“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”

A few days ago I wrote about Zettelkasten:

In the end, it just wasn’t for me. I tried it, and Obsidian is an excellent tool for organizing your work that way, but I think the problem I had with it was that the ratio of “volume of stuff that’s just there in my head” to “volume of stuff I need to keep in a second brain” didn’t justify the existence of the second brain, or at least not one organized in classic Zettelkasten fashion.

That remains true. However …

In the process of thinking about what to make of old blog posts I realized that one of my bigger impediments to blogging at all was a little personal confusion about what a blog is. In the past year I had a small crisis around my personal domains and realized things had sprawled and gotten a little too tangled up, so I got a new domain that solved a few problems the old one caused, and I went to some effort to establish new email addresses and sites. It was time to do all that, because I was pretty sure I was about to get thrown out of my work nest, and I had some ideas about what I needed to do to be ready for that.

But solving one problem – correcting for a lack of intentionality in my web presence over years – led to another one I only recently figured out, which was about having the wrong intentions once I got more intentional.

The brochure site months

I got very into the “personal branding” aspects of my web presence. I had some ideas about a small book, I had done some writing about work, and I was feeling defensive about what exactly it was I said I did there. So as I sat down to think about why I wanted to have a website, there was a “professional considerations” piece to it that loomed larger than it ever had, and I was thinking in the direction of “content marketing.”

I built that site and really enjoyed doing it. It was a chance to stretch a few web development muscles, and I really loved the way I’d managed to blend my photography and writing. And I liked the idea of positioning it as a slow-moving, professionally safe space where I could pull in work from past sites, but keep the focus on The Work Persona. I didn’t discount the value of a more personal, faster-moving site, so I focused on fixing up my microblog, too.

Actually maintaining that sort of web presence turned out to be a drag. The second the site was up and running it became a gigantic, statically generated Blank Page Problem. Over on the microblog I was just being me; on the “core” site I was struggling with being the kind of writer I sort of hate to come across out in the real world, trying to sound authoritative and opinionated about matters of professional import. I completely get that some people manage to strike a very authentic balance with writing about what they care about, and what they care about happening to be, in part, their professional life. I couldn’t make myself fill the page, so the site mostly sat.

Then I did get thrown out of the nest, and something I thought was kind of irritating but would eventually be surmountable when push came to shove actually became even more of an issue for me, because what had been a simple but misguided idea that I’d just gradually fill that site up with stuff as it came to me felt inadequately urgent.

I am very lucky to have a supportive partner and some other good voices around me, because after I spent maybe six weeks last fall using a period I’d known for months was meant to be restful downtime doing anything but resting, thrashing around, coming up with Big Projects, I just settled down and actually rested. I just stopped. Or rather, I stopped doing anything I would ordinarily believe I was supposed to do, and let myself do what I wanted to do as it occurred to me to do it:

… I am feeling good because I realized at some point over the past couple of weeks that I am doing all this because it is playing. I used to do a lot of little utility scripts and silly gadgets because it was fun and absorbing, not because it was hugely practical or efficient. It was just playing. I stopped playing for a long while. It feels good to play again.

Since January, I’ve slowly turned back to what I need to be doing, and I’ve been immensely grateful that my friends and network have been there for me as I find my way back to a job because there are parts of The Job Hunt that are a colossal drag – the grind of getting opportunities into the top of the funnel – and there are parts of it, once something works its way down the funnel that are hard in different ways.

The value of this site has played out a little differently than I imagined when I thought it was going to be a content marketing thing. It definitely does come up in interviews, because I’ve done writing for it that is about work stuff, but less HERE IS A BROCHURE OF MY THOUGHT LEADERSHIP and more “oh yeah, you know, I wrote about this very thing a few weeks ago, and found my thoughts changing a little once I thought it out more.” A few people say “oh, I’d love to read that if you don’t mind sending me the link,” but not many. But when they’ve asked there’s been, in funnel terms, a 100 percent conversion rate from top-of-the-funnel to middle-of-the-funnel. That’s great.

But the hidden half of that has been the very real struggle, after ten years in one place, of getting back into the swing of looking for my next thing to do, and shifting from that mode of sitting quietly with your hands folded politely in your lap answering questions as correctly as you can muster, to finding the people who want to have actual conversations and welcoming the opportunity they present.

It took getting all the way to the end of one very mechanistic, flat, incurious hiring process to flip a switch in my brain.

