A love note from the trenches
“Make money writing on Medium, they said. It'll be fun, they said.”
It's fun until you:
- Stare at that blinking cursor for 15 minutes
- Still don't know what to write
- Come up with something
- Meh, publish
The Second Brain / Zettelkasten / Thought Garden supposedly fixes all of that.
Be blown away with a flood of ideas and a cornucopia of brilliance on tap.
My Obsidian vault? It's more like a leaky faucet than a roaring river. It's getting better, but only because I'm doing some hard work I didn't do for a while.
Throwing seeds wherever doesn't make a garden
It just makes a mess, honestly.
Plant A chokes out Plant B, or gets starved of sunlight by Weed C.
A garden needs to be tended. Like:
- Placing plants where they'll best thrive
- Removing weeds at the right time
- Watering and fertilizing
- Cross-pollinating
Cross pollination is especially important. It produces new varieties of plants, as well as providing genetic diversity and ability to adapt. The resulting hybrids also tend to be stronger.
Cross-pollination with a PKM system isn't as easy as keeping bees, though.
(Wouldn't that be awesome?)
No, the personal knowledge management cross pollination I'm talking about is creating links between notes in the vault.
The best, and probably only, useful way to make these links is by hand-forging them.
That means spending time in it.
Exploring it. Marinating in it.
Thinking about how the notes relate to ideas, and to each other.
This takes time, and is at some level hard work. (At least comparing it to a quick copy-paste from a website.)
Two techniques I'm using now to forge links in my vault
I'm by no means an expert. I'm just a guy in the trenches seeking to grow some usefulness out of my musings.
Here's my vault graph now:
It's taking some shape. Those gray lines are what make the vault more valuable.
Here are a couple of ways I'm building up those links methodically.
1. Creating topic indexes
These are a collection of links that relate to a single topic.
My topic indexes are red on the graph.
The big red dot near the center of the graph is my Side Hustles topic index.
It has a bunch of other notes connected directly to it, as well as a couple of other topic index notes.
2. Connecting the orphans
All of those dots with no connections? Those are my orphans.
I'll scan through them, either visually with the graph or with a random note plugin, and when I see one that sparks a connection with another note, I'll connect it up right there.
No longer an orphan! That's a good thing.
Sometimes I do nothing more than create an index note for just that one orphan and connect it. It's a start!
Interested in journeying with me?
I'm in the process of working with a bunch of templates I've created to streamline what I just talked about, and they'll be available soon!
If you want to journey with me on this kind of thing, check out Solid Cash Tips for regular insights on spending less, making more, and living well!
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