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My Knowledge Wiki contains most of my knowledge (From 2023 onwards mainly). I gather all information I find interesting and my learnings in this wiki. The goal is to create a digital garden for my thoughts and share as many of the things I find interesting as possible. The goal is to have a comprehensive library for my thoughts and experiences to share with the world and look back on.

I use Obsidian for most of my digital garden work, but it is not only for digital gardening but also for other things. It is an essential part of the digital garden workflow.

Methodology

I believe consistent work and updates are the keys to improvement. I am a fan of trying to make a quick standard with at least some structure that can be expanded upon when making new choices.

I want to make daily updates as long as possible and have created some incentives to do this.

  • I have a digital entry reminder to fill in something I have learned during the day, only on weekdays.
  • I have a workflow where I try to add something new I have learned and enhance or add to an existing article every day.

Workflow​

I have designed this basic workflow for making a daily entry and continuously improving the digital garden.

CAE​

CAE stands for Create, Add, and Enhance and is a task list for daily entries. To work in the digital garden, I use the term item to designate a standalone piece of text. An item should either be an article or a header with some text following it and should be an intelligent and clear piece of text that can be understood separately from other texts.

  • Create is that I want to create a new item in my knowledge hub. An Item is either a header or a new article. The goal is always to add new things to the garden.
    • I do this by having a learning section in my daily note, where the purpose is to write down a paragraph about something new I learned that day. This enables me to easily create new sections or ittems.
  • Add is when I want to add something to an existing item. It can be a sentence or thought. The goal is to improve all items. If no particular things have been added, then going through the unfinished list is good.
  • Enhance is that I should improve either a process or item during the daily entry. A process can be a script used in the digital garden sorting the entries or fixing the style of some articles to the newest style. The goal is to improve the items in the digital garden continuously. The enhancement should be used on a different article than add.
    • To add or enhance, I have a custom dataview script that takes entries I have not changed lately and picks out a random article that I can go into and either research something and add it or enhance the article. By using the CAE workflow, I can let the thought of always finishing things go and rather focus on writing for the fun of it.

The key to making this work is to automate as much as possible and make sure you are put in a position to succeed. Making reminders, creating scheduled tasks that pop up, or just noting down each time you do some entries or fix things help make it much easier to work consistently.

Problems and Disadvantages​

I think a lot of the work I do is difficult to immediately assess correctly. Should I have my own data engineering folder? Well, not at the start when data science, AI engineering and ML engineering dominated my work. However, after working for a while, this might change. Also, sometimes I don't really have to split the articles into granular enough places so that i cannot find the best place to put it.

I think I would like to have a better way of taking my book notes out of my Booklist folder and having them in other sections. Maybe have them in sections on fiction, classics, machine learning, leadership folders etc. As of 2024, I have not done this, but with over 100 book reviews, it might be a good strategy.

Links

Thoughts

  • I want to experiment with randomizing the daily entries, maybe creating a list of enhancements and articles I want to write about, themes, or others.
  • One particular fear I have is a lot of double entries, where I write the same thing repeatedly.
  • Working on this one step at a time is quite fun, and reduces the stress of finishing up.
  • I want the digital garden to be a place where I enjoy writing and filling in. It should be a pleasant experience.
  • I want to share this with the world, but only when it is large enough to be useful.
  • Articles that are not finished are not marked as finished in the header so that I can do some sort of differentiation between articles. One thing I would like to do is work with dataview and use it to create an unfinished table so that I can use that to finish up unfinished articles.
  • Access to my Mac has been a driver for this. When I worked on an engagement as a consultant, I had issues with writing down and having the normal workflow, which makes it a lot easier to jot down quickly some notes and then later, during the daily review, actually write down more comprehensive thoughts.