🌲Building a habit of checking in with the bigger picture
On the importance of knowing when to sit down and dive deep into your notes... so you don't get overwhelmed always keeping them neat.
I reached a point on a project where I realized that I had too many links and too many discrete pieces of information scattered throughout my notes. Some folks refer to this phenomenon as "information overwhelm," or "mental squeeze points," but for me it manifests as a sort of itch to sit down and organize. Although I touched on this briefly describing my favorite productivity app that isn't a productivity app, I thought it might be helpful if I shared how that works for me in a little more depth.
Finding Information
Someone once asked me whether I tend to use maps of content as "navigational aids," or if I just navigate through the folder structure.
The truth is, I typically navigate through the quick switcher, search, or folder structure (or the calendar) unless I'm actively working on a project that uses maps of content I've already created. These maps of content are valuable to me (I'm glad I made the ones I did), I use them mostly for article writing as a "workbench" to have everything relevant in my notes handy, and to keep myself from needing tags. But a lot of my vault is production-based (i.e. my notes are oriented primarily around content creation) so your mileage may vary in terms of how useful this is for you personally.
Anyway, let's say I'm working on an story and I'm trying to figure out how people dropped suddenly onto a planet with no domestic animals can go about getting themselves something like cows. This kind of thing happens pretty often; it's why I write about domestication a lot, and ancient economies, early class systems, environmental challenges, etc. Cows are relevant to all of that. But previously it wasn't really a topic I put a lot of effort into indexing, so a simple search of "cattle" in my notes returns results that are a bit of a hot mess. I don't always remember which things were relevant, but I want to reference something about cattle in an article or a synthesized note or whatever, it's a good idea for me to sit down and make a little meta-note about all my notes about the topic.
Often during this search process I come across articles I haven't yet processed into useful notes, so if I have time, I do so while I'm creating the workbench file. If the note title doesn't make it obvious, I also often write little summaries of the part of the note I'm linking to that's relevant to the topic, so it acts as a useful overview note in its own right (although mine are more "index" like). This helps me see in one place what different kinds of things I've got related to different topics. So for example it's handy to see that I've written, say, four relevant research overview newsletters, four longform articles, and many synthesized notes about a particular topic, as well as read a bunch of books with a lot to say about the topic.
It's incredibly useful for realizing "oh hey wait, this is enough to sit down and actually figure out what I know" instead of just relying on search to surface a couple of things
I haven't found a way to replicate that experience with just folder navigation / tagging / search, although I occasionally leverage queries if I don't have time to write out summaries of everything related; it lets me put the results of multiple searches in one spot so I can cross-check them easily. This results in a sort of "inbox" section at the bottom to make sure I didn't miss anything when synthesizing my notes into a a more cohesive whole, but, automating it isn't really robust enough to rely on exclusively.
Knowing When to Look
It occurs to me that the ability to recognize when it's worth creating these sort of synthesized maps of content before things wind up so messy that it is almost impossible to actually organize everything is a skill. I know a lot of people who get overwhelmed by messes (of all kinds!) and have difficulty cleaning them up. Or conversely who want to keep their notes perfect and pristine updated constantly and never really have the chance to use them for what they wrote them for in the first place. Going from messy pile of potentially useful stuff to organized groups of usable stuff can be tricky, and knowing when to bother is even harder.
In educational circles, the ability to do this easily is considered an executive functioning skill. The philosopher in me prefers to think of it as metacognition, because the recursive nature of thinking about thinking is easier for me to grasp than the mental image of a secretary in my brain, Inside Out style.
Metacognition and executive functioning skills are not, in my experience, things that get explicitly trained very often. Although this is not something I've researched in any formal setting, as a teacher and as someone who has interacted with a lot of people who are brilliant (much smarter than me) but often bad at taking a step back and engaging in metacognition before getting themselves into trouble with a task, I wanted to share a few insights I hope might help people.
The ability to catch yourself before a bunch of notes become too unwieldy to do anything with is partially experiential (i.e. practice helps -- mistakes are a great learning tool and we should be less afraid of making them) and partially a question of building a habit of reflection. It doesn't have to be written down (although this can help early on), but building an awareness of your own process and your own workflows and how your own brain works takes work whether we realize it or not.
Many months ago, I was talking to someone in discord about one of the reasons I was interested in trying Logseq being that I have a preference for having multiple windows on my taskbar, which is not something that Obsidian supported well at the time. The person I was talking to remarked that I seem to pick up and adopt workflows very easily -- they would never start using a whole new app just for something as silly as wanting a new icon in the task manager.
My own awareness of the way that I work means that I know that I can pick up new apps pretty easily. And I know that the mental friction of retraining myself to have completely different habits with workspaces in obsidian would be less effort than retraining myself to use an additional tool. So like I was able to make that decision for myself -- a decision about how to most efficiently use my time -- because I have an awareness of how I work.
After talking to some people over the last year or so, and also my experience in teaching, I think a lot of people don't have that awareness of how they work. It's, it's kind of a funny metaphor, and I know I've mentioned it before, but one of the best pieces of advice I ever got for becoming more aware of my own workflow came from League of Legends, which is a video game where you're supposed to work in teams of five to defend your base and capture the other team's. The details don't matter much, but there's a mini map in the game that lets you see an overview of is happening within your team's zone of control at any given time.
The very best players check the mini map almost constantly. It's not where the action is usually happening -- it's instinctive to focus your attention on the fight your avatar is actively engaged in. But to be good at the game -- to mitigate the risk of getting outflanked or ambushed -- every 10 or 15 seconds, you need to check the mini map. There's often information that changes what you should be doing as you're playing the game. So as you get better, you also need to develop the habit of constantly checking that minimap to see if there's a crisis.
For some people, this will happen gradually and they will come to that realization on their own as they get outflanked and ambushed and realize it could have been avoided if they checked the map more often; the burned hand teaches best. But for me, I got lucky and got that piece of advice early on in my gaming career, because the nicest thing anyone ever said to me about my video game skills was "you play as well as the computer does" ... which for anyone who has ever played old-school Starcraft, you know that's not a compliment ;) so I'm unlikely to have landed on "check the map every fifteen seconds" without a lot of trial and error.
A Habit of Checking In
Yet that kind of habit of mentally checking in with your own mental processes in the bigger picture is really important for learning what works for you. It's it's not just setting aside moments of reflection every evening, which can feel like a chore. It's more than that... and it's less effort than that, once you build the habit of asking yourself:
How am I feeling right now about this thing that I'm doing?
Do I need to be doing this thing?
Is there something else in the bigger picture going on that I could improve and might have downstream effects on this thing?
How well are these processes working?
is this the best way to do this, or can I brainstorm a better way to do this thing?
Is there an improvement I could be making?
I ask myself those questions almost constantly, which I'm told is unusual. Apparently a lot of people will just sort of build habits that conform to their needs and go with their habits. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean it as a criticism; there are advantages to that method, and disadvantages to mine. For one thing, I have to do a lot more thinking because I don't fall back on things I "know" work, and for another, I struggle to maintain good habits and forget things sometimes. But the tradeoff is that I rarely find myself halfway through a cooking task where I've failed to think things through all the way and have a huge mess on my hands.
But if the question is how to become a more effective, efficient thinker, waste less time and become less frustrated when trying out new things? I think this a simple checklist of questions I ask myself that might be helpful to try. They give me a better understanding of how my own brain works in the same way that the map view gives an overview of everything that's on the map instead of just the the moment that you're in, but in some ways that's incidental. The real benefit is that it puts me in the habit of thinking critically about things... which can be difficult to learn to do, because for so many of us, we've rarely needed to think critically about stuff we do.