An Introduction To Thinking Process Using LogSeq
Table of Contents
What Is LogSeq
— Outliner Format
— Plugins/Themes
— Use Cases
Thinking Process and LogSeq
Outro
What Is LogSeq
Taken from its website:
Logseq is the open toolbox for workflows that deal with lots of information: task management, pdf annotations, flashcards, whiteboards
LogSeq is one of the so many tools for note-taking-app out there. It helps us to manage our thinking process, our thoughts, ideas, and so many things that come from our mind, we can move our stuff from our brain to a note with outliner format.
Outliner Format
Taken from Wikipedia:
An outliner (or outline processor) is a specialized type of text editor (word processor) used to create and edit outlines, which are text files which have a tree structure, for organization. Textual information is contained in discrete sections called “nodes”, which are arranged according to their topic–subtopic (parent–child) relationships, like the members of a family tree. When loaded into an outliner, an outline may be collapsed or expanded to display as few or as many levels as desired.
It’s different from paragraph format, which takes an extended form of statements. It separates things into the parent-child structure and becomes a data structure, something like this
I’m using Markmap plugin to visualize this section. For me, it's so natural to use an outliner format, because that is how our brain works rather than a paragraph or long-sentence format.
Outliners are used for storing and retrieving textual information, with terms, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs attached to a tree. So rather than being arranged by document, information is arranged by topic or content. An outline in an outliner may contain as many topics as desired. This eliminates the need to have separate documents, as outlines easily include other outlines just by adding to the tree.
Plugins / Themes
LogSeq is an open-source tool note-taking-app, its repository can be found here: https://github.com/logseq/logseq
It is just like, WordPressit’s very customizable via plugins and themes.
Like I’ve said before that I’m using MarkMap plugin, we can install so many plugins from the community or official plugins depending on our needs including its themes, we can choose a theme that suited our needs.
Use Cases
As a Students
- Review notes
- Memoize facts
- Outline essays
As an Academics
- Review notes
- Manage sources
- Investigate claims
- Outline papers
As a Writers
- Review notes
- Combine ideas
- Manage with stages
- Outline content
As a Project Manager
- Retrieve notes
- Create dashboards
- Manage tasks
- Outline documents
As a Developers
- Retrieve notes
- Decide on solutions
- Memorize shortcuts
- Build a personal wiki
Thinking Process and LogSeq
Let’s take this article as an example. For each article from this publication, I’m not creating on the fly, just by opening Medium and start writing. Before I’m publishing an article in this publication, I have a page in my LogSeq called The Drafts. This page manages all stories that I want to publish to Medium.
The processes themselves will look like these
- First, I’m thinking about the title
- Second, I’m starting to think about what story I’ll tell to my readers
The second part is a process of deep thinking. With the outliner format, I can separate many topics into parent-child subtopics, and if I visualize it will be like this
This is a “map” of this article.
My “drafts” now contain many articles that managed to publish on Medium
My thinking process starts from
- What is the value of my current story?
- Do I need to research some topics? Maybe some topic that I don’t know yet or a topic that I want to dig deep for more information about it
- What topics that I want to share? For any topic that I think it’s too big, I need to separate it into multiple sub-topics, this is where Outliner format really helps me, if any a topic that I think it’s too complex or too big I can use Outliner format to convert it into parent-child topic-subtopics and become like tree data structure
- If I think it’s enough, I need to start thinking about it, it's a part of my end of the story. It tells about the conclusion or just a close statement of the current story
I’m writing down all of these components, and reviewing them via mindmap. Reviewing our thinking process using visualization tools like mindmap will really help us, rather than just thinking it inside our brain. If we just think inside our brain, it looks like a recursive call to our own brain, it will take much effort and energy. Just put it down to some note (I’m using LogSeq), read it, view it via mindmap, and you will feel that really productive and also objective to your own thinking.
Outro
I’ve just said that we need to manage our thinking process and also use a good tool, LogSeq, this process and the tool actually is a result of reading a book called "Building A Second Brain" (BASB), I really recommend you to read that book. This book really helps me to manage my thinking process using a tool like LogSeq as my Personal Knowledge Management (PKM).
Related story:
