--- # Why do I use Obsidian? notes: - As of recently I've been thinking about the fundamental reason as to why I'm so interested in Obsidian. - Beyond using it as a tool for thinking, I've come to realize that it helps me facilitate something greater, which i have come to label as digital self-actualization - the pursuit of a fulfilling life through the practical mix of digital tools, life management systems, and humanistic philosophies. --- Digital self-actualization: *the pursuit of a fulfilling life through the practical mix of digital tools, life management systems, and humanistic philosophies* notes: - Digital refers to the accessible modern technologies available to us we can use to accelerate our growth. despite growing up in a small city, i've been able to use the internet to learn from the greatest minds in the world, software to overcome the limitations of my brain, and recently, artificial Intelligence to better navigate this online sea of information. - Next, self-actualization refers to going beyond just meeting our survival needs so we can discover our unique potential and work towards a meaningful purpose in the world - So, how does Obsidian fit into my explorations in this digital universe? Thanks to it I now have a personalized environment to not feel overwhelmed by this endless knowledge and uncertain self-exploration. And this is what I'd like to share during our time here --- - notes.johnmavrick.com - notes.johnmavrick.com/USV+Documentation - [[Knowledge Accelerator Presentation Slides]] notes: - Before I start this journey into it though, I wanted to go over what the plan looks like and some additional resources - The first half of this presentation will be an overview of my setup with some recent examples of it in action - In the second half we can open it up for a qna discussion to continue to explore more technical implementations or example usages based on questions and interest - So yeah, as we embark on this voyage, feel free to ask questions in the chat - I won't be looking since i'll be focusing on going through my slides and presentation, but Keaton or Nick feel free to let me know at any time in between slides - Lastly, if you find anything from my systems relevant to your own use case feel free to visit the above link - The first link is my website where you can explore my setup yourself - Second link will bring you to the public documentation I have further explaining it in detail if you were interested in reading up on related notes or sources - Third is where you can visit these slides you're seeing right now --- - Life solar system 🪐 - Interstellar medium 🌌 notes: My digital galaxy has two main systems to achieve different purposes: - First is my life solar system, which which supports me in - Life design for intentionally cultivating my ideal life, as well as - Productivity, the actual execution for working towards this ideal life through actions like tasks and projects - Second is the interstellar medium, the space containing my ideas and thoughts. - just like lyt's concept of an ideaverse, in this space i have personal knowledge management systems to help me use this knowledge across my three use cases of learning, creativity, and productivity - Now how are these systems structured in Obsidian? --- ## Note Types - Process-based ⚙️ - Idea-based 🌲 notes: I have two ways of managing the information in my galaxy, which are denoted by the type of status fields a note can have. --- ## Process-based - 🟥 Not Started - 🟨 In progress - 🟩 Finished - ⬛️ Archived notes: Some notes have a clear finished form or final outcome to work towards. For example, - Action-based notes like [[Projects]] or youtube videos are finished when they are completed - Sources of information like [[Inputs]] are finished when we have extracted the ideas into our own words and applied to relevant projects In these notes, I have a status property to acknowledge this process-based approach. When a note is in a certain stage of the process, I know what specific steps or parts of the note template to use. These steps I follow to help bring it to completion are different based on the workflows I have for each note type. The black status is universal though, and is just for archived ones that I've paused but aren't necessarily done, just to separate them from the active ones. But of course, not all information can be contained or processed with such rigidity. --- ## Idea-based 🌲 - Atomic/conceptual notes ⚛️ - Maps of Content (MOC) 🗺️ - Personal thoughts or memories 💭 - Writings ✏️ notes: This is what idea-based notes are for. these notes naturally continue to grow and evolve as we learn from new sources or nurture them through thinking. I keep track of the development of these notes in [[My Greenhouse]]. Notes in my system that follow this include: - [[Conceptual notes|Atomic/conceptual notes]] - [[Maps of Content (MOC)]] - [[Thoughts|Personal thoughts or memories]] - [[Writings]] - Any other note that doesn't have an end result --- - Quickadd - Metadata menu - Dataview notes: To create this system in Obsidian, I use three main plugins: - Quickadd I use to easily create any of these note types using the command palette - Can just search up the note type - Can also prompt you for relevant fields - Imports template and moves the folder - Metadata menu plugin helps with setting up tags I can add to notes to classify what properties they have - Change tag - Also