@EleanorKonik This is a fantastic writeup thank you for taking the time to post it!
While my own approach is structurally different we both appear to follow many of the same fundamental principles:
- processing from source to individual notes representing ideas from the source, to evergreen notes
- we both provide meaningful titles for the concepts from the source (as your title _ writing emerged around the same time as state-level warfare_) but I create individual literature notes for each one (tied back to the original source note, which contains biblio info and also serves as the structured index of all lit notes for that source)
- atomic notes meaning a single idea rather than specific length
- I have an “atomic note” that is over 10 printed pages but still encapsulates a single process and concept
I don’t use the daily notes feature much but your resonance calendar idea is very intriguing and I’m extremely interested in the plugins you are working on as they sound like they could be significant enhancements to my own workflow.
There are two key differences in our systems, and I’m curious to learn more about your thought process that led to your decisions on these points:
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Why do you keep all of the concepts in a single literature note and then transclude those as sections into other notes? Wouldn’t you gain more flexibility by making each one its own standalone note (e.g. a separate note titled writing emerged around the same time as state-level warfare with the contents you show) that is linked from the source and can be linked to / transcluded in to any other note? I ask because I found transcluding sections to be relatively brittle because you are creating a dependency that prevents you from rewriting or reformatting the note containing the content without risking breaking transclusions. In software engineering this is called tight coupling and is something to be avoided, and I find a lot of similarities between software engineering principles and sound note taking. Additionally I’ve found it easier to scan titles in Obsidian search or in the file system than to first think “oh idea X was in source Y” – instead I can just search for X and see the title (again, writing emerged around the same time as state-level warfare) in the search, or see it directly in the file browser.
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Why do you write contents into an article note without also capturing them in an evergreen note? It seems like you can end up with some concepts in your evergreen notes and some concepts in your article notes, and I’m struggling to understand the reasoning. If something is interesting enough to capture then isn’t it interesting enough to capture as an evergreen note and then write an article that builds on 1…N evergreen notes including that one? That way the evergreen note is always there for future relationships with other notes (and subsequent articles) as well. To me it seems the content is “trapped” inside an article instead of free-floating as an evergreen note where it can engage in conversations and arguments with other notes freely.
(This may be more a matter of style – I tend to write my evergreen notes almost as mini essays similar to Andy Matuschak, so to me that satisfies the itch you mention about writing articles, which to me would become written output based on those mini-essay evergreen notes – with you it sounds like the articles are almost atomically-focused evergreen notes in and of themselves)
None of this is a criticism of your approach BTW, it clearly works for you. I’m just genuinely curious how we are following very similar core principles but ended up with divergence in those two respects.
Thanks again for your thoughts, its very insightful!