daily sentences 2408111657
daily sentences 2408111657
Evernote to RoamResearch, Day One and finally back to Evernote
{{word-count}} roamlearning getting started
#dailysentences as a habit starts with an idea sourced from the Roam Book Club meetings. Every day, dump a set of eleven sentences. Whatever that might be. It can connect and become a whole, but how that block of text reads is never evaluated. Writing, getting that flow in order, a burst of eleven sentences does work. Stringing it into coherent text is a different workflow. Editing and making sure the narrative reads as an observation from the day does take more time than a thought dump. The following is a record from the first day, and a note when this block is moved into Day One.
PART I …
How is thinking in lists different from what I have done till now?
What is the list of things to make up time looking at ideas? What is it to think like Roam? Can using both Evernote and OneNote make up for Roam? One for gathering and ordering content, the other for putting together the drafts which will finally go to Word as the final product.
It's setting up a system between Roam, Evernote, and OneNote to be a second brain for writing.
What is note-taking as a medium to create content?
I already take my notes as bullets. Roam has assisted in identifying, in a way recognizing a concept I was using until now and hadn't particularly articulated. Roam as a platform to understand and link questions and observations, which is the way.
What are the things possible to do in 365 days?
Within a profession, there are many things that are meant or understood as possible and results achievable within established parameters.
Are we only as smart as the notes we take?
Are we going to waste time by taking down notes of everything we think about and publish it somewhere?
Roam Research is a messy note-taking system, as messy as the others but just a way to link them together.
Earlier there were just tags, now it's just bidirectional links.
Rather than actually using bidirectional links, having a daily note-taking habit will help organize thoughts. What other note-taking apps didn't emphasize or didn't factor in is the habit of making the note, i.e., all apps focused on gathering unstructured ideas.
RoamResearch focuses on two aspects of thought: 1. time and 2. ideas. Focusing on daily work and what that daily work is could help in the better building of working ideas.
Without a phone app, note-taking here is a bit redundant
It would have made sense to make a mobile app first and then wind that down.
It's difficult to understand if taking notes daily would help or if putting together structured notes, like in other apps, would be better.
There are now reasons for how note-taking apps have made thinking possible in a certain way over time and therefore the way content got created.
File management, Word as interface, OneNote as a notebook, Evernote as note stacks, Google Sites + cloud services, Notion as databases, RoamResearch as a daily collector of ideas and facilitating intelligence from them.
Ideally, notes taken are a daily reflection of work done. This method of work directs towards making anything in a day incremental.
How will Roam Research be used? Is there a necessity for it in the workflow? Will it help sort out the problems with the other systems?
Bidirectional linking works only if there is an attempt to keep coming back to the same topic daily.
The culture of making in different places, producing work on architecture, and how that is different from when anyone is building based on deliverables.
How each of the note-taking apps has resulted in creating different ways to organize thoughts and how each of these is necessary to create a network to link and connect ideas together.
Notes are gathered and published systematically; the quest now is to tie them all under a specific framework of organizing.
Would one need all these note-taking systems if it's for anyone else's work?
A lack of productivity is mostly repeating tasks, or the same tasks over and over again, instead of making progress.
I was under the impression that everything was one single graph. The question is, would I need multiple graphs? If there were multiple graphs, would it become like, well, any other note-taking app?
PART II A.
It is essential, maybe essential, to keep track of how the notes system has evolved over the span of work and if this evolution is effective.
RoamResearch does not work out because it is expensive, therefore not sustainable long term.
Then there is the issue that the graphs do not talk to each other.
Linear note-taking is better than linked thinking, as it is not as distracting.
A lot of time gets wasted in linking and obsessing about connections between notes. Inadvertently, there is more effort invested in organizing notes taken instead of jotting ideas down.
Just like browsers, I use many notes apps to dump information sets in various stages.
Beginning morning pages is the habit.
They are working drafts, which should become #annualobservations.
Dumping ideas in Evernote in addition to the thirty-six sentences each day.
Planning is on Notion + Calendar.
OneNote + Zotero is for all final drafts when we get there.
VS Code + Obsidian is a file manager to keep track of digital resources.
