09/04/2020

The archive contains older posts which may no longer reflect my current views.

# I realised that I hadn't written my daily log since the 18th of March - my wife's birthday. We had to cancel our trip away but I still took the leave from work. Just as with the morning pages, the break meant I didn't feel the need to write the log but then everything changed and I never got back in the habit.

It's time to get going again.

The log was meant to celebrate the good that came from each day, even if small, and to be a record of key events so as to give each day its own identity. Now that we are in isolation this is more important than ever rather than have everything blur in to one homogeneous mass.

# Drew Coffman (the other half of the Internet Friends podcast) writes:

"Your note library is not an encyclopaedia. It's a tool to facilitate thought. Don’t worry about completeness. Only write if it helps you with your own thinking."

He says that he would always try to "capture a complete experience" about whatever he was making notes about, trying to get everything relevant down at once. He is now a passionate user of Roam Research, the self-styled "note-taking tool for networked thought" - an associatively organised repository where everything is organised and connected via bi-directional links. Zettelkasten on steroids with the soul of hypertext.

I tried, and failed, to use a wiki plugin on the blog to create my own network of connected notes and instigate "slow writing" but the whole blog has become more like this. I moved away from trying to make everything perfect, trying to make everything an essay that explored a whole topic all at once. Switching to more of a micro-blogging ethos where I write more frequent, shorter notes, acting as a stream of consciousness, has become my own version of this connected style.

Linking to previous posts, and the "Related Post" references that creates, is a basic yet effective bi-directional system of connections allowing me to follow threads of thought over time. When you also factor in clickable hashtags (which I really should use more) the blog becomes more of a database than ever.

It really harkens back to the idea that the site is a "succession of little ideas" that combine into something bigger.

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