capturing time
when you find yourself lost in the sauce of your systems, walk away for a week. stop tinkering cold-turkey and see how easy it is to get back into their rhythms when you aren’t obsessing over them every day.
my notes still need to be simplified. i took a week away from my obsidian vault (besides my dailies) and it feels impossible to pick up where i left off. too many zones under construction, too many names and classifications that i have to find in my logs to see why they exist.
right before my trip, i revisited bob doto’s note on using journals as source material. this was an “oh, duh” moment for me – i’ve been trying to make individual journal entries into atomic notes, but they’re really sources for atomic notes. this seems easy enough for me to implement; i’ll probably create a source note for each quarter or year of entries and process them the same way i would a book or article.
but then how do i distinguish between a reflective “journal entry” note, what goes in my periodic notes, and what is a different type of ephemeral entry, like the summary of my trip from last week?
option 1: i don’t. everything goes in the relevant periodic (daily, weekly, etc) note, and my periodic notes are processed as sources. this feels 😐 because i like being able to refer to individual events / entries elsewhere in my vault.
option 2: entries are any note about me, my life, or my inner world, with no further clarification needed. these might be periodic notes, they might be memories, they might be prompted reflections; all are entries and included in time-based sources organized by when a note was created.
option 3: put everything into a single ‧₊˚✧ mega-timeline ✧˚₊‧ of periodic notes and other entries organized chronologically based on when the thing happened. so a note written in 2025 about a trip i took in 2005 would be contextualized in other notes from 2005.
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capacities is usually my notes app recommendation for people who want the sustainability of obsidian and the convenience of notion. it wasn’t right for me, but their onboarding gave me a big 💡 moment: a key part of their philosophy is contextualizing everything in time. see also multi-layered calendars.
building a consistent time perspective is what has been and still is missing from my system. when i am doing, reading, writing something is as important as what i am doing, reading, or writing.
i’ve spent more than a year trying to tackle this problem, trying to find an intuitive way to bind all of my notes and ephemera and reflections to specific coordinates in time.
although…
we can’t think about time without space, and contextualizing by space is simple in my system. a city or state or building or whatever is linked to in a note, and that note can be queried from the city, etc’s note. done. i could theoretically link to years and weeks, and i do, but the querying here would be way more complex.
but, yeah, i guess that’s what makes time so elusive in the first place: time is cumulative, it writes layers over itself, there is no fixedness.
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maybe that’s what we find under a lot of the disorientation we feel: we’ve removed so much of our spatial context – diminishing irl communities, owning less property and so less physical space, being perpetually online – and time consistently changes shape around us. (there’s a further thread to follow here about limited space, unlimited content, and the collective time warp we’ve felt post-covid.)
and maybe that’s the whole thing i’m trying to do here in all my writing and notetaking and archiving. maybe it’s less an attempt to capture myself and more an attempt to capture time.