connected, having the world at our digital disposal was good and needed. We’re healthy, doing ok, and professionally secure. That’s a lot already to be thankful about. Onwards to 2021!
    Take care, stay well, reach out. Happy 2021!

24. Writing my Notions and notes these past months as part of my revamped personal knowledge management system, I realised as the collection grew that using the collection as a thinking tool also requires remembering more of what is in there. Not to make the notes superfluous but to have more top of mind material that serves as a starting point in interacting with the notes I have, as well as to be able to weave that more easily into current tasks and work. I also expect it to aid creativity, as a large chunk of creativity is recombination of previous elements, and remembering more elements lowers the threshold to new combinations.
    Both in Andy Matuschaks notes and in this long article by Michael Nielsen about his use of Anki, spaced repetition is discussed in the context of note taking, and it got me thinking (I write ‘thinking’, but it was as much working through the mentioned material and distilling the concepts key to me from it, as it was chewing on it mentally and adding that to those same notes. Thinking is more interacting with my PKM, rather than sitting down looking into the middle distance as per Rodin’s bronze).
    Anki is a tool (on laptop and mobile), that allows you to train your memory with flash cards and spaced repetition. I’ve used it in the past, e.g. to increase my vocabulary in French and to better read cyrillic script, but not with much energy or effect. It felt uncomfortable to be using card decks made by others for instance. Making my own flash cards from scratch always seemed a daunting task as well.
    With my now much better set-up of notes however I have a great starting point to create my own decks of flash cards. As I am obviously not the first one to realise the potential of notes collections for flash cards, there is already an Obsidian plugin that pulls out questions and answers from my notes, and puts them into Anki. It comes with a wiki that documents how to set it up for yourself, including how to mark various types of questions and answers in your notes.
    The key feature is, that I can add a question and its answer as a part of any note, and the plugin will pull it out and export that to Anki. It means I can e.g. end a note on three key aspects of distributed applications, with an Anki question and answer about those three aspects, which will get exported to Anki. Better still, I can add multiple questions in different forms about the same thing to that note, e.g. a follow-up question for each of the three aspects. Having multiple versions of basically the same question means I can phrase them for different memory hooks in parallel. This will enhance my own understanding, and allows me to place notions in specific contexts for instance.
    I have now installed the Obsidian to Anki plugin in Obsidian, and the Anki Connect plugin in Anki (so it can ‘listen’ for automated input).
    Some things I hope this will yield benefits for is:

    making it a more deliberate choice what I want to remember long term
    making it easier to remember the basics of a new field of interest
    making the effort to remember a habit
    improving my skilled reading
    using remembered material to better connect new notes to the existing corpus
    making it easier to internalise new / relatively new material
    The way I’m approaching it is to have all my flash cards, whatever the topic, in the same single deck. This as I see my notes collection and all the stuff I remember as a interlinked network of topics and material. Splitting it up in some sort of thematic structure precludes a whole range of potential connections and associations, and is artificial in that it makes a current perhaps logical distinction the norm forever.
    The coming 12 weeks or so I’ll work on two habits:

    adding questions to my notes as I work on those notes, and
    using Anki daily to review those questions.

25. My mood and focus improved again this week, which is good news. I still got bogged down in more handover work than I expected beforehand, but all in all this week was ok.
    This week I:

