Thread by @EleanorKonik

I had a great time at the #LinkingYourThinkingConference today, but my fave moments were:

- showing people my notes about email providers and getting tips about updates I hadn't known about 👀
- answering a question someone had just asked in Discord that I hadn't even seen yet

Unfortunately, as often happens, I didn't get a chance to answer all the questions people had.

I'll write something longer over on the Obsidian Roundup website when I get a minute, with like, pictures and links and stuff, but just real quick here's top of my head responses:

I connect sources to claims usually just by linking to them, either the PDF that lives in my vault, reminding myself what category in Zotero is the useful one, or with a hard link the DOI or URL. If 2+ claims, I create a "source note" with all my annotations or connected claims.

I do sometimes use the new PDF viewer in Zotero 6 with the new highlights+notes functions, but I haven't fully integrated the Zotero Desktop Connector plugin to my workflow yet, I've honestly not been reading very many PDFs lately, been more focused on writing not research.

I generally do not use YAML for metadata, mostly because links don't work terribly well in YAML, and metadata is where I do most of my linking. These days I generally only use YAML for things that HAVE to be YAML, like aliases and cssclasses.

I don't plan to live in Safe Mode going forward, but I'm planning to be fairly judicious about what I bring in to start.

The plugins I've discovered I miss the most are Auto Linker, Obsidian Git, Fantasy Calendar, Tag Wrangler, and Show Current File Path.

If you're having trouble finding things using the search functionality in Obsidian, because you didn't tag it and can't remember any exact phrases... the only "trick" I know to deal with that is metacognition: take note of how you're trying to find it. Next time, plan for that.

@the_sample_umm is my number 1 trick for "learning to recognize a good newsletter." Because they send me a different newsletter every day, I read a lot of newsletters, and it helps me get a sense for how newsletters I like do things — and what things I don't like & should avoid.

@the_sample_umm I don't use embedded queries in my "safe mode" vault but honestly just because I don't really like the way they look. I generally just leave myself a note to check the backlinks or what to search for. Usually I try not to leave myself reliant on queries.

@the_sample_umm I collect and organize "ideas" like "here's a cool name I might want to use for something" or "here's a nifty title I could use for a book" in my "Primordial" or "Worldbuilding" folder and just tag them with fic/storyStem or fic/expandWorldbuilding or whatnot.

@the_sample_umm I don't use Obsidian for RSS (I use Feedly and Readwise, mostly) except insofar as I use Obsidian to take notes about RSS tools to tell people about when they ask me questions relating to RSS (like "how do I get paywalled newsletter content into my RSS reader")

@the_sample_umm Deciding what to save is a biiig question of metacognition and I don't always get it right. I tend to err on the side of efficiency, which means that I more often regret NOT saving something than "falling prey to collector's fallacy" or whatever.

But I do have a rule of thumb:

@the_sample_umm I make notes about stuff I think might ever be useful. I know it sounds trite, but the trick is to pay attention to things I actually do find useful, and more importantly, to moments I wish I'd save something.

Fail, do better next time. Fail, do better next time. Rinse, repeat.

@the_sample_umm I don't have a strategy for revisiting notes I haven't seen lately. It's not a priority for me, any more than "remembering everything I learn" is a priority for me. If something doesn't get used, it either wasn't useful or wasn't worth the effort to find.

Deadlines > Serendipity

@the_sample_umm Categorization vs. Organization is one of those semantically tricky notions, but, generally when I organize things into folders, I'm not trying to separate between categories like "history" vs "science" — those boundaries are very muddy.

Instead...

@the_sample_umm I try to organize by type, not category. For example, I now have a "forms" folder (i.e. government forms, i.e. taxes, social security cards, stuff I need for official documents) and not "financial vs. legal" because distinguishing between those categories was getting messy.

Somebody asked about my note about "examples of stupid walls" lol, it's basically "Great Wall of Gorgan," "the southwestern border wall in America," "the Great Wall of China" & Shulgi''s wall (Sumeria).

Based mostly on: worldhistory.org/wall/