How to use note-taking for time travel?

Note-taking, reflecting, & sense-making

One thing that helped me solve this problem, at least partially, is writing. The reason writing helps me with retaining knowledge & memories is that I found writing to be in itself a documentation tool. Of all my habits, writing has consistently been the most rewarding.

One of the best feelings is when you revisit something you wrote in the past and capture many of the details of your state back then. Because we’re humans, we’re always changing, always getting from a place to another, and experiencing different mental & physical states. So having a snapshot that can retain that level of detail is priceless.

Thus the feeling you get when you revisit your past writing is precisely that of time-travel, because the deeper you engage with that version of yourself through that memory, the more you’d feel the sense of progress you have in your life.

The times I spend going through my older journals & writings could easily be some of the best times. Instantly you travel in time and see your older self talking to you now. You see yourself dreaming, going places, and envisioning where you'd want to be. When you do it from a place you dreamt about visiting, the handshake feels like a dream. Because we tend to forget about what we dreamt of, and our thoughts & aspirations.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection” – Anaïs Nin

I think time is an interesting concept. Interesting enough that I believe many people like me would do anything to try understand it. I was surprised to find that writing helped me with this understanding.

Writing about my learnings & experiences eventually made me think about long term games. It enabled me to recognize patterns I wasn’t previously able to notice. Ultimately I found out that lots of things are connected, far more connected than I could’ve imagined. Things like personal experiences, scientific theories, historical events, philosophical concepts, technological advancements, cultural trends, and even seemingly unrelated fields of study. These connections often reveal themselves in unexpected ways, unlocking powerful insights, even epiphanies!

Moreover, if time is that connected, it means that nothing from the past is ever insignificant, even the smallest things. So imagine all moments we have lived, all experiences we enjoyed, all people we met, all places we have gone, and even all music we listened to. Sure each of them was for a reason; which means each of them shouldn’t be forgotten.

The possibility that the past & future are always connected means that nothing is ever random, and nothing happens without a reason even if we don’t see it yet. This single idea of connectedness suddenly means that even the simplest of moments could be precious simply because we don’t know what could possibly happen because of them, right?

In my worldview, this very simple notion just makes life worth it, because the absence of it makes life unbearable. It adds meaning to know that every moment in time we have lived is still alive somewhere, and will not vanish till the end of time.

So only when I was able to put my insights & learnings into tangible visual form (text on the screen), I was able to connect them and unlock even deeper insights, about everything; work, life, relationships, and reality. Eventually, time has become a dimension I can visualize on my screen, simply by jumping between things I wrote at different parts of my life.

Note-taking & time travel

I believe maintaining an efficient note-taking system will enable you to make sense of your scattered thoughts across different points in time. I have spent a better part of the last few years trying to make my note-taking system as efficient as possible, to help me achieve this very goal.

But I always dreamt of what it was like if I had access to a digital time machine, one that is able to track my activity with minimal effort on my part. What if I can have a detailed history of every rabbit hole I’ve been in, or a thing I spent so much time to learn about, or a project I've been doing good progress on? I always thought I can use something like this. Not only to get things done, but if I don’t forget anything I read or learn, I’d become smarter in general.

I found out that lots of smart people are just normal people who know how to effectively manage time & information!

Thankfully very recently, AI changed things, and introduced lots of new possibilities, of which my dream software was one. This advancement has enabled effortless tracking of our activities, thoughts, and experiences. So building a comprehensive timeline of my life with minimal manual input has become less of a dream and more of a reality.

Having this timeline would enable me to jump across different points of my life, and see what I was up to, and what are the things I learned from around that time.

One thing I noticed is that knowledge does not start from scratch; it’s always something from my real life: a meeting at work, a conversation with a friend, a place I’ve been to, a book I read, a podcast, an article, even music – All of these things contribute to my knowledge and things I become interested in at different parts of my life. So if I want to build a timeline that works, these things would have to be parts of it!

I’ve been taking multiple shots at building this timeline concept for quite a bit, until very recently I managed to implement something that just works.

I’ll walk you through it.

In this timeline, every memory from our life is a ‘life event’, with each event capturing as much about this moment as possible. And the timeline itself is just a stack of these life events. Where later on we could choose to zoom on any of them:

If you’re using a mac, it has a frequent backup option, it’s called the “time machine”:

So similarly, what if we would want to do the same for our life events?

Such that we’re able to revisit memories and experiences of the past?

Let’s imagine it will look something like this:

This could be the only axis we need, on top of which we reach out to anything we want to remember or revisit from the past, including knowledge.

This way if we capture our thoughts & ideas on their corresponding events, we’re sure they will always remain there –on the timeline– which means that the door for connecting them with more thoughts & ideas from the future is always open.

A thought or an idea is often not dismissed just by saving it somewhere; we often expand on ideas, and newer ones are always emerging from older ones. So it helps immensely if we actually have those ideas on the timeline, as opposed to having them in a folder or a doc, Because on the timeline, it becomes easier to track progression of thought, which could be helpful in projects, learning, creative writing, journaling, and many other things.