lets me have custom options for what value a field could be - Status, process-based for inputs - I also use it to establish relationships with other notes in the system, which I can then use to create custom queries inside those related notes using the dataview plugin - For input I have one called source which links it to the input collection it is part of. can add this to whatever - If i visit [[Writing Original Works LYT Workshop]] you can see how related notes of input type are shown and organized - You can then view these in the view for the note type, which I denote by the "My" prefix and then whatever the note type is - Can see "My Inputs", which I can then sort in custom ways - Usually just do it based on the statuses though now that we know the main parts of system and how its built, we can start exploring them further ! ---  notes: As a recovering hustle culture productivity workaholic, I've been exploring healthier and more balanced ways of getting things done without compromising areas of my life. And after reading Cal Newport's book Slow Productivity, I resonated with his more sustainable and fulfilling method approach to productivity, [[Attention-centred productivity]]. Instead of prioritizing our achievements and how much we grind ourselves down, we get things done through effective awareness and prioritization of the efforts that matter most to us in life. --- Alignment ![[Life Solar System.excalidraw.svg]] notes: The way I've implemented this into my Obsidian setup is through the concept of alignment using my life solar system. In the book, he emphasizes three key principles that i feel are important for encouraging alignment. - [[Do less things]] by selectively prioritizing only what is important - [[Work at a natural pace]] by regularly being aware of your efforts and progress - [[Obsess over quality]] by making adjustments when needed to stay in alignment If we map the different parts of the system to the way we can intentionally design our life, like - Sun to personal values - Orbits to life timeframes - Planets to actionable objectives - Cycles to the time we do our periodic reviews We can work towards alignment. ---  notes: - The wheel of life is the sun of our system—the central, life-giving source that everything else revolves around. - In my wheel of life, I break down my life into the core areas I value and rate each area from 1-10 based on how close I am to my ideal version - For a wholistic approach, I use the 9 areas suggested by Ali Abdaal in his 2024 annual review and planning system - For health we have body, mind, soul - For work we have mission, money, and growth - For relationships, we have romance family and friends - There's also a 10th rating for joy to also accomodate for the enjoyment of the process getting to these ratings - To make time and awareness cultivating these areas, we can look at the next part of the system --- ![[Life Solar System.excalidraw.svg]] notes: The orbits around the sun represent the different sized timeframes in my life solar system at which I work towards these life areas. In my case, I have daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly orbits. To make sure my solar system continues to stay intact, I try to aim for harmony across all orbits. When a full cycle elapses, I make time for reviewing on whether I stay aligned and whether I worked towards my ideal wheel of life. Despite some orbits happening less frequently, we can still use the cycles of smaller orbits as reminders for potential reflection and adjustment of the larger ones. The way I regularly go about this maintenance this is through [[Periodic reviews]]. --- - Recap - Reflection - Plan notes: When doing my periodic reviews I go through 3 key phases: - Recap, reviewing the past periodic review and the smaller timeframes that happened during that period. this gives me information to work with - Reflection, gives myself time to discover insights and better understand how it went by answering prompts - Plan, using my reflection to inform my future direction and focus for the upcoming period The phases serve the same purpose, but are implemented slightly differently based on the size of the timeframe --- ![[Life Solar System.excalidraw.svg]] notes: These plans then manifest in the forms of planets, which are the main priorities in each orbit. - The planets in your daily orbit would be your most important [[Tasks]] - The planets in your weekly orbit would be your actionable [[Projects]] - The planets in your monthly, quarterly, and yearly orbit would be your longer-term [[Goals]] So, what does the implementation of this system look like in action? ---  notes: For 2024, I came up with my ideal life ratings for the year. I made sure not to make too big of an increase from last year and to not have everything high, so i only increased some by a bit, from a total 78 out of 100 to 84 out of 100 ---  notes: To rate my wheel of life areas for quantitative data on whether i am working towards it, i do so during my weekly review. i might not get a chance to always work on each one in a daily basis, but i feel in a week i would have had time to have more balanced efforts Next I needed to figure out how I can actually work towards this rating throughout the year ---  notes: - I thought of what each ideal rating would look like. what would it mean to maintain or improve each area? - I broke this down into these vague yearly goals that