Hi Logseq community,
Saskia from Berlin here. I am a web developer in my main job and on the side I am a public speaker at conferences and events, write books, create online courses and more about the two topics that I am most passionate about. Growing and organizing all my knowledge and ideas is an essential part in al this. I have known about Logseq for quite a while because I’m very active in the world of productivity apps and tech in general. I was sceptical at first, because of:
- Local first: I’m running almost my entire digital life from the browser and have almost no desktop apps installed (except pre-installed ones) and don’t like cumbersome syncing workarounds. I’m a developer and tech enthusiast, but I don’t like my everyday tools to be too technically complex to manage - they should just work where ever I am.
- The editor: It looked quite intimidating with all the brackets and queries and special syntax - it felt like I had to learn yet another “programming language” just to take some notes
BUT … now I love it. Here’s why:
- Sync service: One of the first things I did when I chose to seriously try Logseq today was to pay my 5$ for syncing my Windows PC with my iOS devices - and it works. No Gothub or weird third party syncing tools needed.
- Features: Sometimes I love tables and data, sometimes a creative visual canvas. Logseq offers both with Queries and Whiteboards. Also I love that even though it’s an offline application, I can embed things like YouTube videos to watch them and take notes on them at the same time. The quick capture on mobile is great as well. I heard you can annotate PDFs. This would be amazing. The contents of my online uni degree program almost exclusively consists of PDF textbooks that I have to work through. The flashcards will be also really helpful for all the courses I take (my digital media degree, public speaking course and other learning projects).
- At work: We’re not allowed to install anything or host client info in the cloud without going through lots of privacy and legal stuff. So I opened the “live demo” (web version of Logseq) - created a local folder called “notes” and now I can use Logseq securely and locally without installing it as a desktop app. The bonus: My personal work management “graph” is not synced, so it’s separated from my main one which is for personal life and the knowledge building side of writing, teaching and giving talks in my side business.
- Localization: I’m glad the user interface is available in German (even though I’m fluent in English - but switching between languages all the time can take me out of my flow sometimes). I just wish the dates in the daily note / journal would be to (“Freitag” instead of “Friday”).
I can’t wait to learn more about this amazing piece of software.
Update after my first full day using Logseq:
Wow! I have been so productive and creative. The focus, mental clarity and speed of working with Logseq is something I haven’t found with other notes apps that I have used for a long time. And I learned:
- Zooming in into a block is so great for focusing! I created a subheading in today’s journal “what I have to get done today” and dumped my most important todo items there. When I had a focused work session, I just zoomed in to that part of my daily note - so I wouldn’t get distracted by my random notes and ideas
- You can first bring an entire page into your whiteboard, then drag out the pieces (blocks) you need and then delete the long page from the whiteboard again - obviously without affecting the actual content. I used this to write an article. I opened the article page in the whiteboard, dragged out “research notes”, “outline” and the part where the actual article will go, arranged them side by side and then deleted the page itself from the board. Now I can write and just glance over to my research notes and outline - without having to scroll much.
- Queries aren’t as hard to learn as they seem, and searching the forums is such a great resource. I already built query-based dashboards of: Tasks I completed in the last 7 days, all my active work projects with project manager, status and more, Waiting tasks with their blocked-because property (reason they are in waiting status).
- How to add an icon to a page (I don’t do it for every page, only for dashboards like: Meetings, Projects, Important Links, Waiting Tasks, People Directory)
- How to embed a block on another page. For example I have a daily meeting with my coworkers. I need some help with a task I struggled with today. So I embedded that task block in the “to discuss” section of the meeting note for Monday.
- How to move uncompleted tasks. I had one task that I couldn’t finish today. So I created a link to Monday, opened that journal in the sidebar and just dragged the task block over.
- It’s great that it lets you search when you click the “new page” button - this helps avoid duplicates.
- With other software I got frustrated because they said they were flexible, but squeezed me into their way of organizing things. Logseq is flexible and powerful but not overwhelming or confusing (at least to me)
These are only my learnings of day 1. Tonight I’ll spend the evening watching some more tutorials and dive in deeper. I only have one question so far: How do I change the date picker so the weeks begin on Monday. I wanted to mention next Monday in a few blocks and clicked on the first day of the week - it created a link to Sunday.
Have a great weekend everyone!
