Trying New Things
If you have talked to me over the past year or so you know I'm on a big "own my data" kick. Not in the scrub myself off the internet way because of work, but more so I don't want everything in the cloud. This isn't anything new either. I use to be super anti-cloud especially in the video game space. I now share so many things with friends and family across the US that I gave into the cloud life.
Nothing wrong with wanting to access your things everywhere, but now I'd like to cut back on that. Enter in my solution to consolidate: r/datahording. lol
Seriously though I've had a NAS for awhile and I'm doing more to move all my data there. I have any cloud drive backed up to my NAS and I'm trying to reduce the amount of apps I use across my devices. If I can self host even better. Even this website eventually will change (I'm testing migration on other things and it's harder than expected).
How did you get here?
Honestly I just felt like I was too spread out technology wise. I have a ton of laptops and I've lost data/apps/ect from crashes or just full out messing up my computer. Take those things combined with my growing homelab and sys admin skills I just thought I'd jump all in on some things.
I've almost got everything baked into 3 core apps/devices. My NAS, my mini server (server could grow but who knows), and Obsidian. Due to this intentional reduction I feel like it's easier for me to be back on "my grind" with learning. I'll always be a stationary girly and that's ok for some things. It's not that I don't want to kill trees, I want to be anywhere on anything and have the same experience throughout.
Ok so what is Obsidian?
Glad you asked. Obsidian is an offline note-taking app. Think Evernote or Notion but less headache for me. I found it from a group of friends and fell in love because I enjoy writing in markdown all the time. What really encouraged me to seriously funnel everything into obsidian was this article. I was just scrolling Reddit when I found it and I was like "yea that's what I'm missing".
How does everything connect?
Well I kept things simple. If I write things on paper that I want digitized I fold the page. My notes are either in Obsidian or on my tablet. The things on my tablet are more fleeting thoughts. Obsidian is where I put more long term thoughts (that's also why I'm moving my websites there).
You can be super organized and pick a day to transfer things like the GTD method suggest or you can just forget until your at a computer and have the notebook out like I do. lol My desk is also a whiteboard so sometimes I write myself notes to check certain notebooks there.
Why do you keep saying notebooks with an "s"?
I told you I like stationary. So here is how I split things with paper...journal, nightly brain dump (for now), and work. My work notebook I'm ready to have shredded at any moment, that's why that one isn't as important to me. I hate digital journaling and I've tried it multiple times. I also really like using my fountain pens so I'm super picky about my journal paper selection.
My nightly brain dump notebook can eventually go digital. Right now I'm just trying to dump what I feel like I need to do the next day/morning in a little field notes. Do I go back to these things? Not really. lol The beauty is I can go to bed with an empty mind and if I deem something important I know to wake up and take a peak. As of lately I rarely write anything down that isn't on my desk or in my todo list app if I deem it super important.
And this is working for you?
Yea it is! I don't like calling myself a hoarder, but this is fun. In taking this journey I've figured out what things I do and don't use. I've felt like my workflows are more consistent no matter what computer I pick up or where I am and that's super important to me.
With all the changes I hope for everything to feel like less of a task. I think that the hardest part of wanting to be a lifelong researcher is not having an established system to keep ya going. Now that I'm working on my system I feel more confident in how much faster I can consume and process information.