How to become the historian of your social groups?

Read to the end to see how China imagined the Western world in 1894

Hello everyone, long time no see! I hope you didn't miss your weekly dose of Personal Knowledge Management tips too much. I am actually writing this newsletter sitting next to my boarding gate at Shanghai Pudong airport, waiting for my flight back to Seoul. I just spent two incredible weeks travelling around China but unfortunately, I couldn't find enough downtime to write this issue. So here we are now.

I didn't have time to write my newsletter but I still wrote about 8000 words documenting my trip. Like I said earlier, most of my writing is not public, but it doesn't mean it's not important. Far from it. Once it gets into my personal knowledge system, it will be useful at some point. For example, these 8000 words will be the starting material for some future travel essays.

So today, I am going to show you how I do my journaling using a daily note template and my calendar app.

People tend to use their calendar app to save future events. I do that too of course. For my trip in China, I did put the time schedule of various flights and trains I booked in advance. But why limit ourselves to future events only? Why not record past events as well? And that's exactly what I do. I put events in my calendar to remember the flow of my day with the location and even sometimes a quick note about who I was with at that time.

I kind of became the de-facto historian of my different friend groups. What did we do on April 1st, 2023?

So during my trip in China, at the end of each day, I would sit down and write in my journal (which is stored in my notetaking app alongside my digital garden). I looked in my calendar as a refresher to be sure not to forget anything.

You may be wondering why I don't do everything in one spot in my journal. The reason is simple. I learned that there are some tasks that are better left to specialized tools. A calendar app is just the perfect tool to do one thing and one thing only : record events. That way, I don't have to try to bend my notetaking app into something it wasn't designed for (and oh boy, did I try to bend it to my will many times)

My notetaking app (Obsidian btw, for those interested) is good at storing thoughts and ideas like I demonstrated here. So that's what I do when I journal every day. And to reduce friction, I use a daily note template that generates something like this for me every single day :

It acts as a daily dashboard for my day to day activities. It's perpetually evolving according to my needs and experimentations. For example, I tried to implement some productivity tip in the Making Fast Decisions section but I haven't filled that part for a while so I think it's a failed experiment.

I guess it's a lesson I keep learning. Once again, I was trying to bend my notetaking app into a task manager when a specialized tool like Trello would have been way better.

The last section is my diary where I write down my thoughts of the day. That's where the 8000 words for my Chinese trip were written. And the beauty of this system is that I can connect it to notes in my digital garden to deepen my reflections.

It's actually a virtuous cycle. Daily notes get deeper because of notes in my second brain and notes in my second brain get created from all the experiences I write down in my daily notes.

So don't be afraid to get out there, live fully and experience things in order to fuel your own PKM system. On that final note, I am boarding my plane. See you next week!

P.S here is how China imagined the Western world in 1894 (Instagram reel)