On Roam, it is possible to write a lot more.
how gallerists build communities
In Roam it is easy to pack a day together. Day One is very clumsy. The app is great but in the age of AI when there are way too many bots to toy with another is counter productive. The mandate now is just get Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, and OneNote in sync. Journaling in Day One has this appeal of converting an year into a book, a very neat service. A learning from this instance is to only capture text which will become any one of the {OBSERVATION} iterations, the experiment, the annexure or the study. How this material benefits the community around my feeds is a perpetual question finding for an answer.
What do mushroom cultivation workshops, visits to neighborhood metal shops, and an artist-brewed coffee service have in common?
“The space mixes the old and the new,”
“Our space has a homelike feeling,”
“When we put on special events at the gallery, it is to build a diverse cultural community,”
“We like to describe our artists as old souls,”
“Artists come to our gallery first because we’re problem-solvers, and we don’t say no,”
“AAPI people have consistently been called hard workers,” he reflected. But rest assured, he said, “there will be a time when we are allowed to move past that.”
“I wanted to give them a platform to show their work here,”
“I want to show different materials and mediums,”
“My personal taste is a big part of that decision.”
“As a gallery, I think it’s most important to listen to the artist and to understand what their practice is,”
“We brought in strips of potting soil, plants, and flowers,” she recalled. “We watered the garden and kept it alive.”
“I’ve always asked myself: What does an art gallery do?”
“It’s since been an ongoing learning experience,”
“We have amazing small businesses in Sunset Park,”
“thanks to the Asian community in Brooklyn.”
“What I think about programming, I think about how to support and champion artists without pigeonholing them,”
“As someone who is diasporic, coming from Hong Kong, I’m interested in how people navigate intersecting and overlapping aspects of culture.”
“I’m interested in building an ecosystem, a community that becomes a support system for its members,”
PART II B. before productivity there is a schedule to get to that, then there are 4 main skills: editing, data analysis, coding, product management
Day One journaling is very reminiscent of sentences writing on the Roam daily notes page. As a productivity pattern, to keep a log extending into writing pages works very well. Interstitial journaling, “the simplest way to combine note-taking, tasks, and time tracking in one unique workflow” works best on Day One and Roam. Fragmented text blocks when it scales is tedious to manage. Then there is a potential design flaw where graphs cannot be renamed and material between then are siloed. Separate graph instances are as good as multiple applications running next each other. Both applications cause very high friction to the writing stack.
"Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart" Clarice Lispector, from A Breath of Life 2012
{Morning pages} is more about writing the first thing as a task.
It is just a dump of material.
Like anything ideally to get ideas in place.
Without thinking.
It should help sort out the typing speed and then concentration.
Three years and three months have gone by, and today is some kind of anniversary it is only urgent to try and celebrate it some way.
Eleven sentences have become easy since that was the threshold to get done daily.
Changing that to thirty six sentences or a full page is now the goal.
Sitting through is the most challenging part.
Random writing also feels like productivity but most often it is not.
It is but words which ramble.
Less stressful thinking.
Now need to find the words to make sense.
Three full pages to point out is 108 lines.
Eventually thirty-six should get to that, but it is an aspiration now.
In a typical day, it is possible to get a minimum of ten pages out if the mind is in order and all the notes are in place, but most often, that is a rare occurrence.
Five is achievable.
Pages that is, so around 1200 words, four sets of eleven sentences each.
The difference between journaling and research writing is that one is a thought dump of personal reflection while the other is objective.
Objective notes, a result of references, are always better as they can be reused and extended into {annual observations}
The note now to define is in two parts what is {annual observations} as a writing practice all about and for this first batch of OBSERVATIONS, how does low content architectural notes look like.
OBSERVATIONS #kindledp low content is a catalogue of material collected to assemble {annual observations}.
Raw material that must be distilled to direct a finding, a reflection of seeing the world from a perspective.
Locating significance in a minimum set of words is a direction too, as are the gospels by Byung-Chul Han.
I have to read to get to writing.
That is the inherent issue with research writing.
Without the semblance of other words in the background, it is impossible because of habit to generate new ones.
