collecting inspiration (& tools to use)

the biggest hurdle we have when it comes to writing blogs or journaling is: what do we even write about? every time we would sit down to write, all our thoughts vanished into the void. every opinion we have would be gone forever.

so here is how we (mostly) solved this problem, with a side of general knowledge management/second brain nonsense. we'd love to hear how other people go about this kind of thing too!

1. our pocket notebook

we carry around a tiny 10.5cm x 6cm lined notebook with a cardboard cover that we slapped some nice stickers on. every thought we have that we want to remember, whether it's a task, story idea, or tiny doodle, everything goes in there.

at least once a week, we go through the pages and move everything we wrote into its proper place. tasks go in our planner, story ideas go in obsidian, etc. then we mark the page with a small slash or x in our red pen so we know we went through it already.

2. our planner/journal

we have a hobonichi cousin that we adore. we have a page in there full of ideas we want to write about, whether they end up as a full piece to post to the internet or just a journal entry. we also use the diary section daily-ish, and periodically we read back through it for anything we want to write about more.

3. our firefox bookmarks

we used to save all our cool websites & articles & whatever in various separate apps like pocket, raindrop, or obsidian. but that added an extra step whenever we wanted to actually go back and read it. so we got rid of that friction and everything we read in our web browser that we want to save, goes in our bookmarks, always less than 3 quick clicks away.

we have a "to be read/to be sorted" folder right in our toolbar. everything that we happen upon that we want to save for later goes here. then eventually things get sorted into various other folders we have, like webcrafting resources or fun browser games.

if it's an article/video/whatever that we want to annotate or reflect on, that's when it gets put into:

4. our obsidian vault

this is the meat and bones of it all. most everything that we write is in here somewhere. we're gonna try not to ramble because it's Quite A Lot, we've been using obsidian for multiple years. but if you have any questions please ask, we love talking about this kind of thing :)

obsidian has a really cool web clipper extension that lets you highlight webpages and then either save the highlighted article in plain text to your vault, or save just your highlights as the content of a note. we do the latter, and then expand on the highlights with our own words.

there's a vast variety of ways to organize & connect your notes in obsidian. the way that has been most successful for us has been this (with a real example from last night):

we have pages for different, broad topics, such as "productivity" or "game development"
we save a new note, such as highlights from an article about capture notebooks that we found does a good job of putting our ideals about our pocket notebook into words
in the frontmatter/properties of that article note, we link "productivity"
obsidian can automatically show all the notes that link to the note you're currently viewing, so we can see everything we've collected about "productivity"
we can scroll through the "productivity" topic and notice, hey- there's a video with a quote we saved about building "systems" for the goals you want to achieve. that kind of connects to our pocket notebook, since its a system/routine that helps us with writing more & forgetting less!
then we can link those two notes together and... hm... we've been on a "productivity and journaling methods" kick right now, what's a way we could link all of that together? maybe "life systems," since it's more than just "productivity"
is that already a term? no idea. but maybe we could write about how we would define it, and what it includes for us... (blog post draft: initiated!)
...and then maybe we can make a thread on melonland about it! (you are here)

having all of our knowledge & inspiration laid out like that is the only way we would have come up with that idea! it's hard to parse through everything we know about productivity when it's nebulous thoughts in our brain. but when it's all there in writing, and it's organized in a way that makes it easy to make connections, it helps our brain make new connections of its own!