    Did some invoicing and prepared for the January invoicing, which I’ll do the coming wee
    Reviewed the procurement terms by a service provider for some data for a client, to help guard their data sovereignty as a public body.
    Moved my mail archives to the new laptop (I use Mailsteward for it), and switched to local archiving on the new laptop. As I’m working from home anyway, there is currently no need to keep any e-mail in the IMAP’d inbox, as I won’t be accessing it from my mobile or tablet anyway. This meant I could happily archive anything that was in there, and have been able to declare inbox 0 the entire week. It showed me how often I tend to check mail on my phone, as I now noticed there was never anything on my screen! Let’s see if my average use time on my phone decreases the coming week.
    Made a first design for a story telling site, where we plan to collect individual experiences w.r.t. air quality, as part of the citizen science community building project in Rotterdam we started last month. The idea is to look for patterns in the collected stories, and run the ‘survey’ for the entire 2.5 years the project is scheduled for.
    Made some but relatively limited progress in reading the documentation on all the EU data related policies and regulations. I am working towards a legal, organisational and content timeline to provide a helicopter view of everything that has a bearing on data. This entire year I will spend about half my time on this subject and making a (moving) ‘map of the world’ will be very useful to me and the client(s). I’m tackling these documents with a lot of note taking into my PKM system, and I’m starting to feel the momentum that is bringing.
    Revised a document describing a role and process description for the open data coordinator and data publication efforts of a client. Not finished as I had hoped, but nearly.
    For the Open Nederland association I reviewed the received comments on the draft statutes, and presentend them in the General Assembly where we approved the statutes. Now I can have them notarised and registered. This will allow us to start the process of getting recognised as a public benefit institution (promoting open knowledge and creative commons).
    With the move to a new laptop I’ve left behind my previous feedreader, ReadKit, and have been using my personal TinyTinyRSS instance. I run it on one of my domain names since some time already, but now adopted it as my main feed reader as an experiment how that fits/feels in my workflow. Started musing about feed reading again because of it.
    Due to the forecasted snow followed by a week of freezing temperatures (up to -15C) accompanied by strong winds, made some preparations like wrapping some potted plants, bringing the sleigh and snow shovel from the shed into the house. And, because the supermarket cancelled deliveries because of the weather, made an unforeseen trip to the supermarket myself to stock up for the coming week.
    Today was a relaxed day with lots of fun in the snow with Y. I feel physically tired, not mentally tired, and I realised how it has been the other way around for a year now. I suspect I’ll sleep as well as Y tonight (she didn’t make a peep anymore after her head hit the pillow).

    Primary schools are reopening as of tomorrow, so Y will be in school in the mornings, allowing E and me a bit more time for ourselves and work than in the past weeks of lockdown.
    Y was ready to go outside into the snow as soon as she woke up, and spent most of the day outside

26. Lukas Rosenstock posted a write-up of a group discussing their personal CRM routines he organised. A little over a year ago I was impressed with how Rick Klau (an old blogging connection) described his ‘homebrew CRM‘.
    Lukas mentioned there were three groups in his conversation, one using specialised tools, one group using no digital tools, and one group using more general tools (“like Roam, Notion or Airtable“). I’m definitely one of the latter.
    After reading Rick’s posting a year ago I parked it for a while, but when I adopted Obsidian for note taking, after a while I also started using it for some light weight CRM notes. Unlike Rick I haven’t added any process or automation, but I did start creating CRM notes so that something like it might become possible over time.
    What I started with is making notes about people I encounter.
    LinkedIn has one glaring hole in its functionality and that is allowing me to add something about the context of when I met someone. After using LinkedIn for 16 years I now sometimes come across a LinkedIn contact and then don’t remember how or why we connected. LinkedIn by now does show when you connected, allowing me to browse through someone’s CV to see what that person did when we connected and try to remember the context of that connection. Xing, mostly used in German speaking countries, had this from the start including a field for a few notes on when / how you met someone. That has proved valuable. [UPDATE In the comments Aad points out such a feature has been present at some point. Online search suggests it was introduced in 2013/4 with LinkedIn Contacts, and became a premium-only feature from 2017. By 2013 I had some 2k contacts, 10 years worth of interaction, where such contextual info was missing, and I use the free version, so the general point stands, even if factually not correct since 2013]
    Back when I used a wiki on my laptop for notes, I also kept CRM style notes in it, especially 2004-2008. The useful bit was that I could link to a person’s page in the various notes I made about meetings, events etc. That ‘backlinking’ overview in itself was a great way of adding contextual info.
    With Obsidian and the use of simple text files in markdown I have that back, and actually in a better way than in that wiki of old. Because those text files can be approached by a wide variety of software tools, not just Obsidian.
    I’m not attempting to be complete in these CRM notes, I grow them the same way as I grow the other type of notes: when I encounter someone new I make note of it. Especially when I don’t know someone yet, or don’t have a strong connection to someone I make those notes. Not so much of people that I’m already connected to like colleagues. I’ve started a few new projects in the past few months, which is always a moment when you encounter a lot of new people in a new context. So those I’ve made notes for, as it helps understand a new client organisation, relevant stakeholders and context. For now backlinking in meeting and project notes is the way for adding a record of interaction.
    Maybe in a year or so I can start doing more pro-active things with those notes, like Rick has built into his routines. Another element to me is potentially leaving LinkedIn behind at some point in the future, or at least be somewhat prepared when LinkedIn goes away, as all these platforms do.
    Do you have some personal CRM-type routines or automation?
    Handshakes and conversations is what I’m interested in, not marketing instruments. Image Handshake by Elisha Project, license CC BY SA

