I didn’t go looking for Logseq; it found me, as did the wider world of PKM, of which I had no awareness until Logseq caught my eye while my attention was focused elsewhere on the web.
I didn’t know it would be worth exploring, except that Logseq helped me recognize the unnamed yet unmistakable sinking sensation I’ve had in all these many years of pouring my work life into OneNote: Where is it? I have spent a not-insignificant amount of every day asking that question, unaware until now that there might be a method available to me that could reduce, if not eliminate, that friction.
I am a huge fan of OneNote; in my book it is the most underrated Microsoft app, its tag-summary functionality is genius, and I have spent countless hours bending the app to my will, tagging, linking, backlinking, color-coding and grouping to create a robust GTD system within it. I rarely use One Drive for document storage; OneNote is a much more contextual environment for organizing disparate yet related documents, and easier to navigate.
Yet for all that, when presented with the need to put my eyes on the latest thing that someone said about that particular project, I freeze. Where is it? Search turns up 40 pages, 39 of which lead me to something related, maybe, but not the exact thing I’m looking for, cannot name, but which I know exists, somewhere. I am deeply invested in OneNote. I am comfortable in it. I am nervous about abandoning it. Yet it taxes me multiple times each day with nonzero amounts of friction just trying to locate what I need.
Will Logseq’s promise of frictionless data capture and retrieval free me from the burden of maintaining an organizational structure of notebooks, sections, pages and elements? Or will it be its own form of procrastination, an alluring method, cool interface, and bottomless rabbit hole that leaves me as lost as I can sometimes be in my familiar OneNote?
We’re about to find out. Knowing nothing of Obsidian, Capacities, Tana or any of the other PKM platforms – heck, I hadn’t even heard of them or that term until last week – I aim to stick with what I found first, and take this slowly. Journal-style freeform data entry is not so much my concern; thorough retrieval and task management, GTD-style, is. I know enough at this early stage that I need Logseq to give me a rock-solid method for clarifying my inbox and for monitoring and prioritizing my Next Actions. If Logseq’s methods cause me to lose sight of what I need to do next and to manage multi-step projects, I will have lost more than I might gain. So I will try to get the basics of daily journaling, linking and simple to-do maneuvers down, and let it grow on me. Let’s see where we are after a couple of months.
Meantime, I’ll be looking in on these discussions for guidance. Thanks for inviting me in.
