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| title | date | tags | heroImage | heroAlt | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thoughts on personal organization | 2023-08-31T13:57:29.022Z |
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./calendarHero.png | pastel colored stationery background with a bunch of calendars and personal organization tools in a crayon drawing style |
After working for quite a bit I like to catch up with some old friends from time to time, when I made a surprising discovery -- many of them don't really use a calendar of any sort to manage their lives. Tracking something that happens more than a week into the future is generally out of the picture.
But I understand. Putting events into a calendar is kind of a chore. Calendars that are standards-compliant are still primarily use email for the most part (sending invites, updating times, etc.) and calendars that aren't standards-compliant won't be compatible between different people unless they're using the same service.
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 without more information. The only things calendars can see automatically with no intervention on my part are emails that happen to include .ics files.
I'm sure Google or Apple could probably ritz up their mail servers to scan text and try to see if there's events without there being an actual .ics file, but that's missing the point. The vast majority of people I associate with rarely sends email events anymore.
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 million other similar apps that allow you to write some markdown-ish content, store it, and then never look back at it again)
The world of journaling apps is vast but 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.
I think the community is starting to realize that these journals are really just databases, and extracting structured fields is extremely important if you want any kind of smart understanding of what is being journaled.
Logseq, the app that I've settled on, is backed by a Datascript store and 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:
- ... other content ...
- minicross:: 34
- ... other content ...
I use this on my daily journals to track how long it takes me to do the NY Times daily crossword. But Logseq is able to index this property in particular and let me query on it later:
I can write todo items inline in my journal and find them all at a time as well. As an example, here's all of the todo items that I've tagged specifically with #read:
The fact that it truly is a database means I can start piling things in here and automatically perform data extraction for a more complete picture of my daily life. 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 also started developing a calendar plugin for Logseq that will have the ability to display numerical data using various visualizations by using the D3 library.
Side note: this isn't sponsored in any way. While this post makes me sound like just a Logseq shill, it's actually quite the opposite; I've been donating to them monthly on Open Collective and they've been actively developing really cool features!
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 feature that ensures data is never able to be accessed by your storage or synchronization providers. Of course, end-to-end encryption is not possible unless the entire software is able to be scrutinized by the user or community. Do careful research before deciding who to trust with your data.