tags
- information exhaustion, ig post, reels, how everything has become so consuming
- very hard to make sense to things we’re learning
- lots of streams, very short attention span, we’ve become very distracted
- newer gens are more affected
- some examples of notes i take throughout the week
- unfinished projects: folders / extreme structure imply that we have all the time in the world to make all our knowledge follow it, which we don’t, which means it’s a facade - an extremely organized system of daily notes is an extreme goal and a big lie - its price is always not taking enough notes - versus daily notes, where we capture as much as possible because we need not to care about organizing
- when i sit to write, i don’t find myself compiling everything i know about a topic, but rather everything i have recently known about a topic
- one can safely assume that this understanding is always lacking
- because both are not equal: everything you have recently known about a topic is not everything you know about the topic
- in fact, in most cases, you don’t learn about topics from scratch. in order for a topic to be worth thinking/writing about, it means that you’ve probably had some more thoughts about it than most people, which means that you’ve probably been building up to this understanding at earlier points of time → now our aim is to catch that! we don’t just want the most recent context, we want to catch the full context! which we can also safely assume is embedded within our daily activities, between surfing the web, reading books, and talking with people. time is the only thing we can use to organize and fetch our knowledge about topics as comprehensively as possible.
- what started this is just one thing: no note-taking app can keep up with my thoughts - i wanted to write about so many things that ultimately i thought that -auto- recording the activity that led to it should be enough - if iwanted to return back to it and expand, fine, but if i didn’t, which most of cases i won’t (due to limited time, attention, and headspace, we walkted about above), it’s there forever for me to remember - the effort exerted to keep track of my ideas -and things that lead to them and emerged from them- is boiled down to -almost- zero, and the upside i have from having the tracking being done in the background is maximal → while this could seem normal/underestimated, it’s a knowledge worker’s heaven
- a very small example of this, is: i setup this blog with the goal of sharing and writing as much as possible, then i iterated on it by building a smaller/minimalist blog that neither readers nor me have any expectation from what comes out of it → in other words i set it in a way that i can publish anything, in any form, and of any length, could be a longform 20-minute article or just a few sentences - that was essentially because i was thinking the friction for publishing was coming out of “not having the notes ready” - until i ultimately discovered that many thoughts & ideas i’ve been thinking about are not published because “their notes are not even there” - so it’s not like i haven’t organized or polished the notes, but more like i can’t write about all the thoughts in my head because i lose track of them so fast because their stream and intensity are so high because the main sources of them are so much,….. 🔁
- 1 post over the last 2 months, publishing statistics, etc
- LOTS of notes, unrelated, scattered over the timeline, need work to organize, and context to support
- so you can imagine why no specific note-taking app worked for me, because all these years i was searching for an app or a tool or a system or a framework that can introduce the perfect organization of notes - until i suddenly discovered that this exact goal is not possible - my real eureka moment was when i realized that no files or tagging or organizing system exists that will work with all these silos - there are so much information from everywhere, and in every format, to be able to capture, store, and organize - lots of new info, open tabs, web highlights, book highlights, journal thoughts, meetings notes, and things from my life that relate to each other that could not ever be silo’d or maintained in a computable format
- and then another realization hit me: as time passes, i dropped searching for an organizing technique, and in an attempt to combat this loss, i resorted to the most basic, most default thing of trying to reach out to older information from different places: Time
- i was always just searching by time because i don’t remember any keywords (tags) about the things i was searching about, but i knew that this is probably something i have been doing or learning or writing or reading around last month, so according to the interface:
- i will type in last month’s date in the search bar (in a notes app)
- or pick a date from last month from a datepicker (in ios calendar, or a journaling app, or a location tracking app)
- or scroll up or down (in photos app, or browser tabs, or spotify listening history)
- or swipe left or right (in a fitness app, or a screentime app)
- all this effort just to remember a specific point of time, because i have no other organizational structure other than time itself
to reach to last month!