Journaling of research is a genre that {thirty-six morning-sentences} builds towards and closes a year set of notes with.
Index all the pictures and build a linked graph obsidian graph is the first objective.
The other is to edit 31 medium posts to build Lukewarm with.
A book is but a form to find and then fill it up with words and images.
An outside in way of thinking.
Leaving out Mumbai urbanism and image-heavy lists is the beginning of the task to get to.
Everything in the folder will make two books eventually.
Volume 01 Lukewarm.
Volume 02 readings of architectural essays.
References
Interstitial journaling: combining notes, to-do and time tracking [Workflow]
Replace Your To-Do List With Interstitial Journaling To Increase Productivity. A new journaling tactic that immediately kills procrastination and boosts creative insights. [Workflow]
PART III the design of information work
From eleven sentences, the habit I have evolved to four paragraphs. Roughly four to five points of notes around an idea. It is a finding from between 2021 till today, modelling it within multiple applications. Sentences do not translate into drafts and most often are but warmup exercises to clear the mind of clutter. Information scraps do not always process well and difficult to edit out stray ideas as they are always without sufficient context. Paragraphs do take more time than sentences as more effort is required to string a coherent narrative in order. The habit has changed from dumping to drafting.
What is notetaking for knowledge work is never clear. The problem is compounded when notetaking apps have very distinct interpretations of what a note, notebook and a stack of notebooks are. A block in Roam, isn’t the same as a journal entry in Day One and especially distinct from a note in Evernote then. After the Bending Spoons acquisition almost all Roam features are found in some iteration and sometimes better implemented on the green elephant. Writing on Roam is the best experience unlike any other apps even the new Tana but when witing it is a second or third draft aid. Other than only being able to write nothing else is viable on Roam.
Daily notes irrespective of where it is written are information sets. Evernote is the best service to be able to swallow anything thrown at it and retrieve it. Everything else struggles. Tools by themselves are inefficient to get the best out of them a system to manage material dumped is very essential. If its use must be streamlined then the tool by itself does not hold the answer. A new work type is introduced here called as {information work}. Data processed generates information, which then is synthesised into knowledge. To get to knowledge work we have now information work, created a result of having to manage all the notes tools we must think with.
Management of information to get to knowledge is now a full fledged work requiring its own session to contend with. There is way too much material that seeps in when trying to assemble any form of writing. Taking notes of this incoming content from miscellaneous sources to create something with it does not have the intensity of today. Evernote for me is daily notes app. It collects, everything as notes, daily, weekly, monthly, and annually. Daily records help log time and ideas. It is almost efficient and now needs detailing to make some loose ends meet. For 2024, Evernote is better today than then.
Reference
Your Project Management Software Can't Save You. Do-everything workplace managers like Asana and Trello promise organizational utopias. But they reveal limitations that date all the way back to the factory floors of the 1900s. [Essay]
Information work increasingly asks employees to handle more complexity—but we should not have to self-manage our own productivity in imperfect systems laid atop programmer thinking to simply do our work. Because there is no one way to organize projects and workloads, no software can be everything for modern workers. You may find yourself really loving one of these programs—and that’s great! But the utility of software like Jira lies with actual programmers. Smaller, more job-specific software, like Clio for lawyers, is more likely to address the problems of a specific type of work than one that forces workers to claw through SEO-optimized listicles to find a set of features that can be bent to work for their team.
A huge part of your job today may be simply resolving and reconfiguring the natural entropy in your office, but poorly communicated deadlines will remain so whether they’re written on an index card, sent in an email, or appended to a “task” in Asana. If you put something on a digital kanban board without enough information, it is no more useful than it was before you created the task. Workforce software is offloading the job of managing projects to countless mini-projects, each only as useful as the skill and utility of the individual user. And we can’t expect each user to be both a maker and a self-manager, especially with the imperfect tools on the market. When we line up the Trellos, Asanas, Wrikes, Airtables, and endless clones of the same inherent project-management misses, their differences matter less than their end results—to paraphrase Anna Karenina’s line about families, each project-management app promises the same happiness, but each creates unhappy users in its own way.