Today I was playing a lot with org-review. I'm just trying to really incorporate a strong review process because one of the things I started doing recently is that this [Fireflies AI]​ note taker that's running in the background. Now, it produces terrible transcripts, but it produces great summaries. And at the bottom of every summary, there's a list of all the action items that everyone talked about associated with the names.

So I now have some automation, that will all I have to do is download the Word document and then I have a whole process in the background that uses Pandoc to convert it to Org Mode. Then I have Elisp code that automatically will suck it into the file that I dedicate to that particular meeting. It will auto-convert all of the action items into Org-mode tasks where it's either a TODO if it's for me, or if it's a task for somebody else, tagged with their name.

Then, when I have a one-on-one with a person in the future, I now have a one-on-one template that populates that file, and part of the template is under the agenda heading. It uses an a dynamic block that I've written: a new type of dynamic block that can pull from any agenda file. And what it does is it [takes] from all of those meetings, all of the action items that are still open that are tagged with their name.

This has been actually really, really effective. Now, I don't jump into a one-on-one being like, "Well, I didn't prepare so I don't know what to talk about." I've usually got like 10 to 30 items to go through with them to just see. Did you follow up? Did you complete this? Do we need to talk about this more?

I want to incorporate org-review. Scheduling is not sufficient for me to see my tasks. What I need is something that is like scheduling, but isn't scheduling. That's where org-review comes in. I have a report that says: show me everything that has never been reviewed or everything that is up for review.

Then I have a whole Org key space within agenda for pushing the next review date to a selected date or a fixed quantity of time. So if I hit r r, it'll prompt for the date that I want to see that again. But if I hit r w, it'll just push it out a week.

Every day I try to spend 15 minutes looking at the review list of all the tasks that are subject for review. I don't force myself to get through the whole list. I count it as success if I get through 20 of the tasks. Because earlier I had 730 of them, right? I was just chewing on them day by day.

But now I'm building this into the Org agenda population, because in the dynamic block match query, I can actually say: only populate this agenda with the tasks that are tagged for them that are up for review. That way, if we're in the one-on-one and they say, "Oh I'm working on that but I won't get to it for a month," I'll say, "Let's review that in a month." Then next week's one-on-one won't show that tasks. I don't have to do that mental filtering each time.

This is something I've been now using for a few weeks. I have to say I'm still streamlining, I'm still getting all the inertia out of the system by automation as much as possible, but it's helping me stay on top of a lot of tasks.

I'm surprised by how many action items every single meeting generates. It's like, it's like between 5 and 12 per meeting. And I have 3 to 7 meetings a day, so you can imagine that we're generating up to a hundred action items a week.

In the past, I think a lot of it was just subject to the whims of people's memory. They'll say, "I'm going to do that," and then… Did they remember to do that? Nobody's following up. Three months later, somewhere, they'll go like, "Oh yeah we talked about that, didn't we?"

So I'm trying to now stem the the tide of lost ideas. [My current approach] combines dynamic blocks with org-roam templates to make new files for every meeting and it combines org-review to narrow down the candidate agendas each time appropriately, and it combines a custom command to show me a list of all tasks that are currently needing review.

Reviewing isn't just about, "Is the thing done?" It's also, "Did I tag it with the right names? Did I delegate? Did I associate an effort quantity to it?" (I'm using efforts now as a way to quickly flag whether a day has become unrealistically over-full.)

I only started using column view very, very recently. I've never used it before. But now that I'm using effort strings, it does have some nice features to it: the ability to see your properties laid out in a table.

Today's agenda has 133 items on it. I need ways to narrow that agenda down.

I've used a lot of different tasks management philosophies. We're always looking for more efficiency, and we're looking for more personal adaptation to what works for us. I've gone from system to system. What I'm starting to realize is that the real value in all of these systems is that they're different enough from whatever you're using today, that they will force you to think about the system you're making for yourself, that is their value.

That's why I think there should always be a huge variety of such systems and people should always be exploring them. I don't believe any one one system can work for everybody, but we all need to be reflecting on the systems that we use. Somebody else showing you, "Hey, I do it this way" is a really nice way to juxtapose whatever system you're using.

I discovered through reading Karl Voit's articles that there are three principal information activities: searching, filtering, and browsing.

• Hierarchies assist with browsing.
• Tagging assist with filtering and keywords.
• Metadata assist with searching.

Those are the three general ways that we approach our data.