- fullfilment is subjective, you have to create what it means to have/live a fulfilling day, else you’re lost, extremely lost
- metacognition
- An example
- I have been reading this post about the map of consciousness
- I’m almost confidently sure I’ve read multiple pieces about the topics, even saved many highlights and wrote notes about those learnings. That’s because this topic represents an ongoing open thought in my head, which means that, for me, it’s always welcome to come into, read about, and know stuff about this topic
- Now I know for a fact that I have been away from that topic since at least a year – So I can’t easily reach out to knowledge I had from that time since I don’t even remember where did I read about it, what app did i use to write those notes, and what tool I used to highlight which article or what part of what book, if i even did – See I remember quite well that this topic used to intrigue me and that I probably had some prior knowledge about it
- [Plug & paraphrase ⇒ The more time passes, the more pkm systems lose their efficacy]
- Now I’m in front of two scenarios:
- Forget about what I learned in the past, consider this is my first day learning about the topic, ditch prior knowledge, engage with whatever piece I’m reading by either highlighting some of it, or writing notes, or even just reading it for a few minutes and then closing the tab → This scenario happens almost everyday as I browse the internet
- Upside: I have gained lots of new knowledge, no friction in storing what I learned - i read it, close it, forget about it - partly because i don’t have to, and mostly because i don’t have the time to
- Downside: I cannot remember anything about it after one week
- Dig my way through older notes, book pdf files I have on my laptop, and all capture tools i have, just to search them for keywords that seem to be close to the topic
- Upside: Now I have the full context, I can see which knowledge lead to my prior understanding of the topic, and hopefully other/more resources that can support my understanding about the topic
- Downside
- 15 minutes have already passed of me doing this – In a real life scenario, I don’t have the 15 minutes – I will only do this for things I really genuinely desperately want to find or remember
- No search intelligence, the words have to be exact if i have any chance of finding them
- I HAVE to have interacted with the piece I read back then in order for me to find it! If I haven’t highlighted, bookmarked, saved somewhere, or taken any notes, then it’s sure I won’t find it
- Now I’m writing this post to answer a simple question: What if I wanted both upsides?
- Answer: I have spent at least 2 years searching and there’s no effective way to do it.
- transition ⇒ So you can see how by just including context (browser activity) and auto-organizing (AI), we can auto-capture, and auto-organize → which means: Easier search (/reach/retrieval)
- mention 3rd scenario using hyperspaces
- Example II: Something that I wasn’t able to make sense of in my youth, and now I’m able to ⇒ extrapolate ⇒ how many things we consume that we make sense of at a later point of time?
- Biggest learning from past few months is: Life IS me – Your life IS you
- If all your narratives about your past are just how you interpreted them through your lens, then your narratives can tell a lot about THE INTERPRETER which is you
- So in lots of ways, how you view your life, is you
- As events happen, we are the ones we decide whether they are good or bad, we make the event, and the memory of the event, through our interpreter
refactor 1: artificial artifacts vs natural artifacts
refactor 2: daily notes to “day notes” because they’re really “event notes”
use the word "silo”: folders and files they silo our thinking. they are too rigid to structure our dynamic, diverse, and interconnected work
That's it.
No folders, tags, spaces, objects or any of those things. It's just you and your knowledge. And you can access it as quickly and as cleanly as possible. In hyperspaces, the stronger the context & links, the easier you'd find what you need to. Which for each one of us, could be very different. And the stronger the search (AI), the less the need we have for any organizing dimension, like folders, tags, mentions, graphs, etc!
HSS is built on the understanding that AI will keep getting better to the point that using any knowledge org technique would become so obsetele so soon. All of them will be replaced by semantics, so why not embrace it in the experience from now?
Everything we'll do, know, and search will be based on semantics.
principle-app matrix!!!! what app breaks what principle?