i continued to revisit and revise as I revisited them in the smaller timeframes - For future examples, want to point out my mission goal on elaborating on this idea of digital self-actualization in a theoretical and practical sense - No idea what this looked like as of yet aside from the general definition I gave you in the beginning of the presentation ---  notes: - In the quarterly and monthly timeframes, I create goal notes to outline what my higher-order objectives are - These also act as maps to help connect all the smaller projects or notes related to it - Less planned out than projects to keep the actual method of achieving it flexible and only planning it when i feel confident i have the clarity of a small timeframe and resource availability to make progress - Hard to always be accurate in estimations because of how variable this timeframe is - To work on this goal of elaborating digital self-actualization, i planned that in the first quarter I would work on a newsletter and for this current second quarter i would work on documenting my obsidian workflows ---  notes: - Broke it down into monthly goals - One was to update my product and one was to integrate Cal Newport's 8-step framework for transforming your life with the books i've been reading and tools i've been using - But that has been pushed due to other priorities I had to take on ---  notes: - Weekly is a bit different because of the smaller timeframe - Small enough for me to have certainty until the next cycle, allowing me to feel more confident in investing time to thoroughly plan my specific actions - This comes in the form of project notes ---  notes: - Criteria for a project is that I should be able to have a clear outcome in my control I can towards at the end of a week. otherwise it might be better off as a goal. - to take note of this weekly outcome, i can create a weekly progress section for the week in my note that i can explicitly plan out - During this phase I can actually plan tasks and daily habits ---  notes: And as an example on what this looks like, when we visit the week I had this planned for, week 15 of this year, I can then see it there as my main focus ---  notes: Daily is where I spend most of my time in a year for alignment and is what helps me operate on a daily basis. I keep most of my tasks in another app called akiflow since it has better integration with calendar features for time management. i can easily group them into labels for the different projects i'm working on, then create time blocks in the day that i can move these tasks into based on their priorities and how much i wanted to allocate throughout the week --- ![[Life Solar System.excalidraw.svg]] notes: - Thanks to my solar system, if we refer back to the three principles of slow productivity, - I do less things since i can visualize my workload using my vision board - I maintain a natural pace by having recurring times for reflection and adjustment thanks to the different timeframes - I focus on quality by making sure my short-term efforts are in favor of my values and life areas Now it's time to explore the second part where the fun personal knowledge management stuff happens :) --- # Interstellar medium 🌌 - Learning - Creativity - Productivity notes: The interstellar medium of my digital galaxy helps me with the three following use cases - Learning - Focus is on conceptual [[Understanding]] of ideas - Think about the zettelkasten method and [[Progression of idea originality]] where you go from external sources like books, to your own understandings in the form of conceptual notes - Helps me cultivate [[Wisdom]] by spending time understanding the world - Creativity - Focusing on generating new insights through my personal interpretations and synthesis of my [[Inputs]] into the system - Productivity - Focus is on efficiency in managing and [[Retrieving information from your notes]] so you can complete concrete objectives and maintain ongoing responsibilities. So will just guide you through some recent examples for each use case --- ## PKM: Learning - Ecological Psychology 🗺️ - Affordances - Constraints - ... notes: I've been learning a new topic called [[Ecological Psychology]] which contrasts the way we traditionally understand the brain to work. instead of a brain-bound model where all cognition happens in the brain, the field explores the relationship between the organism and it's environment, just like how our minds are extended with tools for thought like obsidian. First I started out listening to podcasts from another PKM creator Danny Hatcher, which was my introduction to this field of psychology. I casually listened to these during walks, so simply captured any interesting tidbits into temporary fleeting notes that would go to my greenhouse. This is where I prematurely created a map of content for the topic, and created a skeleton for concepts and terms I've heard consistently but needed to still learn more about. ---  notes: When I decided I had a decent scope of the subject, I found more thorough resources to flesh it out like Danny's 2 hour video summarizing an introductory textbook to the topic. Since I wanted to be more thorough in my thinking and understanding, I created an input note for it and followed my process. As I watched I filled out the highlights header and actively wrote down any information I found important or relevant to the note. This is due to how we encode new