Hey, I also started to use Logseq just recently.
Read blog posts, and watched YT videos basically. The idea of analysing other peopleâs graph is great because it gives tangibility on all the features.
Then, I could suggest you create a âsandboxâ graph for one topic youâre interested in, and start taking notes on it, you will get the sense of your needs.
As the way I understood it, the app is about:
- Creating pages with logically indented blocks
- Link together what needs to be linked together (there are different ways of doing this)
- Add metadata to pages and block
- Retrieve the info (pages and/or blocks basically) after you have added them
The **Retrieve** part is where Logseq (or we can say, all these new note-taking apps) main innovation is.
You can retrieve info in different ways:
- CMD+K: search for a specific page or block
- Looking at âLinked/Unliked Referenceâ bottom part of a page
- to see all the block the opened page is referred into
- Create custom tables (or list) of pages/blocks â with Queries
At the end, this seems to be it. If you donât add any metadata to a text, that text could be hypothetically lost, or at least it is not lost until you can retrieve with in your mind
.
Limitations
The view on the retrieved data is not that flexible.
In the Linked/Unliked Reference section, at the moment, you can only filter what you don't want to see.
The View of the results of Queries is also very strict.
Also, tables are not that usable, at least at the moment.
Organization
You are not allowed to have folders in Logseq. If part of your graphs is about a strict and clear classification (I don't know, something like a Bird Taxonomy), you can't put them in some separate folders, or even virtual folders.
You perhaps have to create a page that collects all the taxonomy, so you will need to write the pages of the birds inside the collection page one by one, and indent them by the taxonomy inside the blocks of the collection page. Canât drag-n-drop dozens of pages just like that like you would with folders.
So the Retrieve part is kinda connected to the view and organization part.
If you want to have different views and organizations of your data, you have to add a good amount of metadata to your pages and blocks, then create targeted Queries based on your choice of view and available metadata.
The Journal section was created to solve one problem: asking yourself âWhere should I put this page/info?â
So some Logseq users may advice you to put everything, or the majority of your info, inside the date of a Journal (most probably the same date of the day youâre writing the info).
Then, to add metadata to the text added in the journal.
Example:
A Todo regarding Client [[ACME]]
So you write your todo inside the Journal, âSend Invoice nr. 8900â, and then add the tag #ACME to the same block, or the parent block of the todo.
You then should have some queries that would allow you to retrieve all the todos for a specific client. And that would probably be inside another page outside the journal, somehow organized base on your needs.
Yes, the Journal does solve the problem of âwhere I should put thisâ, but on the long term, you may have some part of you graph well organized, meaning you may not need to ask that to yourself, you already know which part of your graph the new info should be put in.
In that case though, somehow I still find a bit of friction to connect these new âstableâ info, because each time I need to put a link inside the newly created page, that connects it to the interested part of my graph. Sometimes, I do miss having the opportunity to have some small hierarchies, some folder-like structure for part of may graph.
Because, for some single pages, in order to arrive to them, you still need to traverse a path of several pages (in the bottom Linked Ref. part) to arrive to the one you need, just like you traverse folders.
Or you just need to remember all the page names, and arrive to the one you want by writing in the search field after pressing CMD+K. I whish I had that kind of superpowerful memory
.
Hope this all text could be of help to smooth out your introduction to Logseq usage.