I’ve been using substack for the past couple years and it serves my use case for blogging so well.
But then the frequency of posting was so bad because I mostly post polished pieces. With time, I found lots of unpolished notes just sitting there, including some transient thoughts, that are just waiting to be turned into a blogpost.
Oftentimes I wouldn’t visit these notes ever again. So lots of ideas end up sitting offline because either I wouldn’t have the time to build upon them or I would lose interest in the topic altogether so I wouldn’t prioritize turning them into blogposts.
Having a microblog checks this box. For whenever I write for a few minutes in the morning about some thought that is top of my head.
I use notion to maintain a stream of ideas, and super.so to auto-publish them. I did this setup in an attempt to reduce friction towards publishing which in turn I expect will increase frequency and help me write more.
Time
I also use the yymmmdd format for dates because this is the same format I've been using for my handwritten notes for years and it helps me search for stuff quickly.
For me, the concept of attaching thought with time is so precious that I 100% believe note-taking is a form of time travel. I strive to monitor how my thoughts are progressing, what topics intrigue me the most, and during which part of the year.
And even be able to link when was the last time I thought of a specific idea or something similar. Makes it much more interesting to learn & document new stuff everyday.
This microblog is a short-form blogging platform I did to help me exactly do that: monitor my thoughts & link them with time.
Linking your thinking
Couple years ago I tried some tool called Obsidian Publish to make my published notes look like this – The experiment is part of a practice that’s now widely used in the world of knowledge management, known as “Linking your thinking”.
Where you can link connected thoughts in your blog through “bi-directional linking”, meaning you can jump from one thought to its successor or predecessor through backlinks. This practice makes it so interesting to hop between ideas that lead to ideas in an engaging interface.
Few months using it I found:
- I wasn’t using backlinks much enough
- Maintaining such system takes LOTS of effort → high friction
So I decided to continue using substack as a normal blog and left the “back-linking” practice behind.
Visiting this couple of years later, I find that linking my ideas with time is the thing that works best for me, in terms of writing, documenting & publishing. Although contexts are now more sandboxed, but I’ll be trying my best to backlink anyway.
Related: 23Apr06 | Working with the garage door open