information. We [[Learn something new by connecting it to something that you already know]]. In my case, there was a 50 episode lecture series called Awakening from the meaning crisis I watched last year that mentioned similar ideas on cognition. at one point i even said i got goosebumps. I referenced those notes and understandings to understand the new concepts I was learning about. ---  notes: By the end of the video, I was able to then move the relevant takeaways into the map and surrounding notes. For notes i still want to develop, i can just easily tag them as in development evergreen notes. After grouping these ideas together inside notes and inside mocs, I could better see insights to explore my personal use case on how this can be used for better understanding the benefits and importance of PKM in a more personalized way than i could have following a school curriculum. So now, I have some food for thought, but it's just time to learn how to take these ideas and share them ! This leads me to the second use case, creativity. --- ## PKM: Creativity  notes: - After taking the writing original works workshop, I have been clarifying and refining my creative workflows with the lens of the creators codex to be more aware of the different stages of the creative process --- Bottom-up: [[Evergreen Notes]] via [[My Greenhouse]] Top-down: [[Brainstorms]] via [[My Brainstorms]] notes: - When it comes to the two thinking styles of top down and bottom up, I have two main ways to facilitate this for my creative efforts - Personal ideas that I grow and collect overtime based on non-rigid curiosity are nurtured in [[My Greenhouse]], the traditional evergreen notes approach - The three usual stages of evergreen notes - But for more top-down thinking for a certain outcome like a new video or essay, I have a brainstorm note where I have a more systematic way of developing the idea. Recently I've used it to write a personal reflection of my two week vacation with Aidan, so I'll share my thought on process on how I wrote it using the creator's codex: --- ## Add  notes: During the add phase I mostly noticed and explored by journalling during the trip in a memory thought note I had for [[Meeting Aidan for the first time in person]]. This is where I took daily logs of the different experiences, activities, and conversations we had, which became future retrieval cues for when I started writing. --- Relate: Prompting  notes: Once the trip was over, it was time to write. I first started off with prompting by asking myself questions to create remarks and comments in the form of connections to ideas or other experiences. - I just decided ask myself: based on these experiences, what insights did I come to about myself, aidan, or the world? - The root bullet points were the main ideas, which had further subpoints - These became the main sections i wanted to include in my reflection The next question was how could I organize these into some form of writing structure --- Relate: Planning  notes: I did some outlining during my morning walk by thinking about the structure I would like to have. I used voice-to-text transcription using [[Fleeting Notes App]] to think about a potential introduction, then imported it into my Obsidian for more source material to work with. For more clarity on what the structure should look like, I applied the [[Name it to frame it]] strategy covered in WOW where you change your perspective of the note by trying to think of a title for it. As a result, I saw it from the new perspective, thanks to my new title of: How making online friends changed my life Further tweaking it to match my brand values, I ended up with: Building lifelong friends for self-actualization Not the best, but it opened up potential routes to connect it to self-actualization. Now it was just time to further expand on each insight I got from prompting. --- Relate: Drafting Types of nuance: - Rationality - Empathy - Detail notes: When looking Aidan's notes from taking the writing course thinking in stories, I personally enjoyed a setion called [The Problem Half Solved](https://publish.obsidian.md/aidanhelfant/Literature+Notes/%F0%9F%90%89Courses/Thinking+In+Stories#The+Problem+Half+Solved) that explains how you can develop ideas from having a mix of the following explorations: - Rationality (knowledge) - Empathy (experiences and feelings) - Depth (nuance and diving deeper) I felt I already had empathy since the writing was founded on this 2 week experience, but realized it would also be fun to incorporate the other layers: - For rationality I expanded on my insights related to work by exploring relevant notes. The most relevant notes I found was [[My Inputs/My Books/The Pathless Path|The Pathless Path]], so I found quotes from there that supported my thoughts - I went into detail exploring what traits of my friendship made it so impactful I started writing this in my brainstorm template that focused on organized ideas. Now that I had the structure and contents, it was just time to further develop it. --- ## Relate: Crafting  notes: - The last part was just crafting where I ended up integrating all my ideas into the cohesive structure and topic - in the same header where i started collecting the details, i combined all the parts together - used the introduction and hook from planning stage - then led into the paragraphs that started from prompting and were developed through drafting - Makes