We discuss our experiences with conferences pre and post-pandemic, the psychological hurdles of public speaking, and our evolving use of Obsidian for personal knowledge management (PKM).

📖 CHAPTERS

• 00:00 Overcoming the Fear of Public Speaking
• 11:40 I LIKE TRAINS
• 13:15 Exploring the Rust Programming Language
• 20:15 Obsidian Daily Note System and Priority Tasks
• 32:45 Using Spaced Repetition for Capture
• 46:15 Morning Routine and Habit Formation

🔗 LINKS

Ours

• https://robinwinslow.uk
• https://noboilerplate.org
• https://lostterminal.com
• https://modemprometheus.com
• https://phosphenecatalogue.com

External

• A System For Writing - Bob Doto
• Clojure: Turtles All The Way Down
• Rust: Turtles All The Way Down
• Fasterthanli.me
• Obsidian.md

🧑 CREDITS

Decapsulate is a NAMTAO Production (namtao.com)

It is hosted by:

• Tristram Oaten (https://mastodon.social/@0atman)
• Robin Winslow (https://union.place/@nottrobin)

This work is BrainMade (https://brainmade.org)

Transcript

DC2

[00:00:00]

Tristram: A month ago I went to my first conference in five years. I think.

Robin: Wow. Tell me about it.

Tristram: I used to go to conferences all the time before the pandemic. Before the pandemic started and I realized that I had lost the, lost the habit I’d, up until that point, I’d pushed myself very, very hard to, into public speaking positions.

Whenever there was something at work that needed a presentation or if there was a, like a, a club at work where people would bring little presentations and talk about things that they liked, I would force myself to do them because at one point I was really, really scared and terrified of doing them

Robin: Yeah.

Tristram: sort of exposure

Robin: Uh, and

Tristram: and,

Robin: is it?

Tristram: throughout my working life, I’ve tried to do these whenever there’s an in-person thing.

and it started out small in just volunteering for like doing a presentation on the work we were doing something like that. But by the end of the 2010s, I was speaking at closure conferences, specifically closure X in London, the first time I just had a, lightning talk in my back pocket.

And the next year I actually wrote a specific talk for. Closure X closure, by the way, perhaps some of our listeners might not know, um, is a lisp programming language. It’s the one with all the ens. Uh, it’s based on, based on Java. It’s the cool one if there is such a thing as a cool lisp.

But, uh,

Robin: people say people that use it. Yes.

Tristram: yes. Right, exactly of the lisps, it’s of, it’s, it’s perhaps the coolest.

the first talk I did at closure X, I actually repurposed into one of my rust videos, one of my very early rust videos. Um, the first slide is, have I got a deal for you?

And it was about how great closure is. Um, because Rust and Lisp were so similar in many regards, I was able to reuse much of that into a, a rust talk.

Robin: you’re at risk of exposing your, your, your patterns. I mean, you’re like, you know, closure. Wonderful. The best thing in the world, everyone should use it. Rust. Wonderful. Best thing. What should you said?

Tristram: Right. I mean, I, if if tomorrow I find a new language that’s better than rust, I will start talking about that. There’s just been nothing, nothing left. Oh, I, I had to look it up ’cause I’ve, I, it’s seven years ago, um, turtles all the way down was my closure video. And then

Robin: that.

Tristram: years ago, right. I rewrote it into rust turtles all the way, all the way down.

’cause really I’m talking about like the, the macro system and how you can like build, build on the language without anyone’s asking permission. Without asking permission from anyone,

Robin: saying is it’s really nice to have something that’s sort of written in its own language, I guess a whole system. language, basically it’s like, you know, you can, you can create the pieces, the fundamental bounding building blocks, and then you can build up on them and it’s all within the same, um, the same syntax.

Tristram: right? Yes, exactly. Like the, the way the way you write a python stack is you build very fast plumbing in sea and then you call those modules from Python. And that, that gets, that’s, that’s quite a good way of doing things really. It’s a good separation of concerns, but it comes with drawbacks. Um, I won’t, I won’t rehash the, the turtles, um, analogy.

