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These articles are as bad as the notes people they are bagging on. The trouble is that people try to fit the kitchen sink into the note app and that doesn't wo
by gexla 5y ago
These articles are as bad as the notes people they are bagging on.
The trouble is that people try to fit the kitchen sink into the note app and that doesn't work. As a programmer, I have specific workflows for each note that I take.
Example. I want to try stand-up one day. Each snippet that I think of as a joke, I write down in a note. All snippets go into the same space. Sometimes I think of a snippet which could extend an existing bit (a joke which is larger than a one liner.) Once this page got to a certain length, I didn't even have to think about new snippets anymore. All I would have to do is open this page and they would jump out at me.
One approach is that if I feel like I got nothing, I can simply scan the list and find something which hits me. Like, I'll see a line and immediately think of something which could extend it. Or I'll see multiple lines which hit me and I can come up with something which mixes the two together. This may start a new branch of a joke.
Apply this to every reason I might add a note. Yes, I have what's basically a trash bin where notes go to die. But anything else is sort of like these jokes, they go into a place where I have a specific way to use them. Within my notes app, I have a system of navigation and discovery, which is basically like a website where you follow links and use metadata to place things in certain spots (unless you're adding to an existing note.) I use a template which fills in most of what I need and then the remaining is a quick add. I can then query that metadata as if it's a real DB.
I use Obsidian for this. I used Roam at one point, but it didn't have a way to hide things which weren't in my navigation path. Everything leaks, because, NETWORK! Nah, I look at it is like building spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet has a certain usage. I don't cram all the data into one spreadsheet. I use multiple spreadsheets. Then the app I use (Obsidian) has the above mentioned tools for nice navigation.
- chrisweekly 5y agoThanks for sharing; I'm also an ex-Roam, daily Obsidian user, with similar (or at least overlapping) reasons for switching to obsdmd, and have a comparable workflow.
- gexla 5y agoI love Roam, it would be on a short list of things to take with me to the after life. It's just that at the end of the day, all I really wanted was something to manage MD files and run queries on the key-value data in the front-matter.
- truetraveller 5y agoDo you use multiple vaults in Obsidian? Or just one vault with many folders/pages?
- gexla 5y agoI hate titles, hate naming files, hate moving files around in folders. Sure, much of these are abstract things which could end up with you doing the same stuff but a different way. But I find that changing a path in front-matter is less painful than moving a file. And I can put a thing in multiple paths. I use the Obsidian Zettel note to automatically name the file and I shove them all into the same directory. I then use the Dataview plugin to run queries for what I need. I have MD files strictly for navigation, as if they are part of a static site layer. These files contain the links to go further into the navigation. It's basically all index files. I keep everything together in the same vault, because so far I don't see a need to do any different. I just want to be able to navigate through the thing so that I'm not seeing a bunch of unrelated junk to distract me. I do use directories to separate very different types. Like PDF's and Epubs go into one directory. Images go into another directory. MD files go into another directory. I don't know that I even need to do this, but I haven't run into a problem.
- yumiris 5y agoI'm exactly in the same boat as you regarding both the mentality and approach. Just a curious question about the index notes: don't you feel they're cluttering up the graph and result in superficial relationships between the notes? In my personal case: I used to create index notes to make navigation easier, but then I've found myself wondering "where should this note be indexed?" and also not getting much value out of the relationship graph. Once I've discarded the index notes, the relationships became much more organic and authentic. Surprisingly, finding notes hasn't become more difficult after eliminating the index notes -- queries and lists are a beautiful thing. What are your thoughts on this? Do you encounter any challenges with indexing?
- gexla 5y agoThis depends on which tool you're using. I use Obsidian, which has options for creating indexes without polluting the graph view. My indexes are produced from queries which don't create actual links which are picked up by the graph.
- Syntonicles 5y agoI've been meaning to set up Roam since my org folder is getting unmanageable. Before Emacs I abused a Tomboy "wiki" style journal - even there I could set up several Notebooks as entry points. Every time I typed a word that happened to be a title it would link. Initially this was useful for discovering links between subjects but without a naming convention it became overwhelming. Is that what you mean by leaking? Can you briefly explain these issue and how Obsidian solves it?
- gexla 5y agoBy leaking, I mean how much of other content I see when I'm using the app for some purpose where that content isn't important. It has been a while since I used Roam, so maybe these points have significantly improved. But the first thing I would see when I logged into Roam was the most recent page. I don't care about these things, Obsidian with a plugin allows me to create a a home page from an MD file which then has links to whatever else I want. Roam also pushed things like a daily journal and backlinks in the sidebar. Most of the time, I don't want to see backlinks and I don't use the daily journal. I only want to see exactly what I have set the thing to show, anything else is a distraction. With Obsidian, all of this is so much more configurable, and easy to do so. I think a lot of the thinking overhead issues people have when they think "where do I put this" is from seeing too much stuff which isn't important to what they are working on.