Tag: notetaking

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How could I not buy these small notebooks? Made by my friend Peter from paper cut-offs from boxes he made and printed in Tuscany, they are made from Magnani 1404 paper. Magnani started making paper in Pescia in 1404 (they ceased operation in recent years, but another Magnani is still making paper, since 1481), right at the moment in time that the literate population of Tuscany started using paper notebooks to make everyday notes, and lots of them. Paper had become affordable and available enough roughly a century earlier, with Tuscany being at the heart of that, and Florentine merchants used their book keeping system and the paper notebooks needed for it to build a continent spanning trade network. After the Black Death personal note taking took off too, and from 1400 onwards it had become commonplace:

At the end of the Middle Ages, urban Tuscans seemed stricken with a writing fever, a desire to note down everything they saw.’ But they remained a peculiarly local phenomenon: there was something uniquely Florentine (or more accurately ‘Tuscan’ as examples also survive from Siena and Lucca) about them,…

Allen, Roland. The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (p. 61).”

Around the turn of the year I gave The Notebook as a present to Peter thinking it would be something to his liking. My own notes have helped me learn and work for decades. E and I when we lived in Lucca for a month, passed through Pescia by train en route to Firenze.

Tuscany, paper from a company that was there from the start of everyday note taking, The Notebook, personal knowledge management, and friendship, all coming together in this piece of craftsmanship. How could I not buy them? So I did.

Favorited Personal Taxonomy (Part 2) by Joost Plattel

Joost Plattel is writing about his note making routines. I’m always interested in seeing the routines of others, to see how I can tweak mine. Timely as well, as I hope he’ll be at the Dutch language Obsidian meet-up coming weekend.

In the previous part I highlighted how I managed my notes in folders. In this part I would like to explain a bit more on how I make the decision between tags & a linked note.

Joost Plattel

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Drummers by Alper Çuğun, license CC BY

Drummer

Drummer is a new outliner tool for blogging launched last month, created by Dave Winer. As it is popping up in various places, connections are built to other tools (like Microblog), I found myself rolling the topic of outlines around in my head.

I have an somewhat ambivalent attitude towards outlining. Actually I need to split that up in being ambivalent on outlining, on outliners, and on OPML, the standard for exchanging outline files. Some remarks on all three things.

Outlines

Outlines are very useful. I use them for braindumps, idea generation, project plannning and design, and when making the storyline for my presentations. They’re great because you can quickly write out many points and then start shifting things around, changing the order, placing items in branches (or chapters) etc.

Outlines are limited as well, because they are hierarchical and linear in nature. This is similar for me with mind maps. They require a beginning and an end, main or central points with sub points etc. Even though you could link or include other outlines on a branch it still is just another part of a tree structure. A large amount of the information I work with is not like that, and a lot of my work processes (especially those where structure needs to emerge from the information, not to be applied to information) are not like that. Stuff is always linked, but those links can loop back, unlike in outlines. In my description of my personal knowledge management system last year I wrote about the distinction between the parts of it that are organised as networks, and the parts that are hierarchical. This is the same thing, at a lower level of aggregation.

Fast Drummer by Hsing Wei, license CC BY

Outliners

Outliners are great tools, and I use them regularly. When done well you can seamlessly move items around, changing the order, nesting them, or moving them several levels up. Dave Winer talks about moving things around ‘on rails’, and indeed that is what it feels like in a well working outliner, an almost frictionless rearranging of things.

I have used a variety of outliner tools over the years. E.g. I used to make my presentation outlines in Cloudliner, which could sync with Evernote. Once the outline was there, I’d move to Evernote to flesh out the story in more detail.
Currently I mostly work in Obsidian, which isn’t a full outliner in the sense that it lacks the ‘on rails’ features, although by now it is way better at outlining than earlier through the use of hotkeys. (See this video by Nick Milo on outlining with Obsidian)
Tinderbox is also an outliner I use, which is also able to work non-hierarchically: I can start there with adding notes visually, and then switching to an outline view of the same information to do the ordering and branching I want.

Where outliners are less great in my eyes is how they generally imply that all outlines are glorified shopping lists. When writing anything it is about creating prose. Sentences need to flow into each other. Outliners in their interface however suggest that every item in an outline is short. A brief statement at most, definitely not something like a full sentence or even a paragraph. This is where for me friction originates, outliner UIs imply bullet lists. The mental model of a bullet list clashes with that of a text, even if well structured. I don’t think outlines need to be bullet lists, but outliner tools apparently do. Obsidian is the only exception, as it works fully in notes, and you can mix up longer pieces of prose with lists of short items, and have bullets as long as a novel if you want. (This is what I gain for Obsidian not having the ‘on rails’ experience)

Even the original demonstration of an outliner, in Doug Engelbart’s famous 1968 demo, shows that clash to me. It demonstrates the power of outliners: rearranging items at will, moving an item to become a sub-item or a sub-item to become a main item, stacking lists multiple levels deep, as well as adding the link to another outline as item in an outline and it being navigable. But the content of the outline demonstrated is short, a shopping list and a task list.

Drummers by George N, license CC BY

OPML

Dave Winer has been developing outliners for a long time, and we also have to thank him for the OPML standard, meant to exchange outlines in XML. Most people that use RSS readers are familiar with OPML because it is the common format in which you can export and import lists of RSS subscriptions.