So I, but I was doing all of this before 20, before 2020. And then either the pandemic or maybe just becoming somebody who does online things professionally, like I just fell out of the habit of. Going to conferences, like I’d worked so hard for 15 years to develop this. I suppose now that I’m saying this out loud, maybe my, maybe my itch had been scratched by doing the videos on YouTube, so I, it

Robin: I, can I just, um, um, I

Tristram: it’s, please,

Robin: like I think most all, I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a conference that I organize my, like as in that I, that I did independently from work. So for me, the reason why it dropped off if I were, you would absolutely be, because I no longer had an employer to like, to get, to get me to go to conferences.

Right.

Tristram: Yeah. I mean, I, yeah, that is interesting. Like you’re no longer sort of in the, in the zone surrounded by people who are talking about the conferences that they’re going to.

Robin: Well, and

Tristram: Yeah.

Robin: you

Tristram: That,

Robin: probably like a budget and a, you know, there’s, there’s some pressure and there’s, and there’s people from your company that won’t go to the same conference and that sort of thing, you know?

Tristram: Hmm. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. I hadn’t thought of, and there’s, there’s probably a lot of small, you know, little, little reasons, but I, the big reason that I wanna bring up in quite a very personal way is that I think I was like becoming a shut away introvert more than I already am. This presumably didn’t happen to you as much because you were still working with other people, talking to other people even virtually. Um, whereas I’d cut all of that off and my days, which I’m very pleased with, it’s a great privilege, are spent quietly working on the things I want to do, not talking on Slack and in Zoom meetings, which was fricking dream.

Lovely.

Robin: [00:05:00] I mean, I think you are actually kind of more comfortable with that. I feel like you are, you are, you are better at both ends than me in that you seem both. Even, even back then, I think you seemed certainly better than me at, um, deciding to create events. You were going to things like um, other,

Tristram: Hmm

Robin: you know, and, and so you’d always have schedules.

You’d always have scheduled stuff, and had this ability to sit for a morning and, work on a thing. And I feel like I’ve become increasingly worth worse at both. And I think that it, the pandemic has played a huge role. Um, like

Tristram: hmm.

Robin: I was working, but I was working remotely. And my work, which became a hundred percent remote after pandemic or during pandemic and then afterwards. And, um, and it, and it was very difficult to come out of. And, um, I, I’ve been to one conference since the Pandemic and that was, uh, um, lead, is it called Lead Dev? Um, yeah. Um,

Tristram: Well, oh yeah, I think I’ve heard of that one.

Robin: Um, and, and it was great. It was, it was wonderful and it, but it was with my, it was with my new company. Um, I can’t go this year ’cause I’m, oh, I couldn’t go this year, I think.

’cause it would, yeah, I think it, it clashed with a important thing. I dunno. but yeah, like I,

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: I feel similar to you. Like I did have a rhythm of going to conferences and I haven’t stopped working. Like, to me, it doesn’t coincide with a massive change in my, in my working patterns, but, um, but I, but it does, it does more coincide with having my second child, so,

Tristram: That’ll do it.

Robin: yeah. That’ll do it. Um, yeah. But, but I, I also definitely went through the same sort of pattern.

Tristram: So it was a huge surprise to me that this suddenly was on my radar. I, I wasn’t speaking or anything, I was just there as a, a, a participant, um, a, an audience member. Um, and I, and it was super last minute. I was doing some audio work for. Um, Amos from Faster Than Lime. Um, I don’t know if, if I have spoken to you particularly about, um, about this, but this is another, this is a fellow YouTuber.

I feel like we’re all colleagues on YouTube because we, we don’t, we’re not competing with each other. If someone watches one of my videos, they’ll go over to a faster in line video afterwards if I’m, if I’m doing my algorithm right. Um, I compliment myself enormously by assuming that, um, and this is the, this is the, the person who my second rust video, I asked if I could borrow one of their blog posts to just kind of make into a video.

’cause I had no idea what I was doing. Maybe my third video, maybe, maybe the second one, I, I was Okay. Uh, rust in 10 minutes is, is the, is based on Amos’s, um, Amos’s Post. Anyway, so we’ve all always been in the same circle and, um, we have become, uh, professional and, uh, personal associates. Um, that’s a weird way of saying friends.