One of the interviewers as good as said “well, you’re coming from this environment you were in so you probably are this certain way” in the midst of a “here are nine questions, prepare your three-minute responses, we are not permitted to have a conversation that deviates from you answering this question” session. It was incredibly belittling and frustrating, and it finally sparked the thing that I guess you have to have sparked if you’re going to continue the process of going around asking people to give you money in exchange for having to use Outlook or whatever, which was a sense that my background – the places I’ve been, the things I’ve seen, and the work I’ve done – adds up to something more than a collection of self-published pamphlets about businessing.

Anyhow, the switch that flipped was, “this could get harder before it gets easier, but it’s going to suck hard and it’s not going to end well if I keep looking over my shoulder.” I, er, contain multitudes, and I have come to believe that the best way to get across who I am is to quit trying to draw a circle around me.

(I do not, by the way, have a “so I told that guy to shove the job” story to tell. I got declined, apparently very narrowly. I definitely would have taken the job, because I’m fine working against expectations. You cannot go from “studied philosophy” to “worked at a newspaper” to “administered UNIX systems” to “volunteered for airborne school” without feeling comfortable being misunderstood by everyone around you.)

So this site is now the way it is, instead of the Brochure About Mike it was meant to be, because this, more or less and as much as I’m willing to disclose, is me.

Okay, but something about org-roam?

Right. As I was saying. A few days ago I wrote about Zettelkasten, related some reasons I decided at the time it was not for me, and then gently defended what I took to be a mild challenge from someone who wished I’d given it more of a chance.

But if the point of this site is less to represent me as a unit of productive capacity and more to think out loud about my preoccupations as they emerge (and hence become its own sort of representation), then it did its work in this case, because over the weekend that post ended up being just a thesis that I applied to what I thought I’d want to use a Zettelkasten system for, flavored in part by my natural (and not always flattering) skepticism about why people get into these things.

But like all good theses, it is subject to dialectical forces – new contexts, conditions, or information.

In the process of trying to salvage something from hours of over-preparation, I realized I had a bunch of good material about what I think about certain things that was suffering from being stuffed into the mold of a very rigid and dysfunctional interview process that nevertheless had forced me to rethink my value proposition and set my sights a little higher than they were going in. And I also realized I have a few opportunities coming up – and will no doubt have more – to use that material very soon.

As I killed a little time waiting for Al to get home, my mind first went to “well, turn it all into a couple of very thoughtful essays about IT, inclusion, etc. the better to stock your website with brochures.”

Then I thought, “we told ourselves we don’t like doing that.” Or as a friend put it, “I thought you said you were over the idea of writing weird shit for LinkedIn.”

Then I thought, “but wow, it can’t stay in this form, because it’ll always smell like the janitor’s closet at the county jail when you try to get any good out of it.”

I realized I wanted to do with it what I’d sworn 48 hours earlier didn’t really make sense to me, which was to sort of draw dashed lines on the surface of that big, strangely shaped accretion of thought, then go at it with a hammer until I had a bunch of chunks I could label and repurpose. So I took some time to re-read the org-roam manual, look at some half-understood config I’d put in place when I was giving it a try post-Obsidian, and clear my head of the idea that I was going to some day write eight-dozen books about management thanks to Zettelkasten, or do anything particularly public at all, really.

Having done that, I started chunking out the ideas in that writing and “inserting nodes,” in the org-roam parlance.

I didn’t get too much into linking anything for now, preferring to start at the level of tagging. I once went to a talk then years later had an interesting exchange with the guy who invented the term “folksonomy,” and his ideas about free-tagging have stuck with me since. People often screw it up by assuming that free-tagging is somehow antithetical to “categorization” or other ways of making associations … oh, just read this for the problem with that. Briefly, I have gotten hung up in the past with the advice to build MoC pages, etc. but was encouraged by that guy to think instead of tagging as cow-pathing. Eventually, you will want to put up lights and signs, and before that you may even want to make a map of the best ones. For now, I am just being careful to tag. When there is a nugget in something that I didn’t manage to break down or separate from something close to it, I am giving it its own heading so I can make it a node with a tag.

Anyhow, I’m giving the whole thing another try because I have a practical thing to do try it out on, and it is already helping me: I have a presentation coming up and it’s great to go through that previous work shorn of a little of the original context.

Last year I went on a tear around personal knowledge management (PKM). It started with discovering Obsidian and really appreciating its out-of-the-box capabilities. I do think, if Emacs is just more than you can bear the thought of, that Obsidian is an excellent choice for the sort of text-as-organizing-data approach org-mode is simply best at.

