how does the notebook work?

The notebook is a personal knowledge management system. It's evolved in purpose, and therefore in shape, over the years. The detritus of past attempts is always around.

I am going to endeavour to keep this page accurate about how it works relative to the Me Of Now.

The notebook began as a place to put things that distracted me - I followed the capture-refile-archive and used to capture things I thought of in the middle of working on other things. I captured heedlessly, joyfully, and struggled to keep up with the rapidly expending corpus of lovingly fluffed mental dust bunnies that resulted. There is a little space in my current workflow for this dump-style capturing even now, but I'm more thoughtful about it to keep the work of dust bunny fluffing manageable.

Now, I treat it more like a wiki. Notes are created for ideas that I expect to see large connectivity for. That means that I will want to read, refer, and edit them again many times over. I don't mind rewriting things but I hate re-remembering them. It's nice to be able to pick up where I left off thinking about something, and also to discover (and cannibalize) past selves.

I am often overwhelmed by the things I work out and think and write about, and sometime by incidental details that jog overwhelming memories. This notebook is a forest with dark corners, and I try to remain alert while in here for the sake of not worsening things by reacting heedlessly to what I find. It's important to remember that the notebook's good memory is only its nature. I'm the only one really here.

I have made notes in the past about how this notebook works, and what does and doesn't work in it. They ar true for the moment they were written. This note is also an index page for such notes.

Create research journal. I need to rework my notebook.