We have to do work to draw distinctions between that data. The whole reason that we're drawing distinctions between that data is to narrow our focus to what is important.

I have over 30,000 tasks in my Org Mode overall. 23,000 of them are TODOs. Several thousand of them are still currently open. I'm never gonna see them all. Even if I wanted to, I'm never gonna see them all. I don't know what to search for. I don't know what the query should be. I have to use tagging and scheduling and categorization and everything. I believe that that is the work of a knowledge worker is to introduce these distinctions. That takes time and it takes effort.

What's really important is to draw meaningful distinctions. Make distinctions that matter.

I could tag things with like the next time I go to Walmart, so that I could do a filtered query to show me all things that I might want to do at Walmart, but is that worth the effort or is just tagging it as an errand enough? Because that list will get within the size range that I can now eyeball them all and mentally filter out the ones that I need for Walmart.

What makes a meaningful distinction? I believe there are two things that make a distinction meaningful. One is semantic, and one is operational.

A semantic distinction is a distinction that changes the meaning of the task. If I have a task that says "Set up Zoom account", if that's in my personal Org Mode, that has one level of priority and one level of focused demand. If it's in my work list, that has a totally different importance and a totally different focused demand. It changes the nature of the task from one that is low urgency (maybe a curiosity) to high urgency that might impact many people or affect how I can get my work done. That distinction is meaningful or semantic. It changes the meaning of the task.

An operational distinction changes how I interact with the task. [For example, if I tag a phone call, I can] group all of my phone calls during a certain time of the day. That changes my nature of interaction with the task. I'm doing it at a different time of day or doing it in conjunction with other tasks. That helps narrow my focus during that section of time that I have available for making calls. It's an operational distinction. if it's changing how you interact with the task.

You're succeeding at all of this if on any given day and any given time, what's in front of your eyes is what should be in front of your eyes. That's what all of this is about. If an operational distinction is not aiding you in that effort, it's not worth doing. It's not meaningful enough to go above the bar.

I'm trying to narrow and optimize down to the minimum distinctions necessary to remain effective. If I can ever get rid of a distinction, I'm happy to do it.

I used to have projects and have categories, or what PARA method calls areas. Projects are different from areas and that they have a definition of completion and they have a deadline, but that's the only distinction. I realized that distinction doesn't do me any good because if it has a deadline, that's the distinction, right?

Calling it an area or calling it a project… I can just have projects without deadlines and then that's good enough. I have a query that shows me all projects whose deadlines are coming up within the next month, and then I'm aware of what I need to be aware of. I don't need to make the distinction between the ones that have and don't have deadlines. I just need to assign a deadline so the deadline was sufficient discrimination. I didn't need the classification difference between area and project.

And then [PARA's] distinction between projects, areas, and archives. I realize that there's only one operational benefit of an archive, and it's to speed things up by excluding archives from the Org ID database or from the org-roam-dbsync. That's it. That's the only reason I would ever exclude archives, because I want to search in archives. org-agenda-custom-commands is already only looking at open tasks. In a way, it's by implication archiving anything that's done in terms of its meaning.

This is all just an example of me looking at the para method and realizing that none of their distinctions really meant something for me.

What was meaningful was:

• Does it have a deadline?
• Is it bounded or not bounded?
• Do I want to included in the processing of items?
• [Is it a habit?]

I did decide to draw the distinction of habits. I want them to look and feel different because I'm trying to become more habit-heavy.

I read this really brilliant book called Atomic Habits that I think has changed my life more than any other. I've read a lot of really good time management books but this book far and away has made the biggest impact on my life. One of its philosophical points that it makes that is so profound is that goal-oriented thinking is less successful in the long run than behavior-oriented thinking or habit- or system-oriented thinking. Instead of having a goal to clean your office, have a habit to remove some piece of clutter from your office like each time you stand up to go get a snack. You seek habits that in the aggregate will achieve the goals you seek to do.

I'm trying now to shift a lot of things in my to-do lists that were goals. I'm trying to identify the habits that will create systems of behavior that will naturally lead to those goals. I want habits to be first class citizens, and I want to be aware of the habits I'm creating.

I think the other thing that Atomic Habits did is it changed my conception of what a habit is. Before, I thought of a habit as "using the exercise bike" or something like that, which always made it a big enough task that I would keep pushing it off. Then I would realize I'd pushed it off for six months and then I would unschedule it and give up on it because it was just it would just be glaring at me with a look of doom from my agenda list.

