sacha chua living an awesome life

You’ll often find me taking notes in a small paper notebook that I tuck into my beltbag for easy access. I like taking notes on paper more than I like taking notes on my smartphone because:

• I don’t have to look down when taking notes.
• I don’t have to worry about battery life. My phone runs out of battery frequently enough even without using it for notes or web browsing, because I use Bluetooth and GPS frequently.
• I can add little sketches here and there.

My notebook habit started in 2006, when I was a graduate student at the University of Toronto. My mom reminded me that living like a student didn’t have to mean denying myself all sorts of things, so I splurged on my very first Moleskine and started writing in it.

I’ve filled a few of these notebooks over time. I don’t write in them consistently. Sometimes there are gaps of weeks or months when I take notes on my smartphone or my laptop instead.

Many of the pages are lists: things I’d like to do in Toronto, reasons for starting a business, ideas to try. Many of the pages are notes from conversations. Few of the pages are straight-up journal entries like the one above, as I prefer to type in my reflections so that they’re saved in Org Mode.

Workflow:

Scanning the notebooks

We have a Samsung SCX-4828fn printer/scanner/copier/fax. The scanner supports both sheet-fed and flat-bed scanning. For batch scanning on Microsoft Windows, I used Picasa’s import function. (XSane on Linux is more configurable, though.) I set up my foot switch to click on a button in the scanner program so that I could scan the next page without touching the mouse. I put the notebook on the flat-bed scanner, hit the footswitch, waited for the scanning head to finish the page, and then flipped to the next page while the scanning head returned to the ready position.

Well, technically, there was also the set-up step of hooking up a second monitor and picking things that would run on that second monitor so that I could watch screencasts while scanning. =)

You can do the same setup without a foot pedal (keep your mouse within easy reach) or a second monitor, but those things made it a lot more fun for me.

Reviewing the notebooks

Picasa makes it easy to flip through images, and I’ve been using that to “star” pages and add tags. I’ve also imported quite a few of my notes into Evernote in order to take advantage of the handwriting recognition.

I saved the images in my Dropbox folder and uploaded them as private albums to Google Photos, so I can refer to them on my Android phone too. That’s pretty nifty. I may spring for the Evernote premium subscription so that I can sync and search the handwriting in my notebooks when I’m offline, too. (Still cheaper than a data plan.)

Updating my notes

Haven’t done this yet, but updating my scanned notebook pages with additional notes should be easy to do with Autodesk Sketchbook Pro or something like that. Hooray for tablet PCs! I might use git or something similar for version control, but it’s not important.

Partial notebooks

Partially-used notebooks are harder to scan because I have to remember to come back and scan the last section, and I can’t seem to change the import filenames in Picasa (one of the reasons why XSane is awesomer). Anyway, I’m going to focus on filling the pages of the partial notebooks, then I can scan them in one go. I tend to update previous pages in my current notebook (lists, recent conversations, etc), so I’d prefer to scan them only when the notebook is finished. I see scanning as a way to carry digital copies of my past notebooks with me, so that works out nicely.

Lessons learned

• Cursive script is hard to quickly read. I think I’ll stick to printing letters.
• Conversation notes are ephemeral.
• Lists are useful for a long time.

Thanks to Markus Zmija for the nudge to write about this!

The first change off the bat is to just start writing more varied material and see what sticks, an approach that I used when I first started blogging back in 2005 but discarded when the broad patterns became more clear, and found myself niched into “personal development”. If I can find a way to write on broad topics but remain topically interesting to a broad audience, that would rock.

David Seah, A restatement of purpose

(See, even people who’ve been blogging since 2004 are working on figuring this out. =) )

How do you balance varied interests and focused niches?

Some people write tightly-focused blogs. They might have many blogs, one blog per niche, each almost a silo of content. This is good for advertising, but it’s harder to keep track of everything and make sure all the blogs are active.