What if we could stick all our knowledge as it happens on one timeline, and let the timeline do the wonders of saving context, extracting insight, and even tracking progress, with minimal friction from our side?

That could not only help get maximum benefit from things we capture, it could actually help us capture more! Now since lower friction goes into the capture process (recording life events).

This year I started executing on a version of this partial digital time travel tool that could operate at the edge of what's possible with today's tech. The result is a web app.

Before we start, for a sneak peek, here’s a 2-minute look inside my own personal timeline:

This challenge is complex.

So let’s deconstruct things and see how this could be beneficial in a real life scenario.

In order for our goal to be achieved, there are 3 steps we need to take:

1. Capture a life event

A “life event” is an important concept for this “time travel” goal.

And it means: location, start time, end time.

So places; this is easy. We can enable location access and thus all life events would be auto-captured. Layer 0 is ready.

Now let’s take a sample event.

On Sunday Oct 26th, I woke up early and decided to continue working on that novel I’ve been wanting to finish for so long. Finally I found some time during the weekend to make some progress.

Now the base of the life event could look like:

2. Add context to each event

Context comes from two things:

Data we manually create (e.g. notes we write, highlights we make from web & books)
Data that is auto-created (from things we use, e.g wearable data, screen activity data,...)

In order to capture maximum context, we want to include both.

Now back to the event.

As I sit down to write my novel using Scrivener, the scriptwriting software, I’m contacted by Tyler, my design contractor asking about next steps. So I set a calendar meeting at 11am to discuss chapter III visual content we need to include in the novel.

I write down some notes that summarize chapter 3 for Tyler (a meeting note); now my event looks like this:

Great ✅ We can visit the timeline and instantly write about any life event or memory.

Now let’s add some more data.

Digital time travel will not be complete if we don't have an option to include things we do on the screen.

This means we could have a detailed record of how much time we spend doing what. And deep links to presentations, work docs, articles, books, or even code scripts; which means everything we consume or create, online and offline!

So how can we do that? Thankfully it’s possible. Modern tech enables that.

So for the case of this event, I’d want to remember links I’ve visited while doing research, link to the chapter script on Scrivener, and any other material I might benefit from when I visit this event in the future. Which helps reconstruct the context of my thought pattern when I was working on this project.

The screen activity widget summarizes the time I spent, and gives it the title of my most visited resource. Clicking the widget zooms in, and provides more detail about other secondary resources.

Awesome, right?

What if we can have a detailed history of every rabbit hole we've been in, or a thing we spent so much time to learn about, or a project we've been doing good progress on?

Best part: it's all auto-created and auto-imported. Everything happens in the background.

Now the event has context of:

What I was working on (notes written by me)
A record of my meeting with Tyler (from calendar)
Resources I used while working (from screen activity plugin/widget)

Let’s even stretch this further.

Right after my zoom meeting, I continue reading in a book that I started a few days ago. The book explains important concepts I use while writing my novel. As my understanding of these concepts gets better, the storyline of the novel gets better, so things I learn from the book and things I create in the novel develop hand in hand.

Whenever I consume something online (blogpost, article, book,…) I always highlight parts I’m interested in. So I don’t want those details to be lost, because they often build up and contribute to knowledge I create later.

So let’s sync Readwise because it’s the most popular highlighting tool.

Clicking on the Readwise widget displays the highlight(s).

Great! So now I have a full event through which I had a meeting, then sat down to do some research, read online, make highlights, and write conclusions. And I can see the history of everything that happened with timestamps.

I now have a record about this event on my timeline, which will not go anywhere, even if I finished or stopped the project. And I can always jump to this time in my life to remember what I learned, what I was working on, and everything that I can carry over to the present.

This is where the timeline is starting to become so powerful; we don’t know which life event would contribute to which output and goals of the future, especially since our aspirations normally change as we go through life, which is part of being human. So for this reason, we shall do our best to capture as much as possible from today, which could only be done by increasing automation and reducing friction.

Now let’s take another event example.

Let’s say I also want to use the timeline to reflect and track progress on some personal aspects of my life, like health.

So for example, since I already have the life event of me going to the gym auto-captured (start time, end time, location – we put the basis for that above), it's very easy to import my workout from my wearable on its corresponding life event on the timeline, with zero effort on my part.

Wearables like Apple Watch, Whoop, Fitbit, Garmin, save records of our workouts with accurate timestamps.

So by connecting my wearable, I can have a detailed record of the life event that included the workout. And ultimately all records of my workouts, in tangible form, whether I choose to add notes or not.

The value from having this history doesn’t just come from the capture aspect, even more so it actually comes from being able to see progression over time, from a high level view. Which was made possible thanks to the timeline!

We often get caught in the nitty gritty, the details (things we do during the day-to-day), so sometimes maintaining –even seeing– the bigger picture could be so hard (quarterly goals, aspirations for the future), which could be frustrating.

Which creates even more pressure because this is just so much context to keep upfront in our brains all the time. Without documenting, we find ourselves in need to always remember the bigger picture to have enough motivation through the day-to-day, and in need to always remember the small details to have enough momentum to keep going!

