[Lifelog 0001] Life is a struggle against entropy
The more you create, the better scaffolding and infrastructure you need to maintain your creations.
I have always been fascinated by everything. However, time waits for no one and we all share the same finite amount of time. That means what we spend our time on matters. Consequently, where others may have a few pools of knowledge with seemingly endless depths I have many many ponds many of which have dried up. To combat this, I have always had methods of keeping thoughts and notes. However, because I lacked depth in my of interests I never had to develop a meaningful system to organize it all. I have thousands and thousands of notes that are unorganized and slowing decaying. Many collections of notes have been stored in various software applications like RedNotebook, Evernote, Leanote, Joplin, Zettlr, TheBrain, Logseq and now Obsidian. If each of these software applications with their hundreds if not thousands of notes were a tree of knowledge all are rotting except for Obsidian, which is the latest iteration of how I am taking notes. I plan for it to be the last.
Taking notes is easy just like planting seeds only requires an animal to digest fruit poop out the seeds. However, pruning and maintaining the sapling and subsequent tree is challenging and never ending work. I have tried many different methods and none of them stuck because the overhead eventually became unsustainable and I gave up. Sometimes the app (Logseq) had performance issues where I was unable to use the note, but often it was due to a lack of my own ability to develop a note taking process that was scalable. I primarily used tags and in my mind tags are the digital innovation that displaces classic table of contents that organized content statically. Tags allow you to dynamically find information, which is incredibly powerful. However, tags that aren’t curated eventually clog the system as old notes can no longer be found due the number of useless tags. All this requires effort to maintain.
Everything changed when I read (or listened) to [[2210071617 How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens]]. I have heard about the Zettelkasten system for a long time, but it didn’t click until I read this book. The Zettelkasten system can be referred to as taking atomic notes with the idea being that every note should be an isolated ideal with that ideal further being referenced in other notes. I was doing something like this in Logseq with the use of block references, but the optionality of that causes clutter if one note has too many notes (in my case I was using my personal variation of interstitial journaling). The focus on referencing other notes instead of tags or a table of contents (toc) help to eliminate maintenance that other PKM systems require. Generally, tags and toc are used to help structure notes and provide reference to a topic. Because of this not only do notes need to be maintained, but the organizational structure needs to be maintained as well. Zettelkasten avoids this by using references to other notes as the structure system. It sounds obvious at first, but it opened my eyes when I understood that you eliminate part of the overhead needed to maintain my note structure or PKM. That brings me to today. On the surface this site looks like a regular block/newsletter, but it’s simply a glimpse of my PKM or Zettelkasten being organized by Obsidian.
As to why I am using Substack as my publisher of choice, you can read about my [[2210271248 Nat Eliason switched to Substack]]
If you are curious about Zettelkasten with the seemingly random numbers and the brackets you can read up on how [[2210310938 What is Zettlekasten]]*
*Brackets are how you create markdown links in Obsidian. As I haven’t written the note I am using brackets here as a placeholder for future articles.
id: 2210310938 Life is a struggle against entropy
tags: 41/07_reflections, 44/02_substack