Aidan's Infinite Play 39 Creating A Library And Home Note For Lifelong Learning LYT 11 Part 3
Hello players!
I finished the third week of Linking Your Thinking Workshop 11!
For those who don't know, The Linking Your Thinking Workshop is headed by Nick Milo and teaches students over five weeks how to build a Personal Knowledge Management System that allows them to do their best. I highly suggest you take the next cohort by heading to The Linking Your Thinking Workshop. During the third week we learned:
- How To Fight Organization Procrastination
- I Built My 🧾Library And 🏠My Home
- Putting It All Together: Adventuring Around Your Second Brain.
If you didn't read the post I created on the first or second weeks of the workshop, I would recommend checking those out before diving into this one:
- Aidan's Infinite Play 37 Exploring PKM Thinking Styles LYT 11
- Aidan's Infinite Play 38 How To Do Bottom-Up Vs. Top Down Thinking LYT 11
⚔️How To Fight Organization Procrastination
One of the key issues people coming to PKM face is organizing too much too early.
Organization can become a form of procrastination. During this week, Nick Taught us a way to try and avoid this tendency in our systems through the Pareto principle. The Pareto principle states that 80% of the outputs come from 20% of the inputs.
In the case of your PKM system, it means 80% of the value it creates comes from using 20% of Obsidian's potential for organizing information.
It also proves 80% of life's joy comes from eating peanut butter, but that's beside the point.
Instead of adding endless tags, folders, queries, and linking methods to your system, adopt a minimalistic organizational approach. When first beginning to use a tool of thought, adopt the simplest organization system possible. Then organize over time as you hit what Nick Milo calls mental squeeze points, the point at which the unorganized nature of a group of information gets so great that you have to do some organization.
This gives us the most time and energy for the important part of our notetaking process, the relating of ideas together to create value.
Built My 🧾Library And 🏠My Home
🧾Library
Another awesome thing we did was build our library and home notes!
You might remember from the first part of this series on the LYT workshop, I realized that I had a more top-down way of thinking than I expected. After realizing that, I began adopting more top-down thinking forms into my PKM system. So I fleshed out my Library and Home Notes.
The library note encapsulates all your highest-level MOCs in some regions of interest.
It's organized using the time-tested Dewey Decimal classification system:
- 000 - Knowledge Management
- 100 - Personal Management
- 200 - Philosophy & Psychology; Spirituality & Religion
- 300 - Social Sciences
- 400 - Communications & Rhetoric; Language & Linguistics
- 500 - Natural Sciences
- 600 - Applied Sciences
- 700 - Art & Recreation
- 800 - Literature
- 900 - History & Biography & Geography
The idea is to put all of your MOCs related to each area under it so you can have a home base for your interests. Surprisingly, I found it splentastsic for helping me identify holes in my reading. For example, looking at a screenshot from my Library below, you can see I don't have nearly enough reading in Communications & Rhetoric, Language & Linguistics, Natural Sciences, Applied Sciences, or History & Biography & Geography:
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If I want to be a lifelong learner, I now know the areas that I need to explore more.
If you want to explore my 🧾 Library yourself, you can check it out on my published Obsidian vault.
🏠My Home
The other thing we fleshed out was our home notes.
Your home note is the highest level MOC in your entire system. It's the jumping-off point for all sorts of incredible adventures. The difference between it and the Library note is that you customize it to you.
Everyone's home note is unique to them.
I already had a home note before the course, but I fleshed it out more using the insights from LYT. Here's what it looked like afterward:
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The adventure jump off is for doing note making by looking at simmering ideas in my encounter box--ideas that have come up very recently--exploring my Literature Notes MOC with all of my literature notes and processing them, or going into my boat box to see notes that have no link anywhere else.
The action and reflection section is not only for goal and project setting but for reflecting on what I'm doing and how it exemplifies who I am.
Relationships are for relationships.
Interest Station is for my interests.
And finally, the content creation MOC is for holding all of my resources related to content creation and my finished content.
I'm confident that the home note will change a billion times as I keep changing. But that's okay. You should change your system as you change with it.
If you want to explore 🏠My Home, you can check it out on my Obsidian Published page.
🚀Putting It All Together: Adventuring Around Your Second Brain
With the Home note in place, the entire idea emergence process put forth by Nick Milo in week 1 is finally complete!
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Notemaking in your PKM system, you can adventure with a top-down strategy and go from the home note itself or a MOC. Or you can adventure using a bottom-up strategy and create individual notes. Slowly, over time, these notes will grow and combine into MOCs, which will connect to other MOCs, which will connect to your Library and eventually go back home.
You can adventure through your system by jumping through links turning your PKM second brain into one massive springboard of ideas.
We are realizing the dream Nick Milo put forth in the first week of the course. To create a PKM system that:
- Improves how we swim in the sea of information
- Let's do our best thinking
- Develop more of the knowledge we already have
- Makes it easy to read, write, share, and teach
Here's what I would like to share this week.
📸News From The Channel!
📺Latest On De YouTube - How To Memorize Effectively With Flashcards And Not Waste Hours Of Time: Do you find flashcards boring? I did, too, until I learned how to memorize effectively without wasting hours of time. In this video, I'll show you some of the best tips and tricks I have found for doing so.
🎙️Latest On De Podcast - E21 Josh Duffney: When Zettelkasten Notetaking In Obsidian Fails...: Josh Duffney is a software engineer, writer, and speaker as well as the author of How to Take Smart Notes in Obsidian and Become Ansible. He records YouTube videos about technology, productivity, and personal knowledge management. In this podcast, you will learn:
- Why the Zettelkasten notetaking system can fail...
- How to take dumb notes over smart notes
- How AI will change notetaking
💡My Best Insights:
📖Book - Everyday Zen: Not all of us want to become monks in order to do Zen practice. Luckily, Charlotte Beck, in this book, explores how we can practice Zen the everyday. Inside of our work and inside of our relationships. We don't have to renounce eating and sleeping with a pillow!
🎙️Podcast - EP144 Happiness Expert Returns Retrain Your Brain For Maximum Happiness Mo Gawdat: One of the main things that make us unhappy is mistaking what we want with what we NEED. Therefore we always feel unsatisfied with reality as it is. He advocates that we learn more about ourselves by reflecting and analyzing our feelings, thoughts, and actions to see if they align. That can give us an idea of what wants we should pursue if it aligns with our values.
📺YouTube Video - The Transformational Impact of Story Telling with Shawn Coyne Voices with Vervaeke: Coyne and Vervaeke explore what makes a great story. They show complex stories are emergent. Emergent stories have a whole that is different than the sum of the individual parts. Each part has meaning in context but combines to form something entirely different. In addition, each time you come back to the story, you change and take away different stuff. Depending on the lens you apply to the story, it also changes. This is what makes them profound.
- A personal essay targeted towards college students in the realm of gamification, relationship psychology, or Obsidian Personal Knowledge Management
- A curated list of everything that has come out on my content channels
- A curated list of my coolest learnings over the past week
In addition, consider checking out my digital notetaking course Obsidian University to help students like you build a notetaking system that compounds your school learning across semesters.