What's important is the consistency, not the impact of any one particular accomplishing of that habit. It's a habit. If I do it daily, it's doesn't matter how much of it I do. So even if it just means I get on the bike and I spin the pedals for three minutes, literally, that's successful completion.

Any time you have a new habit, one of the activities in mastering that habit is to keep contracting the difficulty of the habit down, down. You've got to make it so stupidly small and simple to do, that you do it just for the fun of marking it done in the agenda, right?

I have a habit to review my vocabulary lists for languages that I'm learning. I'm okay with one word. As long as I ran the app and I studied one word, that's success.

What you find happening is that you'll do the one word, and now because you're there, because you're in the flow of it, you're like, "I'll do two. You know, I'm already here. What's the big difficulty in doing two?"

So you make the success bar super low. You're trying to almost trick yourself into getting into the flow of whatever that activity is.

[org-habit org-ql list] So I have all of these habits here, and every single habit on this list is super easy to do. Five minutes is all that it would take, or even one minute for most of them. I use different little icons to group them. It also keeps the title of the habit really small. I found that when the titles were really long. I didn't like reading it all the time. It just was a wall of text. When it's these one word plus an icon, it just kind of jumps out.

I took that to a bit of an extreme sort of with my my package remote called Hammy, for hamster. It's for timers and ideas, kind of like being a hamster on a hamster wheel.

Anyway, one of the timers is called flywheel mode. The idea is: just do a little bit. Like, if I'm just having a mental block, I can't stand working on that test today, I'm going to do five minutes. I can spend five minutes doing whatever. Next time, we do 10 minutes in 15. Pretty soon, I'm doing 45 minutes at a stretch. Maybe when I sit down to do 5, I'll actually do 15. I'm just slowly building up that mental momentum. I'll allow myself to quit after 5 minutes, but I end up doing 20.

Momentum is key. There's a flip side to this whole concept of the value of iterative improvement. The opposite remains also true.

Consistent good is your best ally, and inconsistent bad is also your ally. It's when the reverse is true that you have inconsistent good and consistent bad, that's what leads you into roads of doom.

That never occurred to me before. I would always be one of those people who would set myself up with a goal, like, I want to lose 20 pounds. I would struggle to achieve it. I would be dismayed because of how hard it was to get there, and then you'd have a day when you're like, you get off the wagon and you're like, The game is lost. And then and then you can't get back on again. Whereas now it's like that wagon, it's not so easy to get off of. I have to really make a concerted effort to be consistently bad in order to make things horrible again.

I almost want to change org-habit to have a different kind of visualization, because streaks are not motivators for me. Streaks punish you for losing one day out of 200, right? I don't want a graph that shows me streaks. I want a graph that shows me consistency. If I have 200 days and I've missed five of them, I'm super consistent. Maybe I could do this with colors. Just show a bar with that color, and don't show individual asterisks to show when I did it or when I didn't do it, because I find streaks anti-motivating.

[Discussion about other ways to display habits]

The whole principle around Life Balance [by Llamagraphics]​ was: you take all of your tasks, you categorize them, you associate difficulty to them and priority and everything else. Then it tries to use heuristics to determine if your life is being balanced, [and it percolates certain tasks to the top of your list].

If the system's doing a good job, then your agenda list should always be A-Z pretty much the best order in which you ought to do things. It didn't just do category-based balance, it also did difficulty-based balance. You should only be doing super hard stuff once in a while. You do a hard thing, then you do lots of easy things, then you do a hard thing.

Now, I'm wondering… This idea of momentum is very similar to the idea of balance. "Have established momentum with a system of behavior" is similar to "Have an established balance with all of the tasks that I do related to different activities." Is there a data architecture that would allow me to do both of these things.

The whole idea of making the habits be colors and then sorting them according to the spectrum is literally just to achieve balance among how much attention I'm paying to different habits.

[Discussion about dynamic prioritization]

My fundamental system right now is there's like two org-ql views. There's the view of tasks that are scheduled for today or have a deadline of today, and then there's a view of tasks that I've decided that they need to be done, but I haven't decided when to do them yet.

[Top list]: I just pick the next task off the list or reschedule if it's not important enough now. But then when that's empty, if it ever gets that way, it's the second view. I decide, okay, there's something I need to do. I can do that on Tuesday. Then it disappears until I need to think about it again.

This separates deciding what to do from when to do. Then I can just switch into my own manager mode for a moment, and then switch into "just put your head down and do the work mode."

