Perfect Path

Thursday, 7 October, 2021

lloyd

It's like all this started with Knowledge Management, you know. That's what I was trying to do at the end of the Audit Commission time. Trying to find a way to hold all of that stuff in my head and make sense of it, and knowing that I couldn't actually hold it in my head, but not knowing what else to do with it.

So it came out in a blog.

But the trouble with that is that, after a while, people see your poor little unworked thought and they pounce on it and want to talk about it. And add references and related thoughts they've had and then suddenly something that was just a way of you making a note on your life and thinking today just today, unevolved, unpolished, not finished, im-fucking-perfect, has all of this [[attention]]. And then [[other people's attention grabs your attention]] and then they walk away and you're left with what? a small idea, a bunch of possibly useful, possibly not useful links and threads and untidy mess and no capacity left to deal with it.

And then you just try to start again tomorrow, but a) you've got all this [[cognitive overload]] of yesterday's [[conversations]] and b) you know that it's all going to happen all over again. So [[why bother?]]

That's why I look for ways to [[blog like there's nobody reading]] because, from the start, the attention was simultaneously an unwanted distraction and attention from others that I desperately craved.

About the draft actions

There are two at the moment.

One appends a draft to today's logseq journal.
	it needs a title to work well.  I think ### is the best level, on reflection, but I usually have done ## in the past. (Actually, it doesn't need to be a heading, I suppose, it's just the first line of the draft)
	It uses the OneDrive API to add 
	`[[title]]` at `[[date|%R]]`
	`[[body]]`
	to the end of whatever's already in the main journal file for today.

The other uses a [script that I wrote](https://gist.github.com/lloyddavis/855532279fcdab564e938ef6078a633e) to create (if the first of the day) or append the draft (after an `<hr />`) 
	this doesn't *need* a title, but a useful feature of the eleventy framework is that titles get anchor links.

I need to remind myself of how indents work in markdown in drafts...

note-taking

I'm experimenting again, with note-taking and the part it might play in writing more substantial work. The genesis of what I've just been doing was that I stumbled over How To Take Smart Notes which describes using [[Zettelcasten]] and then, having walked away from it, I looked at twitter and saw this https://twitter.com/hondanhon/status/1445885344688209920 from [[Dan Hon]] which led me to [[Andy Matuschak]] and https://notes.andymatuschak.org which is very like blogging like there's nobody reading, except um, yeah, stuff. Anway, this is all explanation for myself as to why the next (previous? depending on context...) note has appeared.

Because then I wrote this note in drafts and amended the drafts action to append to today's journal to have a title and a timestamp rather than the convoluted thing that I had before, can't even remember what it was. Thing is, I can also publish this to the new blog from the same place, just using a different action. Trouble is, I've brought this back into drafts (from logseq) to publish it and now there are more amendments. I think this is probably more about me wanting to publish than a fault in the stuff itself. I think that creating a few [[atomic]] pieces from this writing is more useful. There are several ideas in this piece already and I'm trying to rush to get it out and off my plate, whereas it can just sit here, in my inbox, as it were, and be dealt with later.

I don't know if this will help, but it feels better than before. Andy's concept of [[Evergreen Notes]] is a revelation, because it's so close (and yet so far) from what I've been searching for through nearly twenty years of hating my writing environment and hating myself for not being able to write "properly". It's like he was a clearer version of me and having seen that, I might integrate it into my own practice. But first, I will need to revisit and understand it more clearly. This is what I wrote as a result of reading it first time and jumping in straight away.