We have become friends and, uh, I’ve, I’ve moved them from one, uh, category to another in my mental database. And, um, and as our listeners probably will now know that though, the project that I was recording is, uh, amos’s videos now contain, uh, a cutaways or added dialogue by a character called Cool Bear.

And that’s me voiced by me. Amos has always had them in the blog posts. They’re these little inline cutaways that where the cool bear says, Hey, what’s with this code block? Why does it look like that? And, and that allows a very interesting narrative. Is it socra? Is it, is it a socra dialogue where you ask questions and then immediately answer them?

Robin: I think is where you tell you make a point through the, through the mechanism of having a sort of master and a student. Um, conversation. I, I

Tristram: Right. Got it. Okay. Yes, exactly. Um, okay, good. So something like that except that it’s, it’s two masters perhaps talking to each other or they, they switch roles. And so it was really fun to record this, this character. ’cause it’s very definitely a character. Um, I, I tried to do a, uh, a certain voice. Um, leaning really into my, my British, uh, my British accent to, uh, to make it even funnier.

Um, and, and it’s really, it’s been very, very good. Anyway, am and I were doing this recording, and at the end of it, as we were chatting, Amal said, are you going to Ure next week? Um, and I was like, no, I’d love to. Uh, why do you ask? And I didn’t even know there was a conference going on because I, they’d just fallen off my radar.

I remember like in 2022 or 2021, I was thinking, oh, I should go to these rust conferences, you know, I’m a rust trooper. Um, and then I just forgot about that and just like, like, it just just left my brain. So I, get tickets with one week to go, six days to go, I think. And, suddenly I’ve got this ticket and I’m like, oh, no. so I check the hotels. They’re 300 euros a night.

Oh my God. I check the flights. They’re not, they’re not great. And I also don’t like flying, but I check the train. Train is affordable. Like it was, it was really [00:10:00] expensive because of how late everything was. But I don’t regret it for a second. whatever, no boilerplate budget I have should be spent on this sort of thing.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I. But do more like, it’s a like, spoiler. I had a great time. So I took the train. It’s always lovely leaving England by train I wonder if our, um, the people in our audience might, might not know this, but we have exactly one high speed rail system, one high speeded rail section in all of the uk and it’s from London to the ocean.

It gets you outta the uk. You can leave really quickly.

Robin: Yeah, that’s the fastest bit because it has to interface with the European rail, which is better than the UK rail. And so we had to do a European grade that bit.

Tristram: Yes, exactly. If,

Robin: which is quite funny. Um, but I wanted to just, just, um, step back, a half step.

Tristram: Hmm,

Robin: Um,

Tristram: yes.

Robin: you were saying you wanted to use, you know, if you had no boilerplate budget, this is what you’d use it for.

Presumably you mean by that, that you think that? What you got out of this conference was, um, was like particularly good, like supportive of the No right project. Is that right?

Tristram: Absolutely. It was, it was wildly, wildly good. Like I, I, I suppose some people might, you know, maybe, maybe some, some companies or YouTubers or whatever might do advertising. Like there, there’s a lot of commercial stuff as there is with any, any conference. But I don’t think I, I want or need to do that. What I got out of it was inspiration.

Robin: right.

Tristram: Like, it was so, so good to see all these incredible programmers, like absolute ninjas. Like there was a, a teenager hacking on the Linux kernel and like telling us all about it. Like this is, this is so inspiring to see all these, all these cool people in our, uh, rust community. Uh, it was so inspiring that on the train home, the train is four hours from London to Amsterdam.

Uh, on the train home. I just wrote another video and then published it a week later. Like, I’d on, on the way there, I just published my writing is thinking video or writing at the speed of thought. I think that is the title. And I wanted to get that published just, just before the, the conference, just to make sure that people remembered who I was.

Uh, it’d been, it’d been over a month since I’d, since I’d done everything. I’m slowing down my, my schedule as the videos get like more complex, which is good and bad. I’d like, I’d like to do like small videos and long videos just to keep things fresh.

Robin: just

Tristram: And that took me.

