What my digital home looks like
A visual tour
Following on from my previous post on why I created a digital home, I have been asked what my digital home actually looks like. I made a little screencast showing how I use it:
In the video, I mention a few specific things that may require more explanation:
1. Ideaverse Pro by Nick Milo - This is a set of Obsidian notes together with plug-ins and settings that you can purchase and download (no affiliation, I am just a user). Obsidian by itself is very bare-bones, and it can be fun to set up your system yourself, but it can also be nice to start from a more advanced, fully functional system and then customise it from there.
2. Tiago Forte - His books are Building a second brain and The PARA method. He uses slightly different terminology and folder structure, but the deeper principles are the same.
3. Zettelkasten - Originally an analogue system of writing notes, developed by sociologist Niklas Luhmann in the 1960's. First you write "fleeting notes" when you have an idea or read something that resonated, then "literature notes" which are more thought through and written in your own words but still written within the context of the source, and finally "permanent notes" which are more context-independent, atomic notes that can be used when writing or changed or added to if your understanding of the concept changes over time. One major advantage is that all references can be traced back to the source, so you can see where you learned something from. This makes academic writing more efficient, where you need quick access to references.
4. Readwise Reader - An app/website where you can collect all your newsletter subscriptions and saved articles from the web (as well as DRM-free book files and pdfs), read, highlight and make notes, and then automatically synchronise with Obsidian, so you have all your highlights together with a link to the context.
This is my no means my final workflow - it is a work in progress. Other than what I show in the video, here are a few more workflows I have already used enough to turn them into habits:
The daily note, where I can write down my thoughts (morning pages-style) before starting my day, or in the middle of the day if I feel my head is spinning with thoughts/ideas/emotions.
Exporting questions to Anki, a flashcard app. This helps me learn the details of things I am studying.
Tracking my progress through online courses by having a map based on the course contents, then clicking on each to write notes on that lecture/activity.
Using ChatGPT for repetitive tasks like formatting my text for export to Anki, or creating a map of content with links to notes from a course table-of-contents. There is a plug-in (Copilot) that lets you use AI chats within Obsidian, in the sidebar.
Taking notes in a pseudo-Zettelkasten way - my highlights and quick comments I write while reading are the fleeting notes. Then I create literature notes on important concepts from that book/article with a reference to the fleeting note. For some literature notes, I create a new note about the concept but within a wider context, not just the context of that book/article (either comparing it with a similar concept from a different source or with my own thoughts and experiences). This means I am using the Zettelkasten mindset, but without the folder structure or tags used by those who implement Digital Zettelkasten more conscientiously.
There are also some other workflows I want to learn more about, experiment with and possibly adopt. Here are some examples:
Efforts/projects - using Obsidian to manage my efforts/projects. What holds me back is that I would be using a combination of my bullet journal and Obsidian, so I need to figure out how to get that to work without writing everything down twice.
Home page - having a page I open when I start the day or when I want to re-centre. This would include links to the important places I go to in my digital home. I don't like the default Ideaverse Pro home page so it will take a bit of up-front work to get this running.
Canvas - this is a feature that (I think) allows you to move notes around in a visual way. Given that our minds are strongly spatially oriented, I think this would be useful but I have not yet looked into how to use it.
Importing hand-drawn diagrams - when learning new things or making sense of what we are reading it is often helpful to draw diagrams or concept maps or other graphical representations. Doing so on paper or on post-it notes that we can move around taps into our spatial brains even better than digital diagrams can ever hope to do. So I want to develop a workflow around getting these diagrams from the real world into Obsidian, ideally without having to (1) take a photo on my phone (2) sync it with google photos and (3) import into a note in Obsidian, which is a cumbersome process and diverts my attention too much. There might be a plug-in for this that I have yet to find, that eg lets you take a quick photo using the computer's camera directly.