The Man with two brains
Autistic note keeping, FTW!
We have recently been undergoing some management and productivity changing at The Day Job. Interesting stuff, but when we got on to the subject of time and productivity, I think I rather shocked her with what I routinely do.
I have been using Obsidian to keep notes for a while. It stores notes in Markdown and the interface makes it super easy to link notes together. Over time this produces a quite detailed mind map of what you’ve been thinking about, which is in and of itself highly illuminating. I keep daily notes – details about what I’m working on, how I’m feeling, random thoughts, problems, etc.
Where this gets powerful is that, since it’s just markdown files, firstly you can easily put them under version control… but crucially, it also means you can point AI agents at it. Very quickly your notes become a record of the context of things you’re working on – code, projects, life plans, blog posts. You can link random thoughts together in a map, and get the AI to help you keep track of it, making sure that random thoughts you have are captured and expanded on.
Additionally, the agents can be instructed to give you insights; pick up on things you may have missed, things that keep cropping up, write todo lists, and give a second pair of eyes highlighting blind spots. Personally (caveats aside), I’ve been finding this approach quite instructive. The agents have already picked up on some patterns which I need to address. Every Sunday I ask the AI to review my week, come up with insights, identify patterns and things I’ve missed, and help me plan the week ahead. Every month I perform a retrospective review, and the AI is pretty good at picking up on trends, and highlighting any projects I may have been neglecting, and flagging any important actions I’ve missed.
I’ve moved my legacy notes into the archive as well – easy enough for iCloud, as you can export those directly in MD. For google notes held in my gmail, this was a little bit more fiddly – export using google takeout (deselect all, select “mail” and export only your notes folders, then use this little tool I asked the AI to make for me to convert mbox files into Markdown). Drop those into a folder inside the vault and ask the AI to import, clean and link them up for you.
The real advantage of this approach is that you can just brain dump into the notes, linking things up where you can, but otherwise let the agents organise it, pulling together your random thoughts into a logical structure. Tracking ideas back to the random thoughts that spawned them.
Run a git init within the vault and you’ll even have version control to track back the evolution of your thinking, as well as giving you the ability to roll back if fat fingers (or an over zealous agent) makes an oopsy in your notes!
Give it a go!
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