I’m four months into starting a new job and am taking a week’s leave as I’ve not had a break where I could slow down since July 2020. On the first or second day a thought came unbidden to mind,
“I need to move my task tracking back to a singular point in Obsidian. The ‘work’ system I’m trying to integrate with doesn’t work for me. It’s too slow and hides critical task and project information from the way I need to think about it.”
I started looking into this a bit more to see if anything had changed since I first began using Obsidian to track tasks. I am an advocate of the Getting Things Done approach to task management and although Obsidian wasn’t perfect I had a good system running. Importantly, it was complete and fast. Two things my work based software wasn’t. Because it was slow, I could never trust it was complete.
Off the back of my initial thought were two more questions related to my use of Obsidian.
- How do I blog?
- How do I journal?
The two are related. I’ve often been caught between wanting to write something and being unsure if it’s a journal entry or something I could blog. No prizes for guessing how much I then end up writing. Nothing.
The Universe delivers as always and this time it was in the form of a interview between Nick Milo and David Sparks where David outlined his use of Obsidian.
Source: https://youtu.be/JLk5jIHpvxE
Something about seeing David’s structure clicked with me. Not to copy, though I have taken some elements, but because it broke how I had been thinking about Nick’s Linking Your Thinking examples.
One of the dangers when developing your own personal knowledge management when there are so many examples to model is that you can focus on “how” and forget “why”. Until a couple of days ago I had not truly asked myself “why?”
The before
I have blogged extensively in the past and it’s been a love/hate affair.
| Loved | Hated |
|---|---|
| Sharing my knowledge | Organising it for readers |
| Writing up ideas | Restricting ideas to maintain privacy |
| The publication process |
Blogging became too much hard work. Then with tools like Roam Research and Obsidian I discovered a new mode for sharing ideas. That of the Digital garden. And it made things worse.
Now I could share all my thinking, no matter what state it was in online and the world could access and be forever grateful for my wise words. Obsidian’s Publish function made posting content a piece of cake and as long as I was careful, the private information stayed hidden.
I settled on an approach where all public articles went into a single level folder called “The Garden” and I would only ever publish from that folder. Having come from the world of blogging, I then lost the ability to notify my millions of followers (<10 in reality) of what I’d written. So I had a website wrapped around the Obsidian content and even a short article meant a matching blog post as well.
Things were getting worse and after recently starting blogging again, I stopped.
The now
I have decided there is no benefit in my blogging in the traditional sense of the word. Nor is there any benefit in sharing all that I can. Instead, and I think this is the true spirit of a digital garden, I will share my learnings, not my notes. The analogy of a garden and a nursery may be applicable. I have had too much nursery stock out in the garden for people to view before it was ready. And I was also sharing, the garden shed, the tools and what some may say was a pile of compost!
For example:
- I was sharing lists of video games I’m playing, have completed and want to play. This is a list that’s for my interest only. Sharing it meant I had to add more information than I need personally for it to be useful.
- I have lots of notes that are simple placeholders for captured information that I’ve not yet processed in any coherent way. To have that shared publicly put a pressure on me to organise it an create navigation for a public website reader. Another barrier to creating.
- Notes on a article were being shared with no real context around them.
My approach is now:
- Share my ideas through articles I write where I think it may be of use to others^[This article is itself an example.]. These will go into “The Garden” section of the site.
- Be free to create whatever folder structures I think are necessary to organise information outside of this single folder.
- Create Maps of content that suit my needs, not those of the public. They will span all my content. It is after all, my system and it has to work for me. If these maps are shared, they will have lots of links that don’t go anywhere on the Publish site.
- Any published content can be updated at any time.
- If I have something like a video game review, I’ll share it from the folder it’s in, not feed the need to create a separate review for “The Garden” section of the site.
- I will publish some kind of “Recent Articles” or “Changelog list” for The Garden to help returning visitors in lieu of an RSS feed^[It is possible that sometime in the future I’ll find a way to create an RSS feed - it will most likely need to be manually created].
The future
Of course, this may all change again as toolsets change. However by giving up blogging, I have freed myself to develop content in a way that first and foremost suits me, so that I can share with others later. Blogging had this the other way around.
“The Garden” can be found at https://quantumgardener.info