From How to Take Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens):

If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words.

Writing and sharing are part of how I learn. Taking notes helps me learn things that are bigger than my working memory or my uninterrupted time segments. Sharing my notes helps me find them again later on, since I can search the Internet from my phone. Also, if I share my notes, sometimes I get to learn from other people too, and sometimes my notes help people figure out stuff and then they can build on that.

It makes sense to me to share these notes on a blog on my own domain, with a chronological view and an RSS feed that makes it easier for other people to check for updates if they want. Well, some other people. I suppose RSS readers are still a fairly technical sort of thing, and I don't particularly like posting on platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn. Anyway, I'll just keep writing here, and maybe people will come across posts via search engines or figure out how to get updates however they want to.

(let* ((annotations '((2001 "university")
                      (2003 "graduated, teaching")
                      (2004 "internship in Japan")
                      (2005 "grad school")
                      (2007 "working at IBM")
                      (2008 "drawing")
                      (2012 "experiment with semi-retirement")
                      (2016 "A+ was born")
                      (2019 "EmacsConf, COVID-19")
                      (2022 "SuperNote A5X")
                      (2023 "even more EmacsConf automation")
                      (2024 "cargo bike")
                      (2025 "added iPad to the mix")))
       (json-array-type 'list)
       (json-object-type 'alist)
       (posts-by-year
        (mapcar
         (lambda (o) (cons (car o) (length (cdr o))))
         (seq-group-by
          (lambda (o) (substring (alist-get 'date o) 0 4))
          (json-read-file "~/proj/static-blog/_site/blog/all/index.json")))))
  (append
   '(("Year" "Posts" "Note") hline)
   (cl-loop
    for i from 2001 to 2025
    collect
    (list (format "[[https://sachachua.com/blog/%d][%d]]"
          i i)
          (alist-get (number-to-string i) posts-by-year nil nil #'string=)
          (or (car (alist-get i annotations)) "")))))

I don't see myself giving up these tools until I really can't use them any more. I'm keeping an eye out for assistive technology that might help me work around my limitations and the likely cognitive/physical decline I'll eventually run into. I'm encouraged by the fact that quite a few people manage to keep learning and writing even into their 80s and 90s.

Some weeks, Emacs News is all I can squeeze in: a long categorized list of links. When I have more time, I add little bits of code, drawings, reflections.

I love writing about little tweaks. Mostly that's about Emacs. I love the way I can shape it into something that fits me.

I like to summarize books and ideas as sketchnotes so that I have a chance of remembering what I want to learn from them. Also, the drawings are handy for sharing with others, and they're a way of giving back.

I'm slowly learning to write about life in a way that helps me learn more while respecting people's privacy. I like doing little experiments. Even tinier than the ones described in Tiny Experiments. Not "I will write 100 blog posts over the next 100 days," but rather, "What if I postpone fretting about A+'s homework until Saturday? What happens then?"

After I get the kiddo through the morning routine and ready for virtual school, I usually play piano for about an hour or so. Then it's recess and some more hugs, and then I settle down for some writing or drawing. The weather is getting better, so I'm looking forward to moving some of that outside. Maybe I'll dust off those baby monitor apps so I can hear if A+ needs any help.

I mostly write on my laptop using Org Mode in Emacs. Org Mode is great for literate programming. I can mix my notes and my code however I like.

I don't write in a straightforward way. I jump around. I go on tangents and down rabbit-holes. It helps a little if I've sketched my thoughts beforehand, like for this post, or if I've done some audio braindumping to help me figure out where the interesting thoughts are. Sometimes I capture little thoughts on my phone and then move them to the post I'm working on. I'm trying to figure out how to chunk my thoughts better.

I have a lot of Emacs tweaks to make it easier to link to blog posts, bookmarks, sketches, sites from search results. I like including the text of sketches, too.

I use the 11ty static site generator to make my blog. I switched to it a few years ago because I didn't want to worry about keeping Wordpress secure. I don't have room for many programming languages in my brain at the moment, so I like the fact that 11ty uses JavaScript. It takes me about five minutes to compile my blog.

From Dan Cullum: The more I read:

There is a strong correlation between the amount I’m reading, and the ideas I have for this blog. When I’m reading a lot, I feel like I have ideas coming out my eyes.

Reading makes me want to write, too.

