Vision

This page contains notes about my vision for the wiki farm project.

Guiding Principles

• Able to find what you are looking for in less than a minute
• Able to enter a note in less than a minute
• Available your entire life
• No ads or data sharing
• Although most is private, there is the possibility of collaboration

Use Cases

• Organized life notes
• Learning notes
• Goal tracking
• Managing projects
• Task management (GTD)
• Vacation planning/journaling

Major Influences

The following...

Book: How to Take Smart Notes

This page contains notes about the book How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens.

Four types of notes

• Fleeting notes are much like the inbox in GTD
  • I'm not a big fan of the name: maybe use Intake, Capture
  • Variety of entry points: email, Alexa, an app (it may have only one feature, but capturing a quick note is the most important), a browser extension.
  • A button to "Create intake note from clipboard", so you have something copied to the clipboard and when you click that button, it creates the page, but doesn't even open the page.
• Literature notes, I would all Study Notes. Examples: my pages on using DaVinci
• Permanent notes (maybe call them Idea Notes or Life Notes): Each should express one idea and make sense when encountered later without requiring you to remember the original context.
  • This is where the most gardening occurs; will often be referenced by projects
  • Examples: wool, probiotic yogurt

Tags For Note Types

Using Tags (or Labels) to identify OAOO (one and only one) type for each notes would allow me to create workflows, alerts, reports, gamification, reminders, leader boards...

• Capture Notes are where you use copy/paste the most - directly from the primary source into the wiki
• Study Notes may start with copy/paste, but will be much more valuable if you put into your own words
• Life Notes (typically associated with a person, place, or thing) are very often copy/paste, because your goal is just to capture what you need and pointers to finding more
• Idea Notes (typically associated with a thought or concept); ideally, every one should link to at least two other wiki pages.
  • THIS IS WHAT EVOLVES YOUR NOTE TAKING SYSTEM INTO A WEB OF KNOWLEDGE
• Project Notes copy/paste mostly used to bring in Capture Notes or organize

Workflow: Capture > Organize > Develop

Study, Life, and Project notes can be one page per note; Either one capture page or one page per medium;

• Capture notes could just be unstructured text, or it could be an "object" (containing text and metadata) that is "moved" to its perm page.

Note Type Influences Hierarchy Type

• Capture notes do not have any hierarchy
• Projects have a definite hierarchy with the project being the top level
• Idea Notes do not have a hierarchy natively, but some users may choose to create one
• Life and Study notes will have some organizational hierarchy that will vary by user

You shouldn't spend enormous amounts of time designing categories, formatting notes, or maintaining elaborate organizational systems if those activities aren't helping you think.

If I made myself follow a "rule" that for all notes other than Capture Notes, the first link on the page should be the parent. I bet I could create something that built a ToC based on that.

I had an idea for classifying all wiki pages into one of five categories

Building a Second Brain

The book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

Getting Things Done

The book Getting Things Done

The book Getting Things Done by David Allen is

The Extended Mind

The book The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

The book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.