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 workflow and mostly used it 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. These days I'm a little more thoughtful about the capture process, and take the "refile" step – which hides a wealth of different kinds of work, and the bulk of the work itself – much more seriously.

Evergreen notes

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.

An accumulation of history

I'm often overwhelmed by the things I work out and think and write about, and sometimes 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.

Accretion of work

Knowledge work should accrete. When I want to keep something, I know it. It already has the taste in my mouth of something I want to chew over. This is what evergreen notes are really for. They don't need to represent things cohesively, but they do need to represent things vividly, mnemonically, contextually, and functionally. That is:

They need to call up the thing I cared about. That's why a lot of the language in here is emotive and metaphor-laden: it helps call back how something feels, which gives me back my best handles on it.
They need to help me remember what it is I was talking about. Sometimes this means naming the thing clearly right at the outset; ideally it would mean designing notes to act like quizzes on their content, since recall is never better promoted than by recall tests.
- I've previously experimented with cloze deletion in my notes, but they inevitably end up too context-rich for that.
- I think my next experiment should be to just have a quiz or a koan section, that's meant to prompt me to recall or reinvent the contents of a note from scratch. Ideally Toricelli would present me with a koan view that only displayed these sections of a note.
Things that link to other things let me browse and that is an incredibly helpful idiom for so many things that I want it for fifty-thousand reasons that are all hard to separate from each other. Suffice to say that the connectome encodes a lot of shit.
When I encounter a note I often want it to tell me what I want to do next with it: what I want it for, and what I need to do to make it better for that. Means and ends. It's a permaculture garden out here, and while we're converging on permaculture, it's best if the work of gardening is self-evident at the point of performance.

Finished pieces

Sometimes I write more traditionally, in chunks of text big and small that are meant to be themselves in nearly their exact sequence of words from time of writing, or fiat time of completion, until death.

I reread these like worry stones. I love my own writing – and a good thing too, or else there's no point in doing it. They belong elsewhere perhaps, but they also belong in the notebook.

Todo keywords

(setq org-todo-keywords
      (quote ((sequence "queue(q)" "read(r)" "link(l)" "tidy(T)"
                        "write(w)" "build(b)"
                        "wtf(!)" "hmmm(?)" "ugh(g)" "aaah(a)"
                        "|" "done(d@!)")
              (sequence "|" "wait(W@/!)" "ask(A@/!)" "paused(p@/!)" "cancelled(c@/!)")
              (sequence "todo(t)" "working(k!)" "|"))))

Verbs for "what kind of attention does this need next."

Horizontal (across the graph): queue read link tidy
Vertical (into a node): write build
Orientation toward difficulty: wtf hmmm ugh aaah
Hold/exit: wait ask paused cancelled done
Legacy (draining): todo working

Prior art

I have made notes in the past about how this notebook works, and what does and doesn't work in it. They are true for the moment they were written.

Create research journal.