blog/src/content/posts/2023-08-31-thoughts-on-organization/index.md

---
title: Thoughts on personal organization
date: 2023-08-31T13:57:29.022Z
tags:
  - organization
  - logseq
heroImage: ./calendarHero.png
heroAlt: pastel colored stationery background with a bunch of calendars and personal organization tools in a crayon drawing style
---

Many people don't really use a calendar of any sort to manage their lives.

I get it. Putting events into a calendar is kind of a chore. It's a menial relic
from work and none of us want to even think about creating events during our
coveted personal hours. We want to live our lives free from the constraints of
the time boxes on our screens.

On top of that, traditional calendar apps still primarily use email for the most
part (sending invites, updating times, etc.) and the new generation of calendar
apps suffer from the social network problem of having to get everyone on the
same app.

But to some extent, it's still valuable to have things down in writing rather
than juggling it in our minds all the time.

Which is why it's such a shame that the personal management story has always
been kind of fragmented. Calendars are supposed to manage the entire picture of
my personal schedule, yet they only see a small slice of your life. The only
things calendars can see automatically with no intervention on my part are
emails that are sent from airlines.

> [!NOTE]
> I'm sure Google or Apple could probably ritz up their services to scan text
> and guess events to put on your calendar, but that's missing the point. The vast
> majority of people I associate with rarely coordinate events over email in the
> first place.

## Journals

For a while I've always wanted a kind of personal information manager: something
that would put all my information in one place and make it easy for me to query
across apps. When I embarked on this search I wouldn't have thought that the
most promising tool would end up being a journaling app.

(by journaling app I mean something like [Logseq], [Obsidian], [Notion],
[Workflowy] or [the][roam] [million][joplin] [other][craft]
[similar][stdnotes] [apps][bear] that allow you to write some markdown-ish
content, store it, and then never look back at it again)

[logseq]: https://logseq.com
[obsidian]: https://obsidian.md/
[notion]: https://www.notion.so/
[workflowy]: https://workflowy.com/
[roam]: https://roamresearch.com/
[joplin]: https://joplinapp.org/
[craft]: https://www.craft.do/
[stdnotes]: https://standardnotes.com/
[bear]: https://bear.app/

The world of journaling apps is vast but relatively undiverse. Most of the apps
just have the same features others do, minus one or two gimmicks that makes it a
ride or die. But there's one important feature that I have started looking out
for recently: the ability to attach arbitrary metadata to journal entries and be
able to query for them.

While new apps have been cropping up from time to time for a while now, I think
a common trend that's starting to emerge is that these "journals" are really
more like personal databases. Extracting structured fields is extremely
important if you want any kind of smart understanding of what is being
journaled.

For example, I could write "weighed in at 135 pounds today", but if I wanted to
find previous instances of this or make any kind of history, I would have to
essentially do a pure text search. However, with structured data this could be
different.

[Logseq], the app that I've settled on, is backed by a real database, and most
importantly exposes a lot of this functionality to you as a user. It allows you
to query directly on properties that you write into your daily journal or any
other page, for example like this:

![recording some property in logseq](./minicross.png)

What you're seeing is me using my daily journals to add a todo item for reading
a paper and tracking how long it takes me to do the [NY Times daily
crossword][minicross] (which I've shortened to minicross). I just add these to
my journal as it comes up throughout my day, but Logseq is able to index this
and serve it back to me in a very structured way:

[datascript]: https://github.com/tonsky/datascript
[minicross]: https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords/game/mini

![performing a query in logseq](./logseqQuery.png)

With this, I could go on to construct a graph and see historical data of how I
did over time. You can see how this could be used for more personal tracking
things like workout records or grocery trackers.

The query tool is very simple and easy to learn, and makes it easy to actually
_use_ the information you wrote down, instead of just burying it into oblivion.
For example, I can write todo items inline in my journal and find them all at a
time as well. Here's all of the todo items that I've tagged specifically with
the tag `#read`:

![reading list in logseq](./readingList.png)

Notice how the paper I added as a todo helpfully shows up here. No need for a
separate todo list or planning tool!

The fact that it truly is a database means I can just shove all kinds of
unrelated information into my journal, do some very trivial labeling and get
some really powerful uses out of it.

In the future I'd like to do dumps for my sleep and health data as well
and have Logseq be my ultimate source of truth. I've started developing a
[calendar plugin for Logseq][2] that will have the ability to display numerical
data using various visualizations for this purpose.

[2]: https://git.mzhang.io/michael/logseq-calendar

> [!NOTE]
> As an aside, this isn't sponsored in any way. While this post makes me sound
> like just a Logseq shill, it's actually quite the opposite: they're an
> open-source project solely funded by donations. I've been donating to them
> monthly on [Open Collective] and they've been actively developing really cool
> features!

[open collective]: https://opencollective.com/logseq

## Privacy

Because people are dumping so much of their lives into journals, it's absolutely
crucial that boundaries are clear. Without control, this would be a dream come
true for any data collection company: rather than having to go out and gather
the data, users are entering and structuring it all by themselves.

**End-to-end encryption** is a technique that ensures data is never able to be
accessed by your storage or synchronization providers. If you are in the market
for some kind of personal tracking app, make sure it talks about end-to-end
encryption as a feature. While it's [not the end-all-be-all of security][1],
it's certainly a big first step. Do careful research before deciding who to
trust with your data.

[1]: /posts/2021-10-31-e2e-encryption-useless-without-client-freedom