[More details]

The top view is basically tasks that have a deadline, that are relevant to now (either deadline today or in the past), or it's an item that I've scheduled to work on today or in the past.

The view below, that is items that have no planning date. I need to give them one, or maybe they can just sit in that list of projects that have no next task. I use a project heading to [note] something that needs to be subdivided if I don't have a next task for it, then that'll show up there to remind me to give it one. Once it has a next task, [that] task would appear instead of the project heading until I schedule it. Anything I've forgotten to schedule yet will show up in that list.

Below that I just have a small window that shows me things. I've completed or clocked in the past week.

And then, another small window shows me anything that's a project status so I can get an overview.

In the work file itself, I have a number of links to org-ql views, like "Show me all my top level projects," "Show me tasks I need to talk to my boss about" or somebody else.

Org Mode is really a database, right? It's a database of of highly structured data that has a lot of associated metadata.

The value of that data requires a certain level of consistency which is work that we have to do. In the same way we do work drawing distinctions, we need to do work to keep that data consistent. Am I using this [property]? Am I using this tag to mean the right thing or whatever? Karl Voit says that one of the most valuable things if you're going to use tagging to organize your data is a constrained tag vocabulary. Make a fixed list. Then it's an error if you tag something and it's not in that list, because you either need to expand the list or you need to choose a better tag. That's really valuable.

Even though I use org-lint on all my org files, I found serious data errors. [The newline before an initial star had been lost], and then Org wouldn't see the entry. I never knew that it wasn't even being a participant in any of my queries. I just didn't know stuff like that.

I created a whole bunch of Haskell libraries that allow me to parse Org Mode data. It's a very opinionated parser. It's a very strict parser. It will not parse data files that do not have the exact shape and text and taxonomy that I want.

I wrote a linting module that basically encodes every single rule that I have ever wanted to apply to my data. Like, in the title of an Org Mode heading. I don't want two spaces. I don't want extra excess white space. That should be a rule right?

[Multiple examples, including when a file had TODO entries but didn't have a TODO filetag.]

My linter makes sure that this rule is consistently maintained. Being able to have an aggressive, thorough, universal consistency throughout all of my org data has really put my mind at ease. I can't break my data because I just won't be able to commit the broken data into git. I find myself adding new linting rules on a weekly basis. The more that I add, the more value my data has, because the more regular it is, the more normal, the more searchable.

• The ideas in our conversation had some overlap with Podcast #1,029: Treat Your To-Do List Like a River, and Other Mindset Shifts for Making Better Use of Your Time - considering TODO lists that are very long; doing habits dailyish
  • Nudged by this conversation, I experimented with using org-ql to show me a random set of my SOMEDAY tasks so that they show up on my radar from time to time, or maybe trying the autofocus method with them.
• Also nudged by this conversation, I borrowed Atomic Habits from the library and made notes. It might be good to think about what habits I want to build and how I want to support that. John recommended Flat Habits for people who have iPhones. Maybe I'll try Loop Habits, which can export to CSV.
• A custom consistency checker might be good to make for things like tags, or at least an interactive function that prompts me to choose from a controlled vocabulary.

People:

• John Wiegley
• Adam Porter

mickeyp on Reddit

By doing everything with the clear purpose of writing about it, you will do what you do deliberately.

I like chapter 5's focus on keeping writing in mind. I want to push most things towards writing and drawing (posts, code, whatever; public as much as possible) because it's a good way for me to remember and to learn from others. It's a reminder to not try speeding through my to-do list; it's good to slow down and write about stuff.

I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.

I always work on different manuscripts at the same time. With this method, to work on different things simultaneously, I never encounter any mental blockages.

During my discretionary time, I usually follow the butterflies of my interest: working on what I feel like working on, moving on to something else when I get stuck. Sometimes I will work on something I have to do because it's got to be done, but those moments are rarer. Amidst all those productivity books that exhort you to focus on a limited number of things, it was nice to know that Luhmann also jumped from interest to interest, that the process of accumulating these notes builds things up into clusters with critical mass, and that these good habits build themselves up through positive feedback loops.

I do all right capturing fleeting notes on my phone, but I want to get better at turning my fleeting notes into literature notes and permanent notes. I'd like to review them more frequently and spend some more time fleshing them out, with the goal of eventually turning more of those things into blog posts and code that I can share as I learn out loud.