Robin: every other day. And then I said in the background, you’re, you’re doing your like

Tristram: Oh God. Well, that’s what I’m doing. I, I’ve, I’m finding that I’ve got these smaller videos in that I’m just, I’m pushing out. But in the background, there’s the big projects. Like at the moment I’ve got a video that the draft title is a system for thinking, a system for thinking. I think, I think that is what I’m gonna go for.

Um, and it’s a big, big topic. Perhaps we will speak about it, uh, later on, like a obsidian task management, PKM EGAs and loads of stuff. And it’s a big topic. The video that I’m pushing out, hopefully next week or the week after, is on async programming in Rust. A much more straightforward topic, at least in terms of, uh, deep creativity required.

It’s more of a, it’s more of an explainer. It’s more of an opinion video. And it’s nice. It’s a nice, tight, tight turnaround. The video I made, the video I wrote on the train back to London was, um, my last video, which is just oxidize your CLI number two, like it’s a, a carry on video from a a, it’s a carryover video that’s not what we call it, a sequel, that’s what we call them.

It’s a sequel to a video I made a couple of years ago with like, Hey, what tools can you replace with rust? And it’s way, way more impressive now. Like you can replace the entire user land of, uh, of your Linux machine. Like, like the head. Program like tail, uh, gr like all of these gu new tools are just, have been rewritten in Rust And Ubuntu is, has got an optional like switch for the, did you see this, the canonical pushed out a, a very simple one line, uh, one-line change where you can swap out your user land tools with the rust version.

Did you see that?

Robin: I ha I basically haven’t used Ubuntu, um, I, since that Canonical, maybe not quite, maybe, maybe since I started my new job. But I, I know, I mean, I’m so far from, from knowing that level of detail on what’s going on in, in Ubuntu

Tristram: Ah, it was, that was, there was some hand wring involved, you know, because you’ve got the canoe tools. They’re like, you know, decades and decades of, of, of slow iteration. They’re extremely stable. There’s 600 or so unit tests for the whole suite. And then you’ve got this upstart rust project that in the space of a year or two has, is, is now, I think 550 of those 600 acceptance tests for the canoe tools are passing in the rust version.

And there’s still plenty of work to be done. Um, but I just switched my whole user land to them on my Nix OS system and I’ve just not noticed any difference. Like, everything’s working fine. Like all of [00:15:00] the, uh, maybe I, I think that they, they were very optimized before. Um, like rust is fast, but it’s like, it, it’s, it’s as fast as see.

Robin: I mean, um, you know, like I use RIP Grab, right? RIP GRP is way faster than gr obviously it’s got a slightly

Tristram: Yes,

Robin: Maybe I’m missing some key difference in the actual feature set, but. But like, are there not similar speed improvements that can be made simply, not necessarily because it’s written in rust, but simply by starting from the ground up with your, with, with how you’re actually solving the problem, maybe?

Tristram: I, I bet there are, and the biggest one is rusts, fearless concurrency. Like it’s, you have to be extremely cautious and careful, and you have to know what you’re doing to write concurrent and parallel programs in C and it requires a lot of thorough testing and it, it’s extremely, uh, it’s extremely challenging.

Whereas in rust, it’s trivial. So a big speed increase is that there would’ve been, I, I, I’m guessing, but I, I think I, I have a good idea. You can, you can get loads of low hanging fruit that the seed developers just didn’t wanna touch. Like, you could make these five threads, you could make this, this little inner loop here.

You could paralyze it if only you wanted to. And in certain circumstances, you don’t want to, uh, you don’t, it’s not that you can’t do it in c it’s that the initial reaction is, oh, I be, I better not, or maybe I’ll do that later. You know, like, that’s some future, you know.

Robin: like makes absolutely, makes, makes that difference in a huge, but, but, but you, it sounds like

Tristram: Yeah.

Robin: saying that that efficiency, that speed of be, of doing these difficult things, like in c they can be done and they are done and they lead to very efficient programs, but it takes a long time because you are carefully considering it, designing it, then you’re testing it really thoroughly, et cetera in rust

Tristram: Mm-hmm.

Robin: they’ve got some core mechanisms that mean that the testing, like it’s not so brittle.

It’s not so dangerous. Um,

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: but, but, but that’s, but that’s not so much led to a suite of much more performant tools. Instead it’s, it’s led to very, very quick meeting of the same standard, if you know what I mean. That’s what it sounds like.

