Notetaking
I'm taking notes.
That wasn't the case not so long ago. I always strove to be the person that takes notes, and later on, when the situation requires remembering some detail about acquired knowledge, can go "aha! I have it here, written down". Now the things change and I start slowly.
In the very beginning, while learning a new language, I started taking classes with a friend fluent in it. She prepared the whole schooling system for me and used Notion to provide required materials for me to strive. I was amazed!
Later on she also showed me the inventory of all the things that she and her boyfriend own! I was stunned! Glory! I want! This is who I am! A person with a catalogue of all the things. I was raised on reading Leo Babatua and his zen habits.
√So I started my Notion journey and after a week of setting everything up I was ready to track everything in my life. This lasted 3 weeks. All the automatically created notes cluttered my dashboard, unfinished projects were dangling on project boards, knowledge base lost the "knowledge" and now was just another "base"...
No, this cannot be. Am I really incapable for this systematic way of living? My partner tells me, she is impressed how organized my life is. But is it? I'll try again.
So I started again. I went to youtube. To the place where every content creator has a recipe for success. And after a week of researching I started... doubting that I can ever succeed. This was too much... when at the last possible moment, I stumbled upon a video from dev ops toolbox that describes the way he takes notes using neovim and obsidian. Okay. Zettlekasten. Obsidian. Neovim.
"Just take notes, and connect them to other notes". This seems easy "Take notes on everything, and then review and categorize to your liking". This seems reasonable.
So I started yet again. I downloaded obsidian, turned on the neovim keybindings and started typing. And journaling. And taking notes from work tasks and learning. And writing down nice quotes. And putting short snippets of code that made me understand some topic better.
And it worked. I'm taking notes! they seem to fall into couple of categories, and sometimes intertwine. I take daily notes, that I review from day to day. Sometimes from those daily notes I extract a separate note and just link it back to that day. Sometimes that small note, extracted from daily journal, grows into a project. I link it in the project section.
- Is it organized? It's in the process of organizing.
- Is it clean? I accepted the fact that it will evolve over time and I'm never gonna settle on improving it.
- Do I track my tasks and put my reminders in the whole second brain system? No! I use calendar and reminders for long and short term goals respectively.
One thing I know for sure. I'm taking notes, that one day will make sense. Or not. But I'm doing it. And you can too. Just start taking notes, and draw some inspiration from the web. Don't try to be the note taking guru immediately, don't think it's gonna work out after a week of taking notes. When you get good at it, build some kind of intuition with how things connect, maybe the system will come to you
P.S.
Shout out to the company that I work for right now. They take notes of everything! Every meeting, every task, every RFC and PRD. is it connected? sometimes. It's organized enough that you can get a glimpse of a given meeting in a short time, and that's already a lot!
If it wasn't for them, I wouldn't have the life force to push forward and write.