Outliners are usually capable of exporting OPML. Most outliner tools however only export to OPML, and don’t store them in files that way or in some other text based format (for the ‘on rails’ effect they regularly keep outlines not as files but in an internal database. Obsidian works on files, and thus doesn’t have the ‘on rails’ style). This means there’s no seamless transition from an outliner tool to another tool, or vice versa, nor a good way to switch between different text based formats such as markdown or OPML. Drummer is an exception, it natively stores everything in OPML files.

Another issue I have with outliners is in how they deal with importing OPML. OPML is an extensible format, which allows adding data attributes to the text information in the outline. This allows me to attach meaning to content that is machine readable. It’s what I did for my book lists for instance. Outliners however in general never attempt to check if such data attributes are present. OPML is short for Outline Processor Markup Language, yet outliners never do some actual processing upon import.

I don’t expect general outliners to be able to do something with such attributes, but I would expect general outliners to at least alert me to their presence in an import, and if possible ask me if I’d like to explore them or do something with them. That general outliners only look at the mandatory parts of the OPML file means they never even look if there’s other semantic information present in the OPML file, though the standard supports it.

Yes, you could create your own outliner tool that reads specific additional data attributes but no regular user would be able to. Tinderbox that I mentioned, allows me to set a wide variety of attributes to notes, and I can create an OPML template in Tinderbox that includes (parts of) them in OPML exports. As far as I can tell though it doesn’t support templating OPML imports. Without this there’s no chance of an OPML using ecosystem evolving, and there hasn’t. The lack of interoperability means novel use cases for OPML always need to come with their own bespoke outliner. This is why I add XSLT to my OPML files for RSS subscriptions and for books, basically packaging a reader right inside the file: it makes them human readable in their entirety and independent from outliners.

Hear The Drummer Get Wicked

I think this is how Dave blogs: He opens up an outline at the start of the day and adds items (thoughts, annotated links, bookmarks, comments) to it during the day which get pushed to his blog. Every line has its own permalink, but it’s a single post for the day, evolving during the day and fixed thereafter. I like the ease of use I can imagine that brings to him.

This is much like how I create my day logs in my personal notes. I open it up first thing behind my laptop in the morning, and during the day it’s my jumping off point as well as where I write things down first. What gets bigger or has more permanent value is then split off in its own note, with the note linked in the day log it sprouted from. (I create my weekly notes on this blog from collating the day logs and then picking the things I want to mention from). I wouldn’t post my day logs though, they’re not fit for publication.

Does Dave also have a personal day log, or is that another branch on his daily outline that doesn’t get published?

The reduction of friction between note making and blogging Dave Winer’s workflow suggests sounds valuable though, and Drummer therefore a tool to watch.


Drummer by Jonas Bengtsson, license CC BY

In reply to Indexing, filing systems, and the art of finding what you havee by Austin Kleon

What I have started doing last April, following a tip by Wouter Groeneveld during the first Dutch language Obsidian meet-up, is scanning notebooks (I use a camera above the notebook activated with a foot button, so you can quickly flip through it). Those scans are available as a folder in my notes app (obsidian.md), where I work through them to create an index first, and to turn them into notes within my digital system later when it becomes useful / of interest.

A writer has to have a system for going back through old work and finding ideas….

But I have a ton of material that never makes it online, and I need to get it out of my notebooks and into an indexed and fully searchable system. I think this will be easiest if I do it as I go, and keep it simple: the minute I finish a notebook, go back and type the whole thing into a .txt file and save it. (And back it up.)

I suspect that rather than being totally dreary, this transcribing step can also be a creative step, and I will see patterns of thought, generate new ideas…

Austin Kleon

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Ever since I was a child in primary school, my mental image of a year has been that of a circle, with January and December at the bottom, and July and August at the top (you’ll notice that this means the months aren’t evenly spaced around the circle in my mental image, spring takes up less of the circle than the fall. It’s a mental image, not a precise graph, likely influenced by my childhood sense of the endlessness of summers, and the long period of darkening days of fall and winter).


My mental image of a year ever since childhood

This Monday I completed a full circle around that image: I’ve been reading my own blog posts from previous years on each day, to see which of those I can take an idea or notion from to convert into a note in my digital garden (named ‘Garden of the Forking Paths‘). Peter has been going around the circle with me I read today (which in turn prompted me to write this), starting from my posting about it last year. He’s been reading his old blogposts every day, not just to reread but also to repair links, bring home images to self-host, clean up lay-out etc. I’m sure I am and have been my own blog’s most avid reader ever since I started writing in this space 19 years ago, and like Peter had been using my ‘on this day’ widget to repair old blog posts since I added the widget in early 2019.

Now I’ve come full circle on reading those blogposts for a year to mine them for their ideas and notions. The next cycle until the summer of 2022 I am adding a layer.

I will of course be making another round through my own blogposts like I did before. Because sometimes I missed a day, I haven’t repaired all of them each day, and I may take new meaning from them the next time I read them.
The layer I’m adding is also reviewing the personal notes I made on this day last year. This concerns the daily notes I make (a habit I started in April 2020), the other notes I’ve created on a certain date (work notes, ideas, travel etc), and indeed the blog posts I converted to notes dated on this day last year.

I see Frank has also picked up on Peter’s posting, and is embarking on a year of reading his own daily postings as well. Like Frank, I have never blogged on this day of the year since this blog started. And like for his blog, that has now changed.

Going in circles… I suspect life is circles, not turtles, all the way down. At least when you get a bit older that is.

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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.