I also don't really have a good way of putting topics "near" other topics yet. Categories are a little coarse, but maybe topic maps are a good starting point. It would be nice to have a quick way to put something before/after something else, though.

Writing a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting and rewriting.

I wonder if making these distinctions between the subtasks of writing will make it easier for me to break writing down into tiny tasks that can be completed and gotten out of my brain.

I want to get better at connecting ideas to other things I've thought about by linking to blog posts or notes. That might also help me build up thoughts out of smaller chunks, which would be helpful when it comes to working with fragmented thoughts.

Thinking about what's not in the picture is hard, and that kind of critical thinking is something I want to practise more. I can pay attention to the follow-up questions I have so that I can get a sense of where to look for more insights or what to experiment with. Questioning the way something is framed is also good and something I don't do often enough.

For example, I wanted to dig into this quote:

Luhmann’s only real help was a housekeeper who cooked for him and his children during the week, not that extraordinary considering he had to raise three children on his own after his wife died early.

I ended up doing a tiny bit of research on my phone and putting it into Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten and life with kids (the kids were in their teens at the time, so they were probably a lot more independent than A+ is at the moment).

• How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens (2017) - author's website
• Sketchnote: How to Read a Book - also talks about thinking about the Great Conversation between books
• Sketchnote: How to make a complete map of every thought you think (Lion Kimbro) - pan-subject speeds: fleeting notes; map
• Sketchnote: Write Faster, Write Better – David A. Fryxell - shuffling ideas on index cards feels related to the slipbox

I mostly work on code, so I need to keep things like TODOs and setup instructions.

I also want to organize resources and refer people to them.

It's important to me to get things out of my head because unfinished thoughts in my head are intrusive (Ovsiankina effect). They get in the way of being able to enjoy time with the kiddo. I need to be able to get them out into a system that I can trust, so that I can stop thinking about it until it's time to think about it again. I don't have a lot of computer time, so I want to be able to pick things up quickly when I do.

Most of the time, I add quick questions or ideas using Orgzly Revived on my phone because I'm not close to a computer. Sometimes I look up web pages that relate to something, and then I can share that with Orgzly using the Android share menu. If I'm close to a computer, then I can use org-capture.

I also use my Supernote to sketch/write ideas.

I use my phone for audio braindumps.

Challenge: I want to write down more context because I occasionally come across notes that don't make sense to me.

I usually tend to work on things that I've recently thought about, so I'm working out of my inbox or out of a few active projects. Either the relevant items I've captured are still there in my inbox or in the project's tree, or I can quickly organize them before I dive into my work.

Sometimes I need to retrieve something that's a lot older, such as when I want to recommend something I remember seeing a year or two ago. This is challenging because I often don't remember the exact words that will bring it up. I can help that a little bit by adding my own words when I create the note, but I don't feel like that's a solid solution yet. I think that this is a challenge that's going to get worse as my brain gets fuzzier. Finding things using approximate matches could be interesting. Most of the time, I end up relying on an Internet search, because then I can take advantage of the variety of words used in other people's descriptions of the thing.

Blog posts (and funneling my toots and sketches into blog posts) makes things slightly more findable. I've come across things I've completely forgotten writing about.

Challenge: When I'm trying to move too quickly instead of writing things down, then there's nothing to retrieve years later when I'm picking a project back up again. For example, when I finally dusted off my time-tracking project so that I could upgrade the Rails version, I had to do a lot of figuring out. That tells me I need to write more notes. As I run into things that I didn't write down well enough (or as I bump into things I could've sworn I wrote about but I just can't find my notes), I try to write down what I've figured out, where I looked, and what words I used in order to look for it. Maybe that will make it more findable in the future.

I tend to work on a few recent thoughts, so I can generally schedule them for the day that I think I'll be able to work on them. Then I can use my Org Mode agenda to get a short list of the things that I want to work on. When that's done, I can then go through the more general things–still biased towards what's recent, what's in my inbox, what I've been thinking about lately. It takes extra time to context shift back into older things.

My life generally doesn't have a lot of urgent commitments, so it's mostly a matter of thinking: What do I feel like working on? What's the most annoying thing I need to work around? What am I curious about? Then I can go to that project or thought.

Sometimes I'll use the TODO status to distinguish between things that I want to do someday versus things that I could do sooner. Pushing things off to SOMEDAY is especially handy for ideas that are not very fleshed out yet. My newly created tasks default to SOMEDAY so that it takes me an active effort to say, okay, this stuff is on my list of things to focus on.