That said, its fatal flaw is basically Markdown, which is not meant to bear the load of text as organizing data. You can use it that way, but after … two decades? … of Markdown, we are not conditioned to think of it that way, and any superset of the core emph/strong/link/image markup comes at the expense of its overall feel. I’m not saying it can’t bear more, I’m saying that the more you add, especially when you start getting into multiple characters to do things like wedge in HTML or what’s essentially XML, the more burdensome it becomes and the more unreadable your source text becomes.

Realistically, org-mode has a similar problem: To get the really good stuff out of it you are adding metadata at at least the heading level. The difference is that for the balance of its lifespan it has been like that, and its development is both enhanced and constrained by the fact that it is a creature of Emacs. There are affordances that can hide the worst of the clutter, and the inline formatting syntax is not much more verbose than Markdown when it is at all. Deciding to use org-mode is not a “buy the ticket, take the ride” proposition. You bought the ticket when you edited your init.el the first time, and org-mode is just part of the ride.

Anyhow, You can’t really get into Obsidian without being exposed to the whole Zettelkasten thing. It led me to Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes, a small book about how to build a Zettelkasten system and what to do with it, and I found that book very compelling.

When I contextualize my reaction to it, I’m going to own a few things up front:

• Like a lot of people, I was in the process of climbing out of a few years of lockdown, isolation, and anxiety. I had a certain kind of mental energy that was very inward-focused.
• I had a strong sense that my job was not going to be long for this world, but was just beginning to get some traction on things that mattered to me, so that energy was searching for an outlet.
• I had a few ideas for projects that I’d shelved for a period, but I was beginning to think that I needed to get going on them as part of my preparation for either being displaced or hitting the job market.

So I was primed for the Zettelkasten pitch.

But I’ve also been a sort of tech/nerd-adjacent type for decades, and was around during the heyday of GTD, 43 Folders, “lifehacks” before “lifehack” meant “refrigerate bologna and you won’t get sick eating it!” or “don’t run up the balance on your credit cards!”, and all the other productivity manias that blew through. This is me in 2005:

Sometimes I read a comment from someone who insists that his routine involves some insanely arcane and convoluted use of yarn and a special shell script he whipped up that reads crap down from his Backpack account and then squirts it into his Palm, makes a redundant backup on the server he maintains in Malaysia and produces printed 3x5 copies in triplicate, one of which he pins to his infant son’s sleeve before leaving for the morning (“If I died, I couldn’t live with him thinking his father went out the door without an action list and a plan!”).

… and me again in 2007:

While looking around for some info on “Getting Things Done” so I could share a summary, I came across:

“Allen says his martial arts background helped him appreciate the value of eliminating distractions.

“‘If four people jump out at you in a dark alley, you don’t want to be thinking about two e-mails you haven’t answered,’ he said.

Fending Off Four People - A Plan

@street, by alley

• run down street flapping arms and yelling for help (?) (save breath by not yelling?)
• run into nearby store? (make “nearby store” context?)
• make Bruce Lee noises to see if that works then run? (split into two actions? or is that too much?)
• prioritize possible ambush choices … by absolute order or relative priority? (make note: plan this ahead of time for future – someday)
• make folder and list for “@street” context … hasn’t come up before
• muggers in @mugger agenda list or defer due to one-time nature of encounter?
• followup – could I have run faster or yelled louder?

Basically, I guess, there is a part of me that reads these things as largely aspirational (which is fine), but also very hung up on the idea that we are one special system or weird trick away from realizing our greatness (perhaps naive, but also fine), and that once we’ve mastered it we will finally become productive (which is fine(ish?) to the extent it means “does enough work to keep job” but is terrible when such a mushy word becomes a proxy for human worth).

How to Take Smart Notes hits all those aspirational notes, recounting the remarkable tale of Niklas Luhmann and his astounding lifetime run of 60+ books and hundreds of articles. It’s an inspiring story, and I’m going to grant one point for sure: If one choice is to be inspired by a prolific academic who expanded the sum of human knowledge with his little slipbox, and the other choice is to be inspired by someone whose productivity system is self-evidently great because he has used it to organize a small empire of retail productivity enhancement books and accessories, I’m goin’ with the perfesser over there.