This is my personal blog. I write about lots of different topics. I use categories to help people sift through the entries for what they want to learn more about, and I make it easy for people to view or subscribe to a few categories I tend to write about a lot. Blog aggregators like Planet Drupal and Planet Emacsen pick up categorized entries from my blog, so I don’t have to worry about being off-topic.

The diversity of topics might result in fewer subscribers than, say, a consistent focus on productivity (or code, or whatever) might, but it has also led to all sorts of wonderfully serendipitous conversations from the intersections of interests. I like this. I like being a real person with many facets, not just a focused and filtered personal brand.

So, what’s my workflow like? I write as much as I can in my personal notes – anything I want, even things I probably won’t post for decades. I might write about a topic several times, as there’s always more to understand. I publish one post a day – an experiment in limits that has been working well for me. When I want to organize a category more clearly, like all of my tips on connecting, I make linking posts, knowledge maps, presentations, or documents. (Maybe an e-book someday!)

That’s how I’m currently working. If you write, how do you balance variety and focus? And as a reader, what would make it easier for you to browse this blog and find things you want?

The new workflow looks like it works better for me. Or rather, it’s an old workflow with new tools. Now, instead of using Windows Live Writer or ScribeFire to post my notes directly to my blog, I’m back to using M-x remember and Emacs, keeping a superset of my notes in text files and publishing selected parts of it.

• The new workflow
  
  • M-x remember saves quick notes into a large text file (~/personal/organizer.org), possibly with tags, with diagrams inserted later.
  • I regularly review and file items into the appropriate sections of ~/personal/outline.org.
  • I post selected items to my blog using C-u M-x org2blog-post-subtree, scheduling them by adding a timestamp or using the C-c C-s (org-schedule) command.

  I sometimes use Microsoft OneNote on my new tablet to take notes during meetings, but it’s easy enough to convert my handwriting to text and paste it into my Org-mode file. I still have to think of a better way to refer to images while keeping my file manageable, but a filename is probably okay.

• A worked example
  

  This is being composed in a M-x remember window. (Well, remember is bound to C-c r on my system, so it’s easy to invoke).

  After I finish braindumping, I’ll use C-c C-c to save it somewhere.

  I may schedule the post immediately (C-c s (org-schedule) and then C-u M-x org2blog-post-subtree), or tag it for later review. (:toblog: – ready to go, but not scheduled? :rough: – needs more thinking?)

  When I review the items, I’ll copy this into the Geek – Emacs section of my outline.org.

  It feels nice having my notes in plain text, and being able to organize it in more than just chronological order…

• The history
  

  From 2001 to about 2006, I kept an Emacs Planner wiki with all of my notes in it. Emacs Remember let me write notes that were automatically hyperlinked to whatever I was looking at, and I added code to Planner that made it easy for me to file the notes both chronologically and topically. Planner rocked. I loved being able to easily hyperlink between topics, and the wiki structure kept pages a mostly manageable size. (My public Planner files are still on the Net, but I need to regenerate the index or enable directory lists so that they’re usable.)

  When I moved to WordPress as a blogging platform in order to make it easier for people to leave comments, I hacked around with RSS to import my posts from Planner into WordPress (ex: http://sachachua.com/blog/2002/). Moving to WordPress meant a change in my workflow. I now had two places to store my notes: Planner and my blog.

  I tried Emacs Org because I liked the way it organized information. In Planner, we’d been struggling with elegant ways to manage tasks and notes that needed to be accessed in multiple contexts. The approach we had taken in Planner was to make copies of the information, but Org had a cleaner way to do it using different views. It was intriguing.

  When I started working at IBM, however, my information workflow diverged. I shifted to using a web-based to-do list and Lotus Notes, posting on an internal blog and an external one, and managing multiple sources and repositories of information.

  I wanted to go back to keeping my notes in plain text, encrypted if necessary, and to have a place where I could keep notes that might not be publishable. I still had to manage multiple computers, but synchronizing systems like Dropbox or SpiderOak got rid of some of the hassles I’d encountered with git. When I found out about org2blog thanks to a test link from punchagan, I modified the code to work with subtrees instead of new buffers, and that solved the blog publishing part of it.