Sometimes I use the [#A] and [#C] priority marker in Org Mode to move things to the top or bottom of my list.

In general, I don't worry too much about making sure that I'm working on the absolute best thing at the time, because that stuff takes planning, too.

Scheduling something on a particular day is how I pick a short list of things that I want to do. These things don't always happen. Sometimes I end up procrastinating something for another few weeks out or a month out. If I do that too often, I usually end up cancelling it, because clearly there are other things I want to do.

There are also the things I've got to schedule once in a while that I don't actively think about until the reminder pops up, like renewing my passport. The Org agenda takes care of that.

I like to keep journal entries so that I can look back and see the progress I've made.

I might start off with just a quick question or idea. Depending on what I have time for, I might flush out that idea in an audio braindump or a sketch. I can convert either of those things into text and dump them into my note for editing, or I can sit down and flesh out the idea further by writing it, with the eventual goal of turning it into either a toot or a post. Maybe some of them will get turned into videos. So that's how I gradually refine things.

I would like to get better at this. Maybe I can keep track of which thoughts could benefit from sketching or doing a brain dump, or refining those sketches or brain dumps into posts. Which posts are almost there and just need a little bit more work? Which ones do I want to turn into a video?

Since the sketching and the braindumping can happen in parallel, it's probably more about tags rather than TODO states.

One improvement could be showing me where these ideas are in the pipeline so that if I'm at my computer and I want to get something out the door, I can make a list of posts that are almost there. If I'm heading out for a walk to the store, then I can make a list of the things to think about out loud. Then I can have my system do the transcript and stick it back into the pipeline so I can edit it.

How do I take those fragments of thoughts, put them together, and turn them into a finished chunk?

When it comes to refining sketches, I can just flip open my supernote and I add more stuff to it. It's very easy to pick up and put down again. I like that.

Audio is harder to work with in terms of refining an idea, but maybe I'll figure out the workflow for that someday. The draft for this post came from a sketch and an audio braindump.

There's also this idea of refining a project. When I do my first pass through my inbox, I'm just basically throwing things in the rough direction of where I'm probably going to want them. I'll refile things very roughly into Consulting or EmacsConf or whatever else. Refining in that context would be collecting several resources and putting them under one subtree, or making sense of something, mapping out the resources for a topic, or summarizing.

If I've saved a web page, it becomes a lot easier to learn from and find again if I use my own words to describe what I'm learning from it. That's another area that I could definitely do better in.

Refining is easier to do when I'm on my computer, but when I'm on my computer, I tend to want to make stuff rather than edit stuff. If I'm refining something with the goal of making it a post, that sometimes happens. But if I want to review a page whose link I saved, sometimes that ends up very low on my priority list. I'm throwing all these things into my SOMEDAY list and not actually getting around to them yet. Maybe someday!

Most of the time, I refile things so they're roughly close to where other things I need are. I can just scroll to find connected items.

I don't have many things that need to be in multiple places in my In my outline. When I do, I tend to use links to connect the ideas. I like linking between blog posts and sketches.

I don't have a good facility for backlinks yet. I should make this easier for myself, either by just opening the blog post that I'm referring to so that I can quickly add a link to it going the other way–a manual backlink that lets me provide the context–or maybe adding some backlink support to my static site generator.

Anyhow, at least the forward links are fine. I've got some completion to help me with that. Web searches are helpful just in case my completion doesn't work, as right now my completion only works with title searches. If I am a little fuzzier about what I've called something, then I will search the Internet, grab the URL, and pop in the link.

Most of the linking happens in my blog posts because the blog posts live outside my outline. They are just roughly organized by date and category. So if I want to build on another thought, I've got to link to it. Fortunately, I've got the URL, so it's easy to link to things.

I can link to things within Org Mode. I probably should more often, and it will probably involve getting the hang of Org IDs. It hasn't been as big a need for me for now because I try to push things into blog posts as much as possible.

Sometimes it makes sense to have a URL or a link that works for both the exported version and my own internal notes. I want some things to open up in Emacs instead. Then I might have a custom link type to make that easier.

There are a lot of things that I want to think about or refer to that aren't within my Org Mode files. Fortunately, Org Mode makes it super easy to link to the things, so that part is fairly solid.

There are some kinds of things that I don't have an easy way of thinking about or working with yet, like audio.