sense it was a reflection. ideas came from within out of curiosity and introspection, but were just shaped a bit to be digestible Now it was time for the final step. --- ## Communicate: Shape and Share  notes: During the last stage, communicate, I have a header in my brainstorms note called potential outputs to help me think about what note I want to shape my draft into. I wanted to include this in my next weekly newsletter, so I created a new note for that edition and copy pasted the current draft as one of the headers. i create a note in my website instead of the email directly to make it easier to link to other notes in my vault in case people want to read further. I didn't change the reflection itself much to publish it because I like having my newsletter editions more casual. ---  notes: I do still think it has room to grow, so I took the draft from the `# Organized ideas` header to a new writing note titled `Building lifelong friends for self-actualization`, and marked it as a herb. This makes it a clean page free of any of the in progress notes or thoughts. I published it on newsletter software of choice Convertkit mentioning I had a new edition, and linked it to the new weekly newsleter edition. Now, the last use case. productivity. --- ## PKM: Productivity - Projects 🚧 - Areas ⛰️ - Resources 📝 - Archives 🗄️ notes: You're probably familiar with Tiago Forte's PARA method where you organize notes on actionability. Whenever you come across a new piece of information, you start at the top and find the most relevant project, area, or resource to put it. For my productivity system I apply those principles but on steroids thanks to the link based nature of obsidian and the additional places in my setup --- - Calendar events 📆 - Tasks / Habits ✅ - Projects / Creative Outputs 🚧 - Goals 🎯 - Areas ⛰️ - Resources 📝 - Archives 🗄️ notes: So instead, my [[Information actionability hierarchy]] looks like this. If I start at the most actionable note and can't find it there, I can just visit the next level. I store calendars and events in akiflow, and everything else in Obsidian To see this in action, we can look at the knowledge process for creating this presentation itself ! --- ## Start - [[Knowledge Accelerator Presentation]] - [[Knowledge Accelerator Script]] - [[Knowledge Accelerator Presentation Slides]] notes: First I had to set up mental scaffolding for the ideas I'll need to store and thinking I have to do: - For my main central point, I created a project note that all relevant information will be inside of or existing notes will be linked to - Keaton gave me some suggestions of previous presentations to get a sense on what the presentation could be like, which I used to pick out any interesting ideas. i try to just keep any small snippets of information in the project note unless they grow big enough to warrant their own new note or be used in other activities - To figure out what I wanted to include in the presentation, I made a brainstorm note where I pooled together relevant notes and created my first outline - And to better present this information, I created a note for the slides I would use ---  notes: - Then yesterday, more information came from when i was doing a mock presentation with my friend Aidan. At the end of my demo, he sent this wall of suggestions, as well as other ones that came from chatting after. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by all the things wrong with it though, I just added them to my project note as tasks and slowly checked them off later on in the day. --- ## Moving ideas - Feedback -> Future checklist - Diagrams -> Atomic notes - Slides structure -> Future video tour notes: The next step is organizing information after the task is completed, but I'm still in the middle of presenting. Instead what I CAN tell you is how I would do so. so, let's go through the information inside or linked to this project and think about if there's anything reusable I can move to other notes Some of aidan's advice presentation can be helpful so i can create a note on public speaking note --- [[USV Documentation]] 📝 [[2024 Second Brain Tour]] 🚧 notes: can also use the way I went about this project as a reference a rough guideline to follow when i do another presentation, so after I do my reflection and think of some future improvements I can also link this to the existing ideas in my public speaking note Explanations and illustrations that emerged from the creation of these slides like the solar system diagram can be added to my overall setup documentation notes. The structure and flow itself can also be useful inspiration for an upcoming video note of my vault tour, so will link it to that video note. As a result of this additional maintenance, the effort from my time spent on this presentation ended up being unexpectedly helpful for a lot of other initiatives in my vault and is once again accessible thanks to organizing for actionability. ---  notes: That marks the end. At the end of it all, if we look at the grand scheme of this that's just my digital galaxy. one of many possible kinds to have a home online. what can yours look like? --- Extras: - [ ] People notes - [ ] Habit and measurement tracking - [ ] Thought notes - [ ] Prominent people - [ ] Book applications for a more in-depth processing compared to smaller articles - [ ] Input collections notes: But yeah that's about it! I have other things I would like to explore