Dis- and Reconnection with my PKM and Journaling Practice
These days I feel more uncomfortable with my PKM and journaling system overall. During the last months, I noticed that it feels like my life has more becoming about documenting what I do instead of doing something.
Like writing down meticulously what I did for how long was more important than getting stuff done or allowing fun in life. At my worst point concerning my documentation habits, I felt like shit if I hadn´t filled five pages a day in my A5-sized journal. I´ve documented when a pen ran out of ink or if I got another unimportant letter.
Overall it was some kind of false pride as I use up one journal every month. It felt like I was “the best / busiest” journaler in the world. My whole journaling system has evolved around using one journal a month.
However, I didn´t notice the toxicity until I watched a replay from an office hour within the Bujo U community, which is not available to the public. It was eye-opening in many ways for me. I journaled for the sake of it, not because I cared. This way I´ve become disconnected from what I wrote down and stopped taking action based on what I´ve noticed. I guess it´s why I feel like I´ve been running in circles for years. My loss of curiosity. My negativity problem. And many other mental struggles.
An additional factor might be that I got stuck in consuming the same type of content over and over again. My YouTube feed, my Spotify feed, my plan-to-read… everything seems pretty similar. Then I still highlight it, it ends up in Readwise… Most of the time I get bored with this type of content because I feel like I know 80% of the stuff already and think “Oh, that´s Atomic Habits quotation number 250” and so on. As a result I´m forcing myself to read something totally out of my comfort zone these days: The Song of Ice and Fire series.
As a representation of these struggles, my PKM also became cluttered with the same facts over and over again, as all of my highlights sync to Obsidian. Long story short: it was time for a declutter. My first attempt was with trash notes. It worked okay, but I knew that this wouldn´t be a long-term solution.
In addition to Obsidian’s poor mobile performance, even with a separate input vault, I noticed that it´s time for a change in PKM, in journaling, and in life overall.
As mentioned before I subscribed for the beta cohort of Ryder Carrols Writing for Being program. Now we are 1/3 through it and it opens my eyes in many ways. Totally worth it. Even if I struggle a bit as life throws everything at once on me these days.
In addition, I decided to allow myself to experiment with one or two new PKM apps. I decided to go for Tana and Capacities. Tana because I notice my outliner tendencies during journaling quite often, Capacities because it feels like a mix of Obsidian and Notion with a time-based approach for note taking, which is pretty intuitive for me.
I´ve played around with both. I´ve noticed that I love the nerdy look of Tana, but for linked notes, I prefer a block-based approach with better visuals as given in Capacities. After several PKM journaling sessions I became aware that I need more of a filing system instead of dumping everything into my PKM app for stuff like digital invoices etc. If I create that I won´t need an PKM app that has a mobile app at all, as long I can send stuff to the app from mobile conveniently.
Capacities provide that, as you can activate sending stuff into the app (and even to a designated workplace) with WhatsApp. All in for me. Within one week I´ve migrated my content creation process to this app. This is the second post I wrote from that app. I´m not used to it 100% yet, but it´s fine.
With Obisidian I decided to delete my trash notes finally. It was a huge step for me to delete 400 notes this way within 10 seconds. I´ve merged my daily notes into monthly notes and plan to export them to Capacities soon.
For the near future, I plan to declutter my Obsidian system further and only migrate to Capacities which feels worth the effort. So far 60–70% don´t feel like it. When this process is done I´ll keep Obsidian, but for Readwise only. I´ll sort the Readwise notes by creation dates in my file explorer and go through these notes like every other week. Highly inspirational stuff will go to Capacities directly. I don´t have a 100% perfect plan yet, as it´s still a work in progress.
For the first time in years, I guess I´ve managed my FOMO to some extent. In my journaling practice, I´m transitioning more to a back-to-the-basics Bullet journal practice. I´m stopping myself to force myself to fill a certain amount of pages every day. I´m improving my abbreviation system. I still force myself to journal for 10 minutes in the morning, but I don´t pressure myself to any amount of words, pages whatever anymore. For reference: just two months ago I pressured myself for 30 minutes in the morning, which I guess wasn´t beneficial as I wrote about the same things in the exact same words for weeks, making the reviewing practice unnecessary time-consuming
In addition, I´ve decided to commit to using an A5 travelers notebook for the rest of the year. I want my journaling practice to feel more light, so I decided on this size as a middle between the different thinking styles. I can easily get booklets in different grids and choose whether I want to put whole journals or just booklets into them. With this flexibility, I hope that I can get my “I have to fill it” under control. The cover is flexible and light-weight, but sturdy. I want it to develop a pattina over time. I want to treasure it as a trusted companion over the years to come.
Ok, this turned out to become about twice as long as I expected. Together with my full-time job, the apartment hunt of me and my boyfriend, and the coaching program the weeks and months ahead are pretty busy. But for the first time in years, I´m positive about that. Like “I know it will be stressful, but it will be worth it”.
