Logbook

writing in a personal wiki

I prefer writing in a personal wiki to pretty much anything other kind of writing. There's a certain amount of producing original words, a lot more editing so that you get the right words or enough words, and a peculiar bit of wiki gardening where you're trying to shape the whole thing one edit at a time.

My favorite wiki to date is Obsidian. I've produced about 3300 pages in my word-hoard there, about 300000 words in 2 years.

I told myself that at 10000 pages I'd start over.

via https://hachyderm.io/@w8emv/110676439276925705

Obsidian at the 2500 page mark

I've been using Obsidian long enough to have accumulated about 2500 separate notes in it as of early February 2023. My goal, such as it is, it to let this total get to about 10000 pages, and then to re-evaluate everything. I'm on pace to hit that by something like 2027.

I use it for everything that might be useful in a daily diary. That means pages for dates, locations, names, etc. The rule of thumb: if it's a noun, it might be a page.

As you might expect with so many pages, most of them are short, suggesting they are there to jog my memory and not to replace it.

I like Obsidian but it's not my first go-around using a wiki as a personal knowledge base. The previous observations are probably true here too: if it gets large enough to really be interesting, it's too large to keep current. You're best off putting dates everywhere you possibly can, so that things that are stale are more obviously stale, and that observations that are old are treated as historical.

1600 pages: https://vielmetti.typepad.com/logbook/2022/06/obsidian-as-a-daily-note-taker-a-year-out.html

Obsidian as a daily note taker, a year out

I started using Obsidian about a year ago, and switched away from Github Issues about six months ago. So far so good. As is my habit, here's some notes on the process that will probably be more useful to me than they will be to you, but that's the nature of blogging these days to write notes to yourself mostly.

Obsidian has completely captured the "daily diary" part of my daily routine, as well as the "write down what you're going to do today before you do it", and the "take notes in wiki format". All of that is about 80% of what I need, and so it gets repeated daily use on my laptop.

Surprisingly, even though I can and do sync my laptop with my Android phone, I don't really use Obsidian much on my phone! To the extent that I do, it's for lookup rather than typing. I guess part of that is that the computer is so much faster as an input device that for any writing of any length I'd rather be at a full sized good keyboard.

When I gave up on Github Issues for daily tracking, there were 10000 issues that I had gone through, and I could tell you with some certainly how long various items had been on my todo list. And you know what, that's not a knowledge about myself that I miss having. I write things down and then I do them or don't do them. The process leaves enough of a trail that I can reconstruct my thoughts. I'm not really reporting out to anyone else the progress towards any one specific goal, so there's less unfinished business to worry about.

Is there unfinished business? Of course. It's just that's accepted as a normal course of events, and you get to things because you remember them and not because there's some Master List Of All Undone Tasks that you consult before taking on the next iteration of your day.

I love Obsidian as a daily note pad, and I really like it that I can bop around in about 1600 separate pages that are a fair capture of a year's worth of doing things and feel at least to a certain degree that it's a connected whole.

At 1600 pages a year, it's about six years when I hit the 10000 page mark. That would be a nice body of work, and by then some other system for writing will probably be available on some shiny new computer and I'll want to start over again from scratch. But until then - this is pretty nice, and I intend to keep at it. (Check back in 2027 and see if I still am thinking the same way.)

moving from Github Issues to Obsidian for daily issue tracking

I started using Github Issues as a personal issue tracker in 2012. The first issue was "Replace mobile phone with new device - iPhone, Android, or burner". It took me months to decide what to do. Since then, I've opened over 10,000 other issues with small or large details of things I'd like to do.

I've decided to give up on Github Issues as a personal info tracker, and replace it with Obsidian. While the thought is fresh in mind, here's a few reasons why.

Speed. Github Issues is available only through a web browser, while Obsidian is an app that stores the entire database in memory. As a consequence there are round-trips to the net for every transaction and every browsing effort on Issues, while Obsidian lets me bop around from node to node with no visible lag.

Portability. Github Issues isn't easy to download as a database. The whole thing can be pulled down to Markdown by a third-party tool (I'll want to do that). Obsidian is easy to sync to Git with a plugin, so I have the whole thing locally backed up, and I can browse and edit when I'm offline.

Native apps. The several third-party native apps I've tried for Issues have been really nice and have had a too-short shelf life. Bee.app was discontinued by its maker, and Gitscout seems to have died before a proper 1.0 release. Having to do everything through a browser feels clunky and slow and distant.

Community. Github Issues is designed for teams working on software. Obsidian is full of individuals with quirky knowledge management habits. I'm much more likely to run into someone with a cool idea about how to traverse their state of consciousness in Obsidian-land, and much more likely to find a product manager burning down a backlog in Issues-land.

Fresh start. Like I said, I had over 10,000 issues completed, which is my signal that I've learned enough about the environment to make some decisions about how well it works for me and whether the limits of it are ever going to change. My Obsidian page-count is nearly 600 right now, which means it has plenty of room to grow and morph as needed.

Wiki nature. I fell hard for Wiki ideals and wiki naming a couple of times (Socialtext, Arborwiki, Localwiki). I like typing a word in double brackets and having it make a hyperlink ready to click on. With Github Issues it is possible to cross-link issues by referring to items by number, but then you have to remember a lot of numbers, and who can do that?

The "law of two feet" from Open Space says that if you're not happy where you are, it's your responsibility to remove yourself from that location and put yourself somewhere that you are happy. I'm ready to explore a new challenge, cross everything off my todo list all at once, and recreate it as needed in a new place. We'll see how long this enthusiasm lasts.