Thought Work Organization Strategy

I have been feeling a lot more productive lately. I feel like that is thanks to nailing down a more structured approach to thinking externally. Both on paper and in digital spaces. I wanted to get a seed started for this because I think that it is going to continue to grow as it gets more use.

I’ve been actively trying to make my daily notebooks more useful instead of just being a glorified journal. I can’t overstate how much I value journaling. So even if that was the only use for it, it’s still plenty valuable. But I’ve gotten a lot better in recent months about making various lists and taking fleeting notes just to get thoughts out of my head and on paper. This has proved to be crazy useful just in and of itself. Writing, I’m learning, has so many benefits even if the only thing you do is write the things that you’re thinking. But, by following the process that I’ll describe next, it becomes infinitely more useful.

My current process is as follows:

1. Fleeting Note Capture - For this I have two notebooks. One is a big A4 sized notebook that I take active time to sit down and write in. The second is a pocket-sized notebook that doubles as a wallet. I use both of these to varying degrees to write down pretty much anything that comes into my head. Even if it’s just something that I want to remember to do later. Sometimes the things that I write in either of these books is valuable and I either expand on whatever I wrote right there in the notebook or I migrate it to step two immediately. Either way, when I find value in a fleeting note, it eventually makes it’s way to step 2. A lot of fleeting notes never make it past step 1 though and that’s ok. I’ve learned that most of this process is about revising and removing.
2. Permanent Notes - I’m very much in the beginnings of adoption with this step. But once you start doing it, you see the benefits immediately. Once I can really visualize a fleeting note in the context of other notes from my day, especially if that note is about a book or an article or with relevance to something important, I can distill it and rewrite it into something more permanent. In this step, I can also relate it to other notes by linking it. This step is made way easier by using a digital counterpart. I use Obsidian but there are other tools out there. I prefer Obsidian because I watched a bunch of videos about Zettelkasten before I had any sort of structure or practice with taking notes and I wanted to be cool and use what all of the other cool people were using to take notes. Having used it for a while now, though, I really do appreciate the way that it works. I think the biggest caveat for me for a digital note system is Markdown though. I use markdown for every piece of digital writing I do unless I am absolutely forced to use something else. Markdown is awesome because, as a software developer, it follows me everywhere. I can use it in Git and GitHub, Obsidian, my personal website, Slack, Confluence, NextCloud, etc. You get the picture. It really is a write once, use everywhere solution for me. The more I can avoid context switching, the more I can focus on the information instead of the process.
3. Artifact Creation - One issue that I ran into with Obsidian in my early attempts at note taking was digital clutter. Now as a high-level concept, good luck with removing the cluttered feeling entirely. If you are writing and recording enough to make anything useful, you are almost definitely going to have a bunch of notes and artifacts in various stages of complete. I’m honestly starting to embrace that as part of the process. Figuring out how to organize the things that I make helps me organize how I think about them a lot of times. This is actually kind of a core tenet of the Zettelkasten system. Anyway, the problem I needed to solve for this step was removing artifacts that aren’t notes from Obsidian thus giving me a clear boundary for resources to aid in writing and the written assets themselves. For this I’m using NextCloud. Bonus nerd points because I self-host my NextCloud instance (Long Live Digital Autonomy).
4. Dissemination - Some stuff actually is functional enough that I want to share it. At this point, I’m using the thing that you’re looking at right now if you are not me and you are reading this, my personal website. This is where using markdown through the whole process really shines. I use AstroJS (at least as of the time I’m writing this) to host my content. AstroJS uses markdown to process content. I’m sure I could make my site way more complicated and add an API layer and a data layer and make expensive fetches to get my assets but I’m a simple man with simple taste. I like markdown and you can go fuck yourself if you think I need all of that other business to maintain a successful digital presence.

I’m really happy to have a system in place to help me manage the things that I think about because I have a lot of different topics that I really enjoy pursuing and for far too long I have just forgotten things that I think are really cool and probably could have proved to be useful in some way. With this sort of a system in place, I can literally work with my thoughts in a more tangible way and that helps me feel better. I hope that if you are reading this, I have given you a path to do the same and hopefully saved you some measure of time because I think it is important to know what you think and to do something with it. I wasted far too much time keeping everything in the fleeting step one phase and I think I probably lost a lot of good ideas to time. But now I don’t lose track of the things that I care about and you don’t have to either. So best of luck. And if this isn’t something that interests you, thanks for reading! Just forget that you read it anyway. Just kidding sort of…