Tristram: Yes, exactly. Yes. Right, exactly. There’s, and there’s, it’s exactly the same happened with the, with the, uh, Linux on Arm project, or rather the Linux on Mac project. Um, like Sahi, Lena wrote the GPU driver for the MacBook in like 10 weeks because she wrote it in, in rust. Like, you get a huge speed up because you’re not firefighting all of the time.

You know, it’s quite straightforward what I, what I say in my videos. I think bears repeating these things are possible in other languages, but in rust they very easy like that. That is a very, very big level up. Like it, it.

Robin: the, the mind fuck of rust.

Tristram: Yes, the, uh, the, the, the, the bo checker, there’s one, there’s one, one thing to understand. Yeah, exactly. And I, and I suppose that the type system, but like, if you can understand Garvin’s type system, you can understand rust. It’s, it’s just a bit more complicated,

Robin: the borrow

Tristram: so.

Robin: referring to. Yeah. I haven’t, I

Tristram: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That, that’s, that’s ’cause you’ve, you’ve not, you’ve not watched my video on the borrowed checker.

Like, it’s so trivial. It’s just, it’s it’s in no other,

Robin: Yeah.

Tristram: it’s in, it’s in no other language. That’s the thing. The, the, the, the bo checker says that you, you can have a, you have as many read-only references to a variable as you like.

Robin: on your story.

Tristram: Oh, right. All right, all right.

Robin: a,

Tristram: Right.

Robin: a, a episode about you teaching me rust, we can, but let’s, let’s do it. That’s a, that’s a

Tristram: I’m making a note. Future episode, teach Robin Rust live on, on air. Okay. So the, the second problem with rewriting everything, the goo tools in rust, I think probably is this, uh, is this suite of, of acceptance tests, the unit tests, the canoe acceptance tests. Probably you can break acceptance tests with parallelism or with concurrency.

Like the tests might, might not be written, assuming that it’s going to be parallel or parallelizable. Uh, so I bet, I bet there are some places where they can’t do it because the goal is 100% future parity and then perhaps improvement.

Robin: Mm. Yep, yep. No, that makes sense.

Tristram: So,

Robin: Um,

Tristram: I dunno why, why I talked about this.

Robin: you were talking about the Rust Conference. Um, I’m not quite sure what got us onto that detail of rust.

Tristram: It’s ’cause I, on, on the way back, on the train back, I was so inspired by the conference that I, I just like the, the, the words flowed outta my fingers onto the keyboard. And I just wrote for four hours continuously and had another video ready to go by the time I got home. It was just, it was wonderful. So an inspiration, I think.

Robin: that experience, I would suggest the train ride as is important of a, of an element of it as the conferences, because I completely agree with you.

Tristram: Ah,

Robin: every conference, my brain is exploding, but I don’t normally have a four hour train, train, ride to then, you know, do nothing but write

Tristram: right,

Robin: Um, which would probably be quite, you know, it’s quite a good mechanism.

Tristram: it sure is my plan for this coming weekend. Uh, I’m going back down to, uh, see my parents, which is another four hour train ride. Um, and uh, so I, my plan is like [00:20:00] I’ll finish the current video that I’m working on the script in that train ride. Uh, I agree love, love a train ride, bad wifi or bad 4G plus.

Nothing really to do that’s good for productivity.

Robin: mean that

Tristram: So,

Robin: awesome. Like I’m quite jealous.

Tristram: So I mentioned very briefly when we were talking about the conference that I have a lot to say about obsidian. PKM Zettelkasten, so forth.

Robin: You said you’ve got an upcoming video.

Tristram: Uh, yeah, I do. Yes. The, uh, system for thinking, uh, it’s related to my previous video, you know, how, how to write at the speed of thought, like it, it’s all going around in my brain and like there’s this big idea that I, that I’m working on and small videos, small ideas are kind of falling out of it almost as a side effect, but it’s not the main, the main idea.

The main idea is this system for System for Thinking video. Uh, the title I’m sure you’ll recognize is, um, base. The title is Inspired by a System for writing a book by Bob Dotto. I’ll make sure that the, the link is in the show notes, um, which is a recent discovery of mine and I think is the best book on the Zettelkasten method.