I love the Toronto Public Library enough to transplant myself from the tropics and learn how to deal with winter. I've been reading more e-books lately. It's easier to highlight e-books compared to paper books. I can pick them up and put them down easily, and keep the pages open when I'm taking notes. I don't have to worry about misplacing them, either. I have some code to grab my highlights as a JSON, and then I can do things with them: include them in blog posts, add them to my personal notes, etc.

Not everything is available as an e-book, though, and sometimes the e-books have long hold times. Paper books are still handy enough.

I like reading blogs. They're much shorter than books are, and much less fluffy. Sometimes I feel like mainstream printed books have a lot of padding because of the considerations of the publishing industry: the book must be a certain size so it doesn't get lost on the bookstore shelf; the book must have a certain weight and thickness so people feel that it's worth $25. Blog posts can just get to the core of the idea instead of belabouring the point. I like the fractal density of hyperlinked text, too, and the conversational possibilities of it. It's a lot easier to bounce an idea back and forth to develop it when you can post in a day instead of waiting for a year for a book to be published.

I like reading on the new iPad. It's smaller than my laptop and bigger than my phone. It's easy to browse through blogs on it, unlike on my Supernote. I'm starting to develop a workflow for reading and writing smaller snippets: (toot)

1. Read in NetNewsWire.
2. Open interesting posts in Chrome on the iPad.
3. Highlight the text.
4. Use "Copy Link with Highlight".
5. Tap on the selection again. Use "Share" to send it to Ice Cubes, a Mastodon client that can post to my GoToSocial instance and let me use my full post limit (5,000 characters, mwahahahaha).
6. Paste the link into the toot, add my own thoughts, and post it.

I like linking to text fragments. Sharing from a webpage on my Android phone does this automatically. "Copy Highlight as Link" works from Chrome on the iPad. It saves people that little bit of scrolling or finding, although I suppose it would be helpful for people to go through the context before that selection. Alternatively, I could share directly from NetNewsWire and just link to the blog post instead of the text.

I like making visual book notes. They help me read a book well, and turning the sketch into a blog post gives me more opportunities to revisit it: when I write the post, and if someone comments or shares it.

Eventually I want to dust off my code for collecting Mastodon posts into a blog post, and maybe also re-establish a weekly review process.

Tangent: Check out Reading more blogs; Emacs Lisp: Listing blogs based on an OPML file for a table of the blogs I'm reading, along with the code I used to make a table of blogs, their latest post (as of the time I wrote my post, of course), and the post date.

As the kiddo becomes more independent ("Mom, I'm 9, you don't have to fret about my jacket"), I'll have more time for myself. This is a good time to go bike and walk and explore outside, and to go deep and wide into our interests as a family. I do about 2-4 hours of consulting a week, just the stuff I'm interested in. (TODO: There's a tangent I want to write about interest-based nervous systems, which I notice in both A+ and myself, and probably building on this 2014 reflection on having a buffet of goals.) The rest is life time, divided among the things we want to learn/do/share and the things we do to take care of ourselves.

Even though I have increasing autonomy when it comes to time, and an increasing amount of focused time, I still haven't gotten to the bottom of my idea list or my to-write list. I don't think I'll ever get to the bottom of those lists, actually. I come up with ideas faster than I can do them. That's a good problem to have.

It makes sense to prepare for a couple of changes that will likely come up:

• Age-related farsightedness: It'll probably get harder to read small text, and I might eventually need to juggle my regular glasses as well as reading glasses. (W- already does this occasionally. He prefers having different pairs of glasses instead of bifocals or progressives, and his reasons seem sound. I don't want to have to adopt different postures to see out of different zones of glasses.) Developing good workflows for reading will probably help here. Also, the cargo vests I wear will probably help me with the "Where are my glasses?" problem.
• Menopause will probably rewire my brain a lot. I hear brain fog and tip-of-the-tongue can be challenging (see also Brain fog in menopause).
• My mom is 79 and running into issues with cognitive and physical decline. She has a hard time typing, speaking, remembering, deciding, or feeling good. On the other hand, there are examples of people who have stayed sharp for decades. There are lots of factors that are beyond my control. Still, it would be nice to see if I can stack the deck a little. So yes to:
  • walks, bike rides, exercise, and maybe I can figure out a fun way to improve strength;
  • lots of learning and sharing and connecting
  • and experiments with technological and cognitive aids, like speech recognition to work around typing, text-to-speech interfaces to work around vision, notes to work around working memory, and maybe large language models to work around issues with recall.
  • … and I might as well learn Morse code or explore accessibility tools, just in case I'm limited to twitching cheek muscles or something like that.

