august soon
Hello! I have been doing okay. I took a two week trip back to Singapore with a short little jaunt in the middle to Penang. I spent most of my time there eating and meeting people, and watching other people get married. I think it was good for me to ground myself with my long-term friendships and where we're at in life.
It made me think about where I want to base myself in the future again, because I've made the best of Brighton so far but I'm not sure it's the best for me. I don't like the culture and I don't really like people who do. And I think everyone here is actually fairly myopic about life and the world, in the way that you are when you only interact with people who are exactly like you (Singapore is like this as well, but about different things). I have come to term this as fish-bowl-ing, because I think that encapsulates the vibe the best. It's the insularity and what is taken for granted as normal without any actual attention to diversity or depth.
I find myself struggling because I don't think anyone here is like me, which makes it hard to connect with others on deeper levels. I don't think I want to stay here in the long term for sure, so I need to think about where else I'd like to go and where I'd like to build my networks. Maybe London, or somewhere further afield!
Anyway, a while ago I said I'd do a walkthrough of my current writing/note-taking system, so that's what I wanted to write about today. :)
I love writing, and I'd like to think I'm good at it, or at least better than the average person at doing it, and that's because I do it a lot. I used to write three A5 pages in my journal every day, and my friends were like, that's kind of mad of you to be doing that Joan. But it was actually fine for me, because I always have a lot to say about everything! And I am always thinking deep thoughts about everything. (Except when it's not that deep, and then I get mad that it's not that deep.)
So I thought I would write up a walkthrough of how my system currently works, how it has worked in the past, and what currently works best for me, so that I have a point of reference when people ask how I set things up.
01. the materials
I have a journal. My current one is a grid Leuchtturm A5 that's pigeon blue, which has somewhere over 200 pages, is 80gsm, and has a hardcover. This is fine and it's perfectly serviceable.
My favourite notebook is produced by the Singaporean brand Musubi, and it's a 400 page Tomoe River Sanzen grid paper notebook that's 52gsm. It's a folio notebook, which means that the cover is basically embossed cardstock, and I keep it in a Galen Leather notebook cover (the simple one, not their zip folios. I don't believe in keeping your pens in the same folio as your notebook). Unfortunately due to running out of notebook while I was in the UK and not in Singapore, I had to make do with an LT while I waited for someone to ferry the Musubi notebook over for me. I am still on that LT.
In my notebooks I usually write and sketch and doodle and decorate with a range of stationery materials, mostly Japanese, because they make the best/cutest decor stationery (stamps, stickers, post-its, etc.). I write with fountain pens. I have a bunch of them with different nib sizes and bodies, but mostly I write with dye-based ink because that's the most convenient and available to me. I try to swap out my inks when my pens run dry or when I get bored of writing with them.
Everything I need to do on a day to day basis that I can not look back on or think about once it's done gets dropped into my physical notebooks. This includes task lists, memory keeping, travel journaling, normal emotional processing journaling, and other miscellaneous things. I used to journal a lot more but I try not to journal too much these days because it becomes a fixation trigger for me (like, it fuels me being obsessive sometimes so I need to be careful!). But I do try to write down what's been happening to me and if I don't remember to write it down in my journal or it's not handy at the moment I will post something on Tumblr or Twitter or whatever so that I don't forget it.
Everything I need to remember goes into my Obsidian.
Obsidian is the place where I keep my notes for my PhD, but also for living life in general and thinking thoughts. I do not believe in a work/life separation for thinking thoughts because I'd like to think that I study the world, and the world is my work. I read broadly between fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and so on, and so everything I read I try to compile in here, just so that I don't forget what I thought about it.
Reading is the most important medium to me, and other mediums less so. I functionally don't really watch TV except for Dropout shows (slop, and yes I have a note dedicated to D20 in my Obsidian) and some really specific shows (like Wednesday 2022. God). This year I've been making more of a conscious effort to watch movies, so I've been logging those on Letterboxd instead. But I do have tags on my Obsidian for if I want to write notes about them. I try to write down most things I learn or ideas I have in Obsidian so that I don't forget about them.
TL;DR anything that is passing goes in the journal. Anything that is long-term needs to go in the Obsidian. Any long-form writing — for essays and presentations and whatnot — is currently going in Scrivener.
02. the journal
The journal holds all of my appointments and major memories and plans. I try to keep memories in a bunch of different ways but the most persistent is the journal, because I have a simple format that works really well for me.