27. I have changed the way I add date tags to my PKM notes. It used to be in the form of #2021- #2021-02-26. This as my main viewer on these notes, Obsidian, only supports search on full tag names, so searching on #2021- does not surface #2021-02 as tag. In December Obsidian introduced nested tags, which you can do by adding a / in between, like in #maintag/subtag/subsubtag etc. Normally I am adverse to sorting tags into hierarchies, tags are not categories after all. But for dates a nested hierarchy is useful: now I can add #2021/02/26 as tag, but in search that will return results for #2021/ and for #2021/02 too. It took a bit of time, but I’ve now replaced all my old date related tags with the new nested tags. An added benefit is that it cleans up my taglist enormously, as all tags related to a year are collapsed into one.

28. @clacke Obsidian isn’t open source, but has a growing community of plugin builders etc. There’s a promising open source alternative called Foam, built on VS code, but it seems a work in progress still mostly.

29. There’s beauty in node graphs like these, even if in this form it hasn’t much use value. This is my graph of the ~2.600 notes I keep in Obsidian after 9 months of daily use, as part of my personal knowledge management system.
    
    (click for larger version)
    The outer rim of islands is the reading and summarising in progress. Yellows and greens are notes and notions (around 50% of the total), red work related notes, blues are about organising and planning (day logs, weekly reviews, checklists, templates etc.).
    For contrast the graph of the around 7.000 notes I exported from Evernote, which has no structure at all (except for one island of notes having numbered footnotes, which causes a connection between unrelated notes having links for the number [1] which also happens to be an existing note title).

    When graphs are useful to me in practice is when I’m looking at local graphs of my notes, while writing. A local graph shows me the notes connected to the current note, at different degrees of separation. One degree I never use (those are the links appearing in the note itself), but two degrees (to which notes the linked notes in my note themselves link) is useful, as it allows associations and new connections.

30. A thorough, deep dive on how Obsidian became his main component in Personal Knowledge Management.

    zylstra.org/blog/2020/10/1…

31. A week that felt almost as normal as before All This. Even though it is a new normal, not a return (and being aware that we’re heading into the fall with rising numbers of cases again).
    This week I