So I tossed myself into Zettelkasten-via-Obsidian. I had a few things I wanted to work on, I had years of material in different formats that needed to be atomized, and I was reading two or three books a week, plus dozens of articles. Like I said, I had a ton of nervous energy to displace because a ten-year run was about to end, and the last time I’d felt thrown out of the nest my comfort zone was “crabby, introverted autodidact.”

In the end, it just wasn’t for me. I tried it, and Obsidian is an excellent tool for organizing your work that way, but I think the problem I had with it was that the ratio of “volume of stuff that’s just there in my head” to “volume of stuff I need to keep in a second brain” didn’t justify the existence of the second brain, or at least not one organized in classic Zettelkasten fashion. That’s not to say I can hold every consideration of a writing project in my head. I benefit greatly, for instance, from the whole project notes thing that integrates magit and Projectile: I have an org-capture template that adds a note to a todo file in the top level of a given project (read: “repo”) linked to the parent heading. If I’m out and about and think about something material to my writing project, I put it in my inbox. It’s a vestige of GTD and the idea of a trusted system. I just don’t think it will help me in a mugging, and the way I write, share experience, and organize my thinking isn’t amenable to the atomicity of Zettelkasten.

Maybe I could have gotten there! I believe other people who say it helps them! I understand the gentle pull of tending a little digital garden! I just don’t think organizing knowledge is my particular life struggle, and I do not think getting better at it will be a huge life enhancer.

So, all that said, I really appreciated this post (somewhat) about org-super-links, which describes how you can get automatic back-linking into your org-mode headings. Even though Zettelkasten isn’t for me, I did come to appreciate automatic back-linking in Obsidian (and my brief excursion into org-roam).

Spring is here, so time to take Lou out

“Lou” is my Yamaha TW200, a little farm bike I bought as a compromise between the tiny and “bounce it between your thighs at stop lights” Honda Grom and the bulkier, vaguely miserable Royal Enfield Himalayan 400. “Vaguely miserable” because mine was a victim of a bunch of factory QA problems that left me feeling like I could never really trust it during break-in.

It is meaningful to me that when the tender cable for my Grom came undone and I didn’t notice it for six months the Grom had so little in the way of parasitic drain that the battery still had life when I got back to it. The Himalayan? It needs to be on a tender 24/7, and never off one and parked for more than maaaaaybe two weeks at a time. It’s just like that, and who knows, and the dealer I bought it from shook the whole issue off with “that’s how this price point is,” which helped me clarify why a Harley dealer was selling Indian-made motorcycles to begin with: You walk in, run over to that Harley, surreptitiously glance at the price tag, realize you’re in over your head but cannot abide the thought of not riding your new bike off the lot on that particular sunny Saturday afternoon, so maybe that Royal Enfield that looks sort of classic will do the trick, for about as much as the down-payment on your Harley was gonna be.

I mean, I went in wanting to buy mine up front. I’d read good reviews, liked the looks, and wanted something of about that displacement and size. The QA stuff, though, is miserable. It took two goes just to figure out that the bleed lines from the fuel tank were tied too tightly to the frame, creating a vacuum that constantly caused stalls. The dealership was plainly sick of my face before I could even get 500 miles on it, and it lives in this weird space where it is too big and not powerful enough. If anyone asked me today, and if they were not interested in the “adventure” pedigree, I’d tell them anything but an RE Himalayan. A Rebel 300 would probably out-perform it, and my TW200, at half the displacement, comes pretty close without having to wrestle the bulk.

Anyhow, Lou is my Yamaha TW200 and I love it. Fat tires, low-slung, pleasant, low rumble. It is simple and sturdy and it is the perfect bike for SE Portland’s pothole alleys and torn-up 82nd Ave. It goes just enough to hold its own for a ride up to Sauvie Island or maybe the back way out to Estacada. It’s a great in-city commuter.

This week it was finally warm enough and dry enough to start Lou up for the first time this spring.

TW200’s (t-dubs) are notoriously cold-blooded, so it didn’t want to go. I dumped some fuel treatment in and shot some starter spray in its intake and it turned over. I let it sit on high choke for a while, then turned it off, rinsed, repeated an hour later and then took it up the side of Mt. Scott. It was still sounding a tiny bit uneven while it ran the old fuel through, but the two runs since it has sounded smooth and healthy, and it turns over right away.

I love it.

Al’s still up in the air about finishing up her motorcycle endorsement, so we have the TW200 and the Grom sitting here. If she decides nothing doing on motorcycling, I’ll find the Grom a home and consider something that can handle two-up a little more gracefully. We enjoy summer date nights on a motorcycle, and the TW200 isn’t quite up to that.