Work ideas are harder for me to link to now that I can't access the company's WebEx chat on my personal phone, so I just write down a couple of keywords to remind myself what to think about or search for. I also tend to read my e-mail on my phone, so I don't have Org Mode's fancy linking. I write down or copy a few keywords and tag the note with "email" to help me remember where to look. Life would be much easier if I could do all of these things within Emacs so that I could just create a task and it would automatically be annotated with the link to the original stuff, but we've got to work with what we've got.

I've been gradually refining my workflow for turning my notes ito blog posts. Org Mode is fantastic for this. I can have source blocks, I can export to various formats, it's all good. I'm also exploring the idea of turning some things into richer text–adding diagrams or sketches, or narrating it, or turning it into a video.

My main thing is I want to get thoughts, ideas, and questions from my notes into some kind of public chunk. Toots are nice because I can get smaller thoughts out instead of waiting until I've fleshed them out further. Blog posts are ideal.

I want to experiment with this by using audio braindumps and sketches to explore ideas faster and use non-computer time to help with writing.

Part of maintenance is figuring out what's out of date and what I can archive to make it easier for me to just see the current stuff. I periodically go through my inbox and archive things or refile things into projects. I am slowly getting the hang of archiving things instead of deleting things, since disk space is cheap. Once in a while, I'll go through my Org file to archive inactive projects and neaten things up.

On the public side, I could probably do automated things like link-checking, but it's been pretty low priority. Most of the time, I end up updating posts when I look up them up in order to link to them or when people ask me about them. I have a snippet that makes it a little easier to note an update, but I should probably improve it to handle adding an update to a post that's already been updated before.

I don't have a list of recently modified but not newly posted posts, which might be a good idea for exposing that to blog readers.

I also want to create more evergreen pages that organize resources, kind of like my blog outline but more granular. I still want to have the last modified date as text in the page itself, but it doesn't have to be part of the permalink.

I have a lot in my notes that I've completely forgotten about. One of the benefits of keeping most of my notes online is that when people come across those notes, their links or comments help me find them again.

I've also added a random blog post button on my blog, and I'm trying to shift some doom-scrolling to use that instead.

For my personal notes, I don't bump into things as much because org-refile is very efficient for getting to just the thing I want to look at. For the most part, things get hidden away under their sub-trees until I feel like working on that particular area, so it might be years before I touch something again, if at all.

I could probably add some kind of randomness thing, but I don't really struggle with finding things to work on when I'm on my computer. There's usually something else more pressing that I want to work on, so it hasn't been an issue.

I do want to add a random sketch thing, though. I think it could be fun to cycle my background through the files in my public sketches on my desktop or my phone lockscreen.

Using plain text and free and open source software is really important to me because I want it to be easy to back up and I want to be able to trust that it's going to be around. Having seen many things get bought up or taken down… Yeah, I want to have my own notes. I feel reasonably confident, based on other people's experiences, that if I want to keep using my notes in another 20 years or more, it'll probably still be there as long as I don't do anything silly with the data.

For my sketches, I put titles and tags in the filenames. I've been using Google Cloud Vision to do handwriting recognition so that I have some kind of text that presumably I could search, although I haven't built that part yet.

Audio is a bit more ephemeral, but it might still be interesting to hear archived audio.

One of these days, I should make an organized backup of the things that I've shared on YouTube and other places. Videos take much more space.

Another thing that I'm thinking of long-term, once in a while, is how to keep going into this, how to keep it easy for me to access, use, add to, and share as I get older. I hear menopause might really do a number on my brain. People report having a hard time remembering words and thinking thoughts. It would be nice to have approximate search in place by then so that I can still find things, or at least have shared as much as possible.

My long-term plan (in case stuff happens) is to have whatever notes might be helpful be publicly available already so that theoretically someone could use the Internet Archive or a static mirror or to get back to it. Even in the case where I die and my hosting stops being paid for, the core things about it, I think, have been well-demonstrated and can be easily picked up by somebody else if they want to.

Planet Emacslife is a blog aggregator. The idea of Emacs News is fairly straightforward and somebody else could step into it easily. The ideas are not dependent on me, whic his nice.

My posts and code are out there too. They're not immortal, and they don't have to do be. If they're useful in the moment, that's already enough. If somebody comes across them months or years later and finds them useful, that's a bonus. I use them to think through something, so that's already a win.

I'd love to hear about your personal information/knowledge management systems, whether you want to think about it using these aspects or your own framework. Let's share notes!