My first few days with Logseq

Last Saturday I wrote about notes and knowledge management and I committed myself to using a new tool, Logseq, as my primary tool. It’s been a few days and I wanted to give my initial thoughts.

A shift in mindset

While it doesn’t have anything to do with Logseq, I absolutely had a shift in mindset about notes and how I approach them. Yes, I still take them mostly on my iPad in OneNote, but now I’m doing more to manage that information. Prior to Eric’s talk last week at Cincy Deliver, I looked at notes as something I took and then bitched about because they were hard to search.

As I mentioned in my Saturday post

I take notes. Eric manages knowledge.

That was a shift in mindset that has taken hold in a big way. I’m all in on managing the information I capture and being able to organize it in a way that makes sense so I can easily find it later.

Logseq

I installed Logseq on my new MBP on Saturday and immediately started entering data. The first journal entry was about the blog post I wrote on Saturday.

After that, I started to transcribe my Azure study notes that are currently written on a stack of 3x5 index cards. When Monday hit, I started using it for work notes.

I’ve been keeping up on work notes, entering them as soon as a meeting is done. I’m still toying with the idea of attaching an image of my original handwritten notes to the transcribed version.

Organization

I didn’t really have a plan for how to organize things, and I don’t recall Eric really talking about it, so when I started writing, I had all sorts of questions I had to work through before I started feeling productive. I would start down a path and quickly realize it wasn’t achieving what I thought it would achieve, so I backed out and tried something new.

What’s awesome is that Logseq makes it really easy to change your mind about things. It’s also smart enough to merge pages if you happened to name something in a similar, but not exact, way.

When I started entering work notes on Monday, I did put some thought into how I wanted things organized. Since I’m on a new project with new people in a different office, I was explicit about all of it. I have pages for the project, individuals I’m working with, notes from the learning I’m doing, and more. I figured if I ever need to pull out the work stuff into a separate graph, it’ll be easier with the conventions I introduced.

Git integration and synching with other machines

I enabled the git integration and created a private GitHub repository so I can push/pull changes from any of my machines. I realized pretty quickly that I need to remember which machine I’m on and ensure all machines are in sync because I did have a pretty ugly merge conflict over the weekend.

I want a way to view the notes on my iPhone, but I don’t want to pay for a sync tool. I haven’t quite figured out how to make that work yet, but it’s high on my list of things to get working. I don’t necessarily want to edit notes on my phone, but I do want to have access to the information whether I’m behind a laptop or just out with my phone.

Growth

My graph looks like this after only a few days

I really love drilling down into this view and see the connections between notes. It’s helped me find some places where things weren’t connected like I thought they would be.

A discussion with a friend

A friend and coworker who was also in Eric’s talk last week asked me earlier today if I had given Logseq a look since that’s the last thing we talked about on Friday before going our separate ways for the weekend. I was excited to show him, so we had a 30-minute call to discuss Logseq and knowledge management today. He’s not as convinced as I am yet because he has some specific requirements for his note-taking application. I get that, and even though I seem excited about Logseq, I’m not sure if it’ll be the tool I use in the longer term.

We’re going to reconnected about this topic in a week or so.

Questions

• Should I have a separate graph for work stuff?
• Do I care about unlinked references?
• Are there plugins I should be using?

Final Thoughts

I did a little research into Obsidian today because I mentioned it’s a tool I wanted to love, but could never really get into. What I discovered is that it does everything Logseq does and is probably a little more polished. I’m not going to switch, but it’s good to know it’ll be a solid alternative if I ever decide to switch.

I have really enjoyed these first few days - the magic is still there. I’m going to keep learning how best to use Logseq and continue entering anything and everything because I think it’s something I’ll get a lot of value with the more I use it.

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