I enjoy the work of setting up my books myself, and so I've steered clear of books where the template is drawn for you like the Hobonichi Weekes. When I write I feel like I write a lot, so I struggle to keep to one page per day for sure. So a blank book genuinely works best for me because I have the ability to do the layouts myself and change things if they're not working for me. My layouts are also mostly drawn from the bullet journaling school of thought, that is to say, simple is mostly best. That said, my main layouts that I return to are:
Annuals
- Future Log (here I dump all my future dates and it's the only place I reliably remember to keep people's birthdays every year)
- Gratitude Log (where I list things I'm grateful for each month so I don't go insane)
- Milestones (so I can look back and be like yeah I actually did do a bunch of things this year)
- Notes (for my future self to remember things that worked and didn't work particularly as they pertain to journal layout)
- I used to write things like Mood Logs and Media Logs in the annuals, but I find that I didn't refer to them enough or those were more conveniently logged elsewhere, like Storygraph or Letterboxd or wherever. Mood logging made me very self-conscious of how good/bad I felt and that often tended towards bad, so now I'm not allowed to do that anymore.
- Coping Mechanisms List - this is a list of stuff that I wrote for myself about things that help me to self-soothe, so I can look at it when I'm feeling insane and pick an activity to go and do. The proto-dopamine menu if you will, except that dopamine menus don't make any sense because that's just not how dopamine works. Whatever. The point is that it's a list of shit I can do if I'm feeling bad and need some kind of Thing To Do.
Monthlys
- The Monthly Log is a list of dates, their day of the week, and what happens on each day. It really is that simple.
- I keep a monthly task list of things that I need to do by the end of the month and if they roll over I try to ask myself why I'm not doing them LOL.
- Next to that is a Mental Health Log so I can write down if anything particularly insane happened. Some bullshit is frankly always happening to me, so this became necessary to keep track of that.
- I keep a little stamp of the calendar view of the month, so that I can visualise it a different way (my memory works very visually!). I sometimes use this view as an exercise log or a "left the house to be a real person in real life" log which is quite important when it's winter and you are the only person left living on this Earth or whatever.
- Next to that is an affirmation. I try to write myself an affirmation that fits each month, like "I am good at writing and I can trust my own intuition", or like "It's not my responsibility to manage other people being crazy to me". This is to encourage my being a well-adjusted human being.
Dailies
- Tasks get bullet point dots that are crossed out once I accomplish them. Once in a while I go through and roll over tasks that need to be done from previous pages to ensure I don't miss anything or I cross out things that became redundant. These get the > if I migrated them forward, or the < if I migrated them backwards to the monthly.
- Long notes (more common notes) get dashes. In bullet journal form you're supposed to use dashes for short notes and plusses for long notes but that's frankly a stupid system for people with a fuckton of thoughts that they're thinking at all times. (I suspect I think more thoughts than the average person on a daily basis but this is, of course, impossible to truly estimate.) (I recognise that this is also incredibly annoying of me to assert but I suspect it is nevertheless true.)
- I spend most of my time writing a lot of long notes for myself. For weeks where I've had a lot of tasks to accomplish, I've found a lot of success with the Alistair Method in the past of having multiple columns and rolling tasks over by day until they get done. Currently I don't do this because I don't open my notebook enough, and all my tasks are things like "read book". If I had more granular tasks, the Alistair method might be more useful to me still.
My Routines
My true routine is that I sit down, open my book, flip to the newest page and write something down. That's it. Once a month I go through my annuals and check the things there, and transfer the relevant information to my monthly. Once I set up my monthly, I refer back to it like once a week at most to make sure that it's up to date with my appointments and whatnot. Sometimes my monthly is done in retrospective because I don't have enough time to sit down and think about writing. Other times I'm too focused on writing digitally that I neglect my journal a little bit. It comes and goes and I have come to peace with that. Things get written down where they get written down because I'm Always Writing, and that's the important part.
03. the obsidian
Obsidian is my hub for learning and thinking about stuff. Real productivity-optimization nerds would call it a second brain, or a KMS which stands for knowledge management system and not the other thing LOL. My Obsidian is kind of based on a bastardised Zettlekasten system in a trickle-down sort of way, but it's what works for me currently in terms of retrieving information!
The main features of Obsidian that makes it incredibly useful to me are that:
1) The whole thing is written in Markdown and stored locally on my computer and not in the software itself (I hook my devices up to Obsidian via iCloud, which is where they live, but Obsidian also has a paid feature called Sync that lets you do it through Obsidian).