The life expectancy at birth for the Philippines for women born in 1983 is ~65 years; in Canada, about ~80 years. I want to keep learning and writing and sharing for as many of those years as I can.

See discussion on Mastodon

I think of this as seeing the opportunity for learning, which I sometimes miss out on because I take things for granted or I don't connect the dots. I can get better at this by slowing down and by borrowing other people's questions. I've been giving myself more time to write and draw these days. It feels a little weird ignoring the other tasks on my TODO lists that are more clearly defined or that are related to other people's requests, but I like the way this feels.

It's easy for me to come up with all sorts of ideas for things I want to tweak about Emacs. I can get better at this by reading more about what other people are doing and what other capabilities are there.

I can also get better at exploring ideas for non-Emacs topics, like ways to respond to parenting situations and things I can do support the causes I care about. I can expand my toolbox by reading books and blog posts, and depending on the topic, I can also listen to podcasts and videos.

It's useful to bump into things I might not think of looking for. One way to do that would be to save various manuals on my e-ink notebook and phone so that I can read them during quiet moments.

I've added some randomness to shuffle old blog posts and tasks, although browsing through this tends to be low-priority. (I never get to the bottom of my reading/thinking list!)

"On this day" might be interesting too. This is more for fun and serendipity. I used to have it on my blog, and it should be pretty easy to reimplement using 11ty.

I'd like to spend more time thinking about and building on other people's ideas, maybe starting with Emacs and then branching out to other topics.

I also want to get back to reading people's blogs through an RSS reader so that I can get a slightly wider view of people's interests and learn more about non-Emacs things. I've added Feeder to my phone.

I capture a lot of snippets in my Org Mode inbox. I'd like to get better at adding some more context and quick thoughts when I create a note so that it's easier to pick up the idea later on. I do most of this capturing on my phone, so I'm getting the hang of slowing down and adding some more notes.

I also want to get better at actually reviewing and refining those notes. My inbox tends to grow and grow, especially when I get interrupted by an interesting idea. I have some writing/editing time while I keep A+ company during virtual school, so it'll be fun revisiting the notes I stashed.

This is about putting a bunch of related notes together, which I usually do by refiling them. It's probably also related to clustering, which I'll get to in the next post about thinking.

I do most of this collecting on my computer, so I can write a few Emacs functions to make it easier. For example, I have some code to do the opposite of refiling so that while I'm looking at a topic, I can pull in a subtree from somewhere else.

Some buckets collect thoughts for blog posts, some for projects, some just for areas I'm interested in. I feel like I tend to lose track of the buckets that I'm collecting thoughts into–the list of slightly-less-active thoughts, as the active thoughts are easily findable. Maybe this is okay.

I want to get better at going from a microblog post/toot or a quick index-card-type sketch to a longer blog post or sketchnote.

Actually, since my current workflow focuses mostly on blog posts, I think this part is more about contracting: picking out a small thought that I can share right now instead of waiting until I write the rest of it. This idea might also include picking a medium-sized chunk and making it the first post in a series, and the current post is an experiment in doing so. I'm a little hesitant to do so because my brain tends to wander off towards the end of a series, but it might be worth an experiment.

I'll also need some code to make it easier to add links between things in a series, which could be manual (handy for other non-series links too) or possibly something handled on the 11ty side (like How to build a blog series with 11ty/Eleventy).

I can also experiment with spreading posts out by scheduling them as Org tasks. I've theoretically added support for holding back future-dated posts in my 11ty config, but I think managing that on the Org side might be easier for now.

This is linked to learning from others. Boosting what other people have said or thought can be a quick and easy way of learning out loud and enlarging the conversation. I can do more of that through Mastodon toots, rolling them up into my blog. I often add snippets to my config based on the things I come across in Emacs News.

I also like the commentary on blogs like Irreal and would like to grow into things like that.

Over the next little while, I'm looking forward to fleshing out the next sections. Let's see if breaking things up into posts works…

• Thinking: trying; reflecting; developing thoughts; shifting; reviewing; clustering; building on; searching (local, web, exact, approximate); questioning; reframing
• Making: organizing; writing; editing; drawing (sketchnotes, doodles); diagramming; plotting; charts; coding; showing
• Sharing: designing; linking; mapping thoughts; joining the conversation