I made “my journaling practice” the focus of some attention this week. I started out with org-journal, but ran into an issue with it I couldn’t untangle regarding line wrapping. I couldn’t understand what was even going on until I read that it uses its own org-derived major mode, which at least explained why it suddenly started working when I invoked org-mode by hand on a journal buffer, at the expense of god knows what functionality.

In the end, I decided “whatever.”

I was happy with my daily journal pages in Obsidian, which fully existed in my Zettelkasten. So I decided to set org-journal aside – I wasn’t planning on using many of its features anyhow – and focus instead on making org-roam dailies capture templates to suit my needs. At this point it just means I have a couple of quick keystroke paths to capture my morning and evening prompts in the current day’s daily page, which also gets used mostly just as a running log.

Being able to say “whatever” and set aside a bottomless round of troubleshooting is how I’ve committed to using Emacs this time around. Doom continues to mostly “just work” and has proven stable and manageable. At the same time, I’m being less adventurous. If something doesn’t seem right and doesn’t yield to a few common-sense experiments, I prefer to bounce off the issue and figure out what will “just work.”

I will say that the sqlite dependency at the bottom of org-roam makes me uneasy. It is odd for me to err in favor of something like that vs. trying a little harder to make another solution with fewer outside dependencies work. It’s just a taste thing that’s been developing more and more over the past few years.

And the whole thing isn’t peculiar to Emacs. It’s any extensible tool. Like, Yoda said the only thing in the Evil Force Tree is what you take with you, so don’t take a teetering edifice of other peoples’ poorly understood code in there.

Job hunting and writing

I realized in the process of preparing answers to 18(!) interview questions that I was doing more intense thinking and writing about why I show up at work and how I like to be at work than I have in a long while. I have done a few “what’s your personal operator manual” exercises, but not in a way that felt as high stakes as “I want really want this particular job.”

I’ve also been doing more writing about work lately, as part of the job-hunting strategy. I haven’t been comfortable with the mode I’ve been using to do that writing. It is a little too ponderous, a little too just-so. And informal analysis tells me LinkedIn does something with those reading time statistics it collects that also cause that form to work against me.

If you are mystified and gob-smacked by the flatly bizarre content that flows across your feed there, wondering “who on earth reads this?” the answer is what it always is with algorithms The Tech People cook up to solve engagement problems: They don’t have a meaningful way, yet, to assess the content, but they are committed to a project of “surfacing” the “best” content. So they assess the formal characteristics of the content that succeeds so they can seed the feedback loop. I’ve done this. I’d be galled with myself for forgetting it if I hadn’t remembered quickly enough.

So I’m going to experiment with a shift in writing approach, and use it as a practical application of Zettelkasten:

The practical writing I’ve been doing to prepare for interviews has engaged me on a different level. Stories play into it because even when the interview style is very conceptual I still steer my answers into the behavioral, giving interviewers something they didn’t even realize they wanted sometimes. So I have to think about what I’ve done, not just how I think things should be.

But an insight from my coach after a disappointing round of interviews has been ringing in my ears, too:

“Mike, they don’t want to hear your stories until they trust you enough to let you in a little more.”

So the change is just: I have a bunch of very concise writing I’ve done to prepare. It has touched on a bunch of stuff I care about and have done: change management, communications, people management, operational excellence, conflict management, and goal-setting. It starts small – a concrete question – grows into something bigger, because I’m inclined to story-telling – then settles back into something I can get across in a few minutes. It’s all so atomic that it wants to be turned into nodes, ready for slight rehydration as part of a different kind of writing I want to get better at, even once I’m done looking for work.

I’m interested to try it, because my writing comes from a certain tradition: Get it all out, pare it back, let something back in, take something else back out, back and forth until you’re asking for just the right amount of attention – nothing less than the lede promised, nothing more than the lede can bear. It’s like sculpting a big hunk of rock. This approach will be more like … Jenga? Starting from a compact, economical place and making sure no more is added than it can bear to accomplish something a little more ambitious than “capture the thought,” but still modest, and still balanced.

Anyhow, today is a little busy, so I’m wrapping early. I’m really looking forward to next week: It’ll be hectic on Monday and Tuesday, then Al and I are taking the Outfitter to Nehalem Bay for its spring shakedown: A few days of beach-walking, hanging out in Manzanita, and movies on the iPad.