This is just so heavy lifting on the brain. Most of which is non-needed.

Thus one of the most prominent upsides of building the timeline, is to use it as a second brain.

Like in all aspects of life, history is always there to help us navigate from worse to better, from dumber to wiser, and from lower to higher. So imagine having a full history of everything you did, wrote, or thought, at all times. This could be the base for a new transformative tool, meaning you are consuming knowledge, building connections between ideas, interacting with people & systems, at a much much faster rate than most people could.

23Apr24 | Self-tracking + Rotated Focus

I started a Quantified-Self spreadsheet back in 2019, since then I've been on & off with tracking multiple aspects about my life: training, sleep, nutrition, vitals, screentime focus, places, and other misc lifestyle & behavioral metrics.

blog.hyperspaces.live

Notice that up till now we haven’t even mentioned ‘AI’. But now let’s see what happens if we decided to plug all of what we have captured up to this point into an artificial brain!

Which brings us to the last step: Make AI manage connections between events.

By ‘manage’, I mean ‘create’ and ‘organize’.

3. Timeline + AI

The goal of this step, which represents the conclusion of all above steps, is better recall.

We wouldn’t be doing any of this if it weren’t for easier access of information from different parts of our lives. Now the purpose of integrating AI at this step, achieves exactly that.

Because thanks to AI, we now don’t need to remember what happened when. AI can just do its thing. And the result would be an artificial brain that carries connections between ideas & information from our lives. And that we can use at any time; which contributes to better output, better productivity, more focus, and less stress.

The moment we apply AI, it's easy to imagine a concept like this:

Event Bi-directional Linking Concept

Did you notice the “Linked Events” section on the right? Each of these other 3 events from my life are directly connected to the current one.

AI knows these events are related to current events based on notes, location, imported items, or all three.

Here we’re starting to see the principle: Events are fundamental units of the timeline.

Events as fundamental units of the timeline

This post briefly answers a question posed in:

blog.hyperspaces.live

Events as fundamental units of the timeline

Which facilitates the way to our goal from the start: Easy time travel; i.e faster, smarter search.

Since now we can search anything from the timeline: notes, days, locations, people, meetings, and insights. AI even ensures this search would be ‘semantic’ search. (search using text of similar meaning to things we wrote, but not necessarily the same text).

So in summary, by end of this step, we’d have successfully:

Automated enough to decrease the friction of capture –and writing about everything–
Captured enough to enable AI to manage information
Connected enough info & data together to enable rich search, and better recall

I'm proud to say that with a small remote team and bootstrapping (no external funds), we were able to achieve step II. And we called the product Hyperspaces.

So far, many people have liked the idea of the timeline and writing their notes on top of their life events. It's crazy to imagine what could be possible with this technology 1 year from now.

Hyperspaces

Build a Second Brain

hyperspaces.live

Note I: Features I mentioned in step 2 but not in the demo, are still in closed beta (under rigorous testing), everything else you can access today.

Note II: Since the inception of hyperspaces, we are focusing on making it privacy-first. Right now all notes are encrypted on two levels. In the very near future, we'll be adding asymmetric e2e encryption, which is the most secure framework possible for this type of apps. We’re a small self-sustained team and we are not in the business of selling data, we’re focused on making this the best note-taking interface possible over the long term, and we know this cannot be achieved unless we prioritize product, feedback, and dev quality, not short-term financial gains. You can check our privacy policy in this link.

If you got a chance to try it or got any ideas towards that direction, I would love to chat personally (zeyad@deepiris.co).

Furthermore, if interested, here are some things you can do:

(those some of the features like sophisticated integrations are enclosed beta still, message me if you want to join access, but most of the features discussed above this point or out in open beta and starting the next quarter we will be packing the AI iPod so that’s it)

Community note
Direct user interview note + cal link
Contribute to our live roadmap by voting on features or even adding new ones!
DM me on Circle if you just want to chat about any of the ideas or concepts shared above.
Visuals & summary - has theme
Beyond what's possible now, might be few years later: VR, 360 vids, AI, samples of env-changing AR
Demo

exclude cta from draft, but include the “at step II” part
intro to step 3 → visual: more nodes and bolder color on the mind notes visual!
privacy note
include a privilege to wop members, till the end of the course (rigid deadline)
“currently in beta, right now, we offer prioritized access in two ways:

wop community members → 1 year worth of timeline + full access (all features) <check super and reader phrasing>
hyperspaces closed beta program → early access to new features & integrations + 1 year worth of timeline + full access (all features)
cta

if you want to join closed beta, you can leave your email in comments / dm, or fill this form
through the next 2 weeks, and till end of wop, all signups by wop members will be granted full access of the premium tier for 1 year, starting on the date of signup

if interested about timelines and etcetera

timeline post
events as fundamental units post

shiny dime
pop writing
minimalist / maximalist
BRICS?

specific? yes
surprising? yes
goes beyond consensus? hell yes

argument-led / story-led

argument-led
claim / promise / pay-off?

some related resources (other than mine):

note-taking is time travel by DP
anything by PG?