2) Your notes are able to link to each other. This is the backbone of Obsidian which really fuels non-linear thinking. Every note (let's say a main note for a book) can be linked to another note that features a related concept, which creates a chain of thinking that mirrors the natural way that people think (IE non-linearly and in threads). Over time, this should build you a network of notes that reflects your key concerns and themes as ideas are linked to repeatedly. E.g. some of my notes with more links are about queerness or Singapore studies.
3) You can enter metadata for each note. With another tool called Bases (and a community tool called Dataview, which predates Bases but I still use for some specific functions), you can view these notes as a database and pull specific information from it. E.g. all the books I read in January (assuming that your books each have a note and those notes all have the date you read them for metadata).
I have three main folders that I work in for Obsidian, which are my Inbox (where new notes are created), my Sources folder and my Concepts folder. Those are fairly self-explanatory. Obsidian doesn't benefit from splitting your folders by topic, because of the non-linearity, so having everything in one folder actually suits me better. I navigate mostly using my map view and my Files In Progress note, which is like my dashboard note.
When I read a new book, I highlight quotes that I want to remember, and crucially, annotate those quotes as I go in my Obsidian. I don't annotate in the books themselves if I can help it because it doubles the busywork. I also make sure to annotate every quote if I can because I should either be trying to explain the significance of them or explain them in my own words. It's a habit I try to cultivate to make sure I understand something! When something has a key term or a major key idea, I turn it into a concept note e.g. "Co-optation of Anti-Capitalism" or "Interpassivity" (can you tell I've been reading Capitalist Realism lately). This concept note goes into my Concepts folder and contains the explanation of that concept, as well as linking to other relevant concepts and texts. Concepts and Sources take turns being linked to each other, which creates a web of my knowledge of different things and fields as they relate to each other.
My FIP note, otherwise known as my dashboard note, shows me what I'm currently working on. Each of my Concept notes (I don't do this for Sources because it's not worth my time) is tagged as seedling (unworked), budding (half of an idea is there but underdeveloped), evergreen (I'm basically done with this), or overwinter (this is in hibernation and I'll return to it when I know more about this topic). I also use the FIP note to find ghost links that I've left as things that I don't know enough about to write on yet, like names of books or authors I haven't yet read.
This is all very helpful because it lets me pick and choose what I want to work on each day! And also keeps me up-to-date on things that are mostly squirreled away in my folders. I've been working in Obsidian since 2023 and I think it is a robust system that mostly ages well, and where my notes don't age well I have been able to improve on them by adding more information, further writing and corrections to them.
Once again, I don't really believe in a "reading for work" and "reading for leisure" split here, because a lot of the stuff I read for leisure is also stuff I read for work. I am blessed to be able to do what I enjoy in this respect. I aim to read voraciously for the rest of my life, and where I can't remember things, to write unceasingly. I don't know if what I want to be is an academic so much as it is a philosopher-king. Much to think about here.
04. scrivener
Scrivener is my newest writing tool! I picked it up to start writing for academic work and it's been very helpful. I like that you can split things into chapters or segments and drag and drop them around as you please. It's been very helpful for long-form writing where I'm referring to previous drafts of the same document, and for compiling all of those sections at once instead of having to split them up.
I know I'm not using this tool to its fullest potential at the moment, and I'd like to get to use it better (I also feel this way about Zotero). But I think that's something that will just come as I write more.
05. in conclusion
I like writing. I truly think being a PhD student/general academic researcher and writer is kind of the ideal career for me because I get to sit around all day and read, and also write about what I'm reading, and it's entirely interest-driven. Sometimes I have to teach and that's okay too, because I get a lot of joy out of watching my students improve and understand concepts, but that's I think a calling and not necessarily a passion. I get irritated watching other people be stupid. Which means that teaching (to some degree) is a way to cope with that, and help other people be less stupid.
I've been finding myself feeling a lot of hunger not just to know more about things, but also to do difficult work and challenge myself. Which I think is really interesting, especially when I'm tired and bogged by other things. It's kind of crazy to realise that I feel driven and motivated because I care about the core of a practice and find it meaningful. I think it's good, and also reflects that my priorities and where I find meaning have changed over time, also in a good way! I hope I continue to learn more always and that I don't get disillusioned about it. Maybe I DO have that dog in me.
I hope everyone is having a nice time. :) I had supervision yesterday and it was good, and my supervisors were like you sound like you're doing work even if you haven't been writing the chapter and that's okay. It happens. So hopefully by next month I will have more chapter written and feel like I've done more for my project. One can only hope! See you next month.