--- /dev/null
+#+title: On writing notes
+#+date: <2024-03-30 Sat 16:40>
+#+filetags: :personal knowledge management:notes:
+
+Over the month of March, my interest veered to the area of personal
+knowledge management. This was triggered reading a blog post by [[https://markbernstein.org/][Mark
+Bernstein]]. He is the author of a software tool called [[http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/][Tinderbox]]. The
+post linked to a [[https://forum.eastgate.com/c/videos-to-help-you-get-started/17][series of videos]] where users of the tool explain how
+it helps them in their endeavours. The one by [[https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-meetup-video-saturday-october-14-stacey-mason-on-goal-setting-and-management-with-tinderbox/7042][Stacey Mason on goal
+setting]] was inspiring - so cool to see how someone is able to set
+goals for both her professional and her personal life and use those to
+improve her relationships, her career and general wellbeing. Maybe the
+most convincing about the whole concept is seeing it in action on this
+forum. Not only is the video of the event available, but key quotes
+are also extracted and resources like books, videos or websites to
+review are there to immediately go deeper or further into a subject.
+
+As suggested in another one of these videos, I read Building a Second
+Brain by Tiago Forte. It's an easy read without a lot of references
+all over - just a convincing argument made by someone who's been
+helped by extending his mind through notekeeping. My curiousity at
+that point was sufficiently high to decide to give regular note
+writing a try.
+
+This decision resulted in a slight detour trying to understand which
+methodology I should adopt, and what tool to use. Keeping in mind the
+advice that these questions are of secondary importance, I tried to
+not go too deep in the rabbit hole this obviously proved to be.
+
+The research however resulted in another pleasant discovery:
+[[https://protesilaos.com/][Protesilaos Stavrou's website]]. Prot as he's known to his friends and
+everyone else is the author of the [[https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote][denote.el]] Emacs package. This is
+the tool I have selected for now, as it is very easy to get started
+with, doesn't impose a particular folder structure on where to keep
+notes, and by default uses org-mode as file format for its
+notes. Prot's a bit of a wizard when it comes to Emacs, and also
+possesses the great quality of being an excellent tutor. His videos
+are fantastic to get better use out of Emacs - I recommend giving one
+a watch.
+
+With a notekeeping system that transcends a journal, the aim of
+writing is not only to offload ideas onto paper. It is key to also
+have an ability to refer back to what is written, and be able to build
+out a train of thought. The idea has been around for ages - John Locke
+(the 'Father of Liberalism') already wrote about [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book][Commonplace books]] as
+they were called back in 1685! In more recent times, the slipbox, or
+[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten][Zettelkasten]] as it's known in the knowledge management world, was
+found to be a superior system to combine and expand a knowledge
+base. In current times, software tools like Tinderbox, [[https://roamresearch.com/][Roam]] and
+various others have made it even easier to be able to trust that what
+you write down can be retrieved again in the future with minimal
+effort, and can be combined with other parts of your knowledge base
+through dynamic search and filter functionalities.
+
+In the limited time I've been focusing on writing notes on matters
+that picqued my interest, I have noticed an immediate improvement in
+the completeness of the evaluation of the subject I touch. The simple
+action of writing down my thoughts is helping me to look at them from
+various angles much more easily than before. I am curious to find out
+how this will evolve once I amass a wide enough number of notes to be
+able to start linking them together, as that's what is supposed to be
+*the reason* to take notes in a structured fashion - *build insights*
+through combining thoughts and ideas that otherwise are fleeting or
+remain isolated.