• follow-up: also check out https://github.com/mariohamann/activity-graph

From @johnrakestraw's On keeping a notebook (toot)

“One thing that really fascinates me is how I'm reminded of events and readings that I'd completely forgotten – but, once reminded, I find that these things are once again in my mind. Perhaps I can say what I'm thinking more clearly — though I'm more than a little frustrated by having absolutely no memory of experiencing or reading something I describe in an entry written only a few years ago, I'm fascinated by how reading what I wrote has brought that experience back to mind rather vividly. Of course I'm reminded of what I described in the text that I'm now re-reading, but I can also remember other things associated with whatever it is that is described there. It's as though the small bit that I wrote and can now read is the key that unlocks a much larger trove of memory. Funny how the mind works.”

I am also quite fuzzy about things that happened, and I'm glad I've got notes to help me sort of remember.

Connections (toot) Following a link from https://manuelmoreale.com/pb-maya , I enjoyed this quote about blogging:

Although, as well researched and as thoughtful as Houston might be there's a messiness at work here that I love; it is the true great quality of a blog. That permission to roam, to let your curiosity grab you by the lapel and hoist you across fifteen different subjects over the course of a single paragraph; blogging is pointing at things and falling in love.

Programmable Notes (toot) Oooh, it could be fun to trawl through these for ideas for things to port over to Emacs.

The Smartblocks plug-in for Roam Research is the system I personally use to build these types of workflows. It offers a set of triggers, variables, and commands you can chain together into fairly readable statements like: <%SET:topOfMindToday,<%INPUT:What's on your mind today?%>%> or <%RANDOMBLOCKFROM:Writing Ideas%>.

Even with limited programming knowledge, many people in the community have been able to fashion their own Smartblock flows. Plenty of them have published their workflows to the community Github for others to use.

Smartblock flows on Github

The promise and distraction of productivity and note-taking systems (toot)

Books are maps to territories that are completely internal to the reader. By focusing so heavily on extracting the surface symbology of the map itself, these process-heavy note-takers risk losing sight of the territory. A book's territory is the reasoning and argument that the book presents to you as a path you take through your own psyche. The goal isn't to remember everything the book contains. Remembering a book's contents is useless. The book exists to contain what it contains. If the contents are important, you keep a copy of it for you to look things up again.

But that isn't the point of reading. The purpose of reading is to be changed. Sometimes the change is trivial and temporary – a piece of fiction that brings some joy in your life. Sometimes the change is profound – a shift in your perspective on life. “Action items” from a book are external and forcing yourself to follow through on them is exhausting.