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I mentioned that Zim desktop wiki is an important part of my day to day workflow. I want to talk about why.
I'm a paper guy. I like to write stuff on paper. I like to use a soft pencil or a fountain pen. For the longest time I was writing into a paper noteboook I was carrying with me all the time. It felt right to take notes and add tasks just in the flow of the text. At first I'd mark pages with open tasks with a small sticky piece of paper. When a task was done, I'd remove the sticky. But this quickly became a chore. First of all, I kept loosing the small sticky papers all the time. Soon I had little batches of stickies lying around all over the place. But worse, as the number of tasks grew, I lost track where which task was in the notebook. For a time I experimented with different colors, then I wrote little symbols and tags on the stickies, then I was fed up and switched to normal-sized post-its for the task and put them on the page, where the relevant context information was written. That quickly went downhill, making the notebook all but unusable. So I switched to a physical task board, Kanban-style, putting large sheets of paper instead of post-its.
For a while that was all good and well. Then the pandemic struck and we relocated into our home offices.
My beautiful Kanban board sat there, all by itself in the office. At first I set up a new board at home. I have a large whiteboard in my home office that was well suited for a taskboard. But I quickly noticed that my workflow was like this:
1. make notes while in a videocall
2. every few days I would go through my notes and look what remained to do
3. put the open tasks on the board.
4. work through the notes, ignoring the board
5. every few days clean up the board
Well, I'm not complaining. It worked. It was basically my notebook of old with break-out tasks. Sort of. It left me unsatisfied. So into the rabbit hole I went: procrastinating by reading how to be productive.
You probably know the drill. To avoid doing boring things, you do useless things. I read about productivity hacks, tools, methods, Orgmode, Notion, Todoist, PARA, GTD, Tiddly, ZTD, WTF, SNAFU, blablabla. OK, I lied. I said "useless things", I should have said "mostly useless things". Because one thing was useful. I understood, what I actually wanted.
1. I need a way to take notes.
2. I need a way to write down tasks.
3. I want a way to write down tasks in the middle of note-taking, inline.
4. I want a way to see all my open tasks. Over all notes.
5. I want a way to rebuild context quickly to understand my tasks.
I basically need what I did with my notebook. And a solution to recover tasks and relate tasks and notes quickly. Surprisingly enough Zim Desktop Wiki can do just that.
The idea behind Zim Desktop Wiki is a good one. It is basically a Tiddlywiki with a local fat client that saves everthing in flat text files, filed into different directories. You can reference between notebooks and within notebooks by name. You can insert tasks, ie. a checkbox, anywhere in a note. You can freeform tag pages. And you can tag tasks. En block or individually. You can summon a list of all tasks in your Zim wiki with the press of a button. Tagged. With references to the surrounding note. Nirvana.
I'm using Zim for a few months now. It still performs admirably. I do not miss anything. Furthermore, Zim has a number of plugins (tags and tasks are two), expanding its capabilities in many ways. Among them is a Journal. Which led me back to journaling.
I've taken up the habit to journal my day in Zim. Thanks to tags and inline tasks this allows me to "stream" through my day, having everything at hand. If I need to deep dive into something I open a new page, tag it, and reference it in the day's journal. Sometimes I add tasks, tagged of course, to those pages. It works beautifully.
Furthermore, this reminded me to take up my weblog again. This led me to gemlog. And this entry. Which was written in Zim ;)