I have been reflecting on the loss of time absorbed by small and glorious obsessions that present themselves before me in windows of time that always feel like perfect timing. How on earth could I say no?
I was speaking with my therapist about how I had to pivot my plans to travel to stay more local. I had grand plans, but as the planned date approaches, I felt my world crashing down. I felt unable to do things I was once very excited to drop myself into, explore another world, another side of myself for a night or a weekend. Although, I am pleased with the pivot I was reviewing old to do lists and am always amazed by the stuff I was working on or where my energy was going at different points. I have the realization after the fact, oh yeah, I was doing that instead of what I need to be doing for work.
I am going to go through a cycle of when a fixation becomes a distraction and then a to-do. This spring I became became obsessed with the library. I would request a book and go to the central branch to pick it up and would end up browsing and find a bunch of other books to check out. Then, I essentially assigned myself to read this books, take notes to be stored in a somewhat organized digital or in a physical notebook. What ended up happening is I had this backlog of work I had to do once I finished reading a book that I would put off because I wanted to keep reading. So it became like a second job trying to read and annotate all of these library books for no particular reason or output.
I think it was a year or two ago when I fell in love with reading again in a "new way". I felt so inspired I wanted to hold on to the words, thoughts or memories that came up while reading. Reading shifted from a passive activity to an active one. I had an a desire to keep track of these notes and quotes in a common place journal. Which I did, for a bit. Even joined Jillian Hess's commonplace journal club, could not keep up and probably shared maybe 5 quotes.
The inefficient process of note taking looks like this:
- Read (usually in bed) and put a small post it note on passages I want to revisit or connect to another piece of writing.
- Finish the book.
- Take notes, usually in the form of verbatim quotes, sometimes with annotations, in a notebook or digitally
- If the passage is really long or there are multiple noteworthy passages on one page I take it back to the library and make copies. These copies usually remain unannotated in a pile.
In attempt to reduce the overwhelm of noting an entire book, I tried taking the notes intermittently before finishing the book to break it down into smaller chunks. Still split between they physical and digital, my notes felt like walking through a maze of scattered piles, an illegible mess ready to blow away at the slightest gust of wind or simply a sneeze. My leisure activity became work and I wanted a change in process.
And then Podge's digital garden offering came into my inbox. I absolutely recommend learning notion from Podge and taking this course. I had been trying to use/learn notion haphazardly for a few years with no success. Podge understands the trap of wanting to use notion and downloading templates realizing you have no idea how to use them for your own needs. I learned some basics of building a database and aesthetic formatting and now I actually have a somewhat organized way to place all the articles and notes in a digital space. What I love about Podge's course is their emphasis on metacognition as the process of figuring out how your brain works which will inform how you build your dashboard. They have a wealth of knowledge in Notion and running a small business as well, so there is a good chance if you describe what you are trying to do they well have an idea if that is an existing function in notion or suggest a workaround that meets your needs.
Through the process of working with Podge you will learn how to overcome the overwhelm of not knowing where to start by setting the expectation that whatever you are building shouldn't stay the same, kind of like the ethos of digital gardening. It's a living system that will need to be adapted as your needs, interests or goals change. One of the of things I loved is by learning how to build a database from scratch, you realize what information you are trying to keep track of. Sometimes this means rebuilding the database. For example, built a few databases to track my reading, noting, and writing and realized this could be one. As you use it you realize what works and what doesn't on your own versus copying what someone else made and hoping it works for your brain as well, finally realizing it doesn't and then being at square one with no idea of how to start again. The only way I learn is by doing and Podge is an excellent teacher who gets the challenges of learning and is willing to listen and adapt to your needs by demonstrating while you build in real time.
As I sat down to write this several days ago, the intention was to summarize the books from my last library haul. Commentating on my library fixation, inspiring on one hand and a distraction on the other, turned into a project I don't have time for. Yet, as I am finishing this letter I am grateful for learning from Podge and developing an infrastructure for future studies and writing practice. Book reviews are coming soon, but I want to highlight a couple of people's personal webpages I consider to be an inspiration for what I want to create in my own version of a digital garden and where I learned about their digital presence.
Click here:
- Wendy Carlos / Serviette's newsletter
- Maggie Appleton / Podge's Digital Garden course
- Cosma / Jessica Dore's newsletter