    Compared the vision document for upgrading the national geo-information infrastructure with the emerging EU legal framework and Green Deal to see where they align or not
    Presented to the geo information policy team at the Ministry for the Interior
    Did the monthly invoicing
    Had the weekly client meetings, this time in person, and spending half of my time at client offices
    Finished the first full iteration of a public client wiki. It contains information on the upcoming EU legal framework for digitisation and data. It is created directly from mark down notes in my personal collection, pushing them to a repository on Github, that using Respec gets turned into a website on github.io. That works really well.
    Spent an afternoon in the cinema, to see Dune. Now rereading the novel itself.
    Did a first detailed check of which elements in the EU framework on digitisation and data need to be incorporated or translated into the national reference architecture for (public sector) digital twins.
    Had a half day session with the reference architecture team to discuss that
    Drove Y to Haarlem for a sleep over with her nieces.
    Went out for (Thai food) dinner with E, and had a few beers together sitting at the bar of the oldest pub in town Onder de Linden (continuously since 1755 in a 1530 building). It’s the pub where E set her prize winning story about Amersfoort she wrote last year, but never visited before. It was very nice to just hang out with the two of us.
    On the way into town for dinner and beers, my bicycle broke down (so we walked back home and took public transport). Saturday morning was spent to select and buy a replacement bike. I thought to buy a second hand one, but ended up with a affordabel new one, which I will pick up Tuesday. I think this is the first new bike I bought in my life. The bicycle my parents bought me for secondary school lasted me through university, and since then I had 2 second hand ones each one lasting a little over a decade or so. I leave my bike at railway stations a lot, so having something that looks too fancy just gets stolen.
    Had coffee and lunch in town with E, before picking up Y again at her nieces’
    Drove to Enschede to visit friends. Cees is a (press) photographer and opened a small exhibition of some of his photos in Het Bolwerk, Enschede’s oldest continuously operating pub (this one 1904, so nowhere in the same league as the oldest Amersfoort one). We had lunch in and walked around our former home town a bit. Afterwards we went back to our friends’ place and chatted over food and drinks.
    Had a conversation with Andy Sylvester for his ‘tools for thought’ podcast, talking about my use of Obsidian and Tinderbox mostly.

    In the Bolwerk café for the opening of Cees’ photo exhibit, in Enschede.

32. Yesterday I had a conversation with Andy Sylvester about the tools I use for my personal process for taking in information, learning and working. He posted our conversation today, as episode 8 in his ‘thinking about tools for thought‘ podcast series. In the ‘show notes’ he links to my series on how I use Obsidian that I wrote a year ago. This is still a good overview of how I use mark down files for pkm and work, even if some details have changed in the year since I wrote it. I also mentioned Respec, which is how I directly publish a client website on a series of EU laws from my notes through GitHub. And not in Andy’s show notes but definitely worth a mention is Eastgate’s Tinderbox.

33. Op 20 november a.s. vanaf 20:00 vindt de derde Nederlandstalige Obsidian meet-up plaats! Dit keer geïnitieerd door @CABenstein in het Nederlandstalige kanaal op de Obsidian Discord. Je kunt je aanmelden op Eventbrite, of anders laat even van je horen op Discord.
    Tijdens de sessie is er alle tijd om tips en tricks uit te wisselen over het werken met Obsidian. Zelf ben ik altijd erg geïnteresseerd hoe het persoonlijk kennismanagementproces (pkm posts op dit blog) van mensen is georganiseerd, en hoe ze dat in hun tools vormgeven. Over de eerste meet-up schreef ik een impressie, en dat deden Wouter en Frank ook.
    Schuif aan!

34. There are hundreds of resources on note-taking systems so don’t take this post as anything more than a collection that caught my attention. Once you go down the ‘zettelkasten’ or ‘digital garden’ rabbit holes, you may find that it takes a while to get out again.

    If you already have a sense of what the domain of ‘personal knowledge management’ includes, the list below might serve as a useful introduction to a systematic approach to how you think about knowledge work. If you haven’t yet come across what the fuss is about, you could find a reviews of Sonke Ahrens’ 2017 book, How to take smart notes.

    100 days in Obsidian – Workflow and system100 days in Obsidian – Hierarchy and logs100 days in Obsidian – Tracking tasks100 days in Obsidian – Writing notes (this post had the most areas of overlap for me; here are my Hypothes.is annotations)100 days in Obsidian – Flow and workspaces100 days in Obsidian – Final observations

    An interview with Ton Zijlstra by Andy Sylvester, where they discuss some of the posts listed above (you can see the page annotation I made while listening to this podcast).

    An example of my Hypothes.is notes on the Writing notes post in the list above.
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