In hss, daily notes -> are turned into as --, --, --, -- because of AI
question we're trying to answer is: how to OFFLOAD all context from our brain to an external tool and make it as easy to get it back <replace with yastad3y> in in no time!
for example, in capacities, you have to keep context of objects!!! and for tagging, you have to keep context of tags! this is not really offloading
how well is the tool performing depends on how easy and how fast it is to both offload and download contexts
capacities lets you use objects and properties and tags to link notes - not only they add non needed layer of context, furthermore, these things cannot do better than only link a very small subset of notes together – which means as the kb grows we'll need more and more of them. adding more & more non needed context.
we found that the only two properties that could create, maintain, and visualize connections between notes of any type are: space & time.
<note on note-taking time travel> <how daily notes fit in this def>
for example,
- object > property > date
- date > daily notes > objects
- creating notes outside the timeline FCUKS (messes) with the whole knowledge base – because in our view now (of using the timeline as an org dim), this new note has just became an orphan, which means we’ll have to look for sneaky ways and workarounds to maintain the integrity of the system, like mention(!) the day in the property(!) of the object(!) that has the note.
- instead, the note usually just exists inside the day, all of these convoluted hierarchies that are often shipped as features(!) are not helping, because our brains are not working this way
- our brains are not programmed to remember objects or tags! so they naturally tend to drop them after some time, it’s inevitable – which renders the added context useless because now we have to remember some context to remember the original context!
- what’s much more realistic when we want to remember something from our knowledge, is not remembering some exterior context we assigned to it, but remembering some other things (that might sometimes be very external to the note) that happened during or before or after writing the note – like how we became to think about writing it for example! Now that’s helpful, and most importantly, natural context! we didn’t do any extra work – our brains just happen to work this way!
- so having a note-taking tool that works in this exact same way seems like a natural extension of the brain - it effectively reduces all heavy lifting by eliminating clutter as much as possible
“Physical space is a really important part of memory formation and recall. For example: sometimes when moving between two rooms you'll forget something, only to remember when you return.
Dates are great hooks for recall too. We all associate memories with time to some extent or another. For example, a forgotten memory may often be recovered by recalling what you were doing around that time (which can be enough of a hook to remember the rest).
This is why daily notes are so powerful, and if done right, you wouldn’t need any other structure.”
- in this above video for example, he opens the day note in which we find notes about a podcast he listened on this day, and notes about some recipes from his research about mediterranean cuisine
- for each of those two types, he creates an object (one for podcast, one for recipe) inside the daily note and then populate them with corresponding data
- in many ways, this could be very much unnecessary because:
- writing notes for both right inside the daily not would’ve been sufficient
- we don’t have to search for names of objects we create (non-needed added context)
- the library of objects can itself get infinite, because no restrictions, adding objects is really just up to us
- if the link between the daily note and the object is lost, no way to recover the full context in a way that aligns with how our brain functions (time & space)
- moreover, both types, are about things from real life! both are notes about things that have existing related data in other mediums
- podcast activity → spotify/apple podcasts/etc
- online cooking recipe → browser history/screen activity/etc
- now by bringing this related data from real-life to the daily note, that could be a nice addition because now we can take notes, have full context, and recall them later, all without adding any additional context that didn’t happen! less heavy lifting in both creating and recall
- both types of data are contexts that are added to the daily note via background automated tracking, so we didn’t do any heavy lifting on our part, and we don’t ever have to do it
- just by shifting to this type of writing (daily notes + automated tracking), our units of thinking inside the digital environment become “events”, not orphan notes, or tags, or files, or folders, or any of those things. an event means “something that happened in our life along with our findings and thoughts about it”. this could be a work meeting or a gym workout or a reflection journal or a creative piece or an academic research or a travel log, or anything in between!
- we’re now bringing context from the background into the digital space, rather than desperately tailoring it to external artifacts and stuffing it with names that are not real things
- daily note ←← ideas, findings, thoughts, web highlights, book highlights, screen activities, links, photos, meetings, diagrams, resources