I think I recommended it to you.

Robin: I think I’ve, um, if it’s the one you recommended, which I admit I don’t remember the title of, then I, you know, I mean, I read probably a third or a bit more. Um,

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: think I was, you know, it’s like I had a plane ride, right? Um, a plane ride. Do you call it a

Tristram: Uh

Robin: Do you ride a plane or

Tristram: oh Yeah. You don’t, I don’t, you don’t ride a plane, do you? A flight.

Robin: I had a

Tristram: You had a flight. Oh,

Robin: It’s,

Tristram: fun,

Robin: shorter

Tristram: fun.

Robin: it, isn’t it? I had a flight and, um, I spent most of the flight reading the book, and then I think I might have had even like a train ride afterwards or something. And I was reading the book then and I was taking notes and all this sort of thing. Um, but it certainly hasn’t flowed into, I mean, I suppose, I suppose my impression of it from the book, which I didn’t finish, um, only got as far as it helped me like it, like ever so slightly augmented my use of obsidian, like for general note keeping, but I, but I certainly am not following like a, um, unification, general unification system of, of like thought, um. In my, in my obsidian use so far.

Tristram: A Grand unified theory.

Robin: exactly

Tristram: Tell me about your, uh, of city news.

Robin: right. Yeah. Well, um, so it’s, it’s always been a bit, I don’t think I’m a person who can, like I’ve seen how you use obsidian and I feel like you, like yours is like a world building experience. Like you, you’ve got different colors for different parts of the day. You’ve given, you’ve, you’ve named like areas, um, rooms, um, within your schedule, like, you know, the library where you’re gonna do your reading and, and this kind of thing.

So, so it’s like, so when

Tristram: Yes.

Robin: it, it’s like you’re inhabiting a world that you’ve built and that I think makes it so much more, um, tangible for you. And it also means that you, that that, because it’s a whole project that you know, and, and, and a significant and and impressive looking project, um, it makes it easier for you to then like to really care about refining it, I think, and making sure that it’s, um, tidy right now. I doubt I am able to do that. I think I tend to have too many parallel things that I care about in my mind at any given time. And my use of obsidian is like, I’ll only use it and this is also kinda the way I work, but I’ll only use it, um, where I think I can do something quick that doesn’t have to be perfect and it nonetheless adds something. So I use the Daily Notes

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: for a while. I tried using weekly notes and I rejected that. So I use the Daily Notes system and I’ve got it so that I’ve set up a little template so that every time I create a new note, it links back to Daily Notes System. It’s got a little set of, you know, standard front matter. I’ve got some categories in there. Um, but it’s like the whole thing is set up with the understanding that the, all, every one of the systems I’m using are gonna have massive number of loose ends, right? Fundamentally, it’s a place for

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: throw information in such a way that if I came back and wanted to find it again, hopefully I could, right? Um, more or less that. So then I, I, I write down tasks I want to complete in future. In there I start new project documents, which I may or may not return to. And I use the system in my daily note, um, of like having, I link through to what I think I call, um, like, I dunno, important documents or something, or, I can’t remember what the word I use is. Um, but

Tristram: Yeah.

Robin: a lot of, so, so, so a lot of it is like, I’ve only got a collection of about six documents that I consider to be high enough importance that they’re there in my face for every daily note. And that includes my priority tasks document, which I will throw stuff into when I think it’s an important task.

But I’ve never, ever managed to have the habit. Of, of like being like, oh, okay, I’ve got some space now I’m gonna go and look at my task list. I’m gonna start at the top. Like that never happens. Sometimes I’ve accidentally done one of them because they came back around in my mind and, and I cared about them, but I never, never ever followed the tasks from the [00:25:00] top. Um, so yeah, so, so my use of, and I keep a journal in there and stuff, and it’s all linked up, but, but my use of obsidian is like that. Like it’s, it’s lots of different patchworky things that I cobble all together and it, and it helps me that they’re all in one place. Um, but any, um, any, any serious structure or any serious routine, um, that’s well kept to, is an emergent property of me using obsidian rather than designed, if that makes sense.

Tristram: It does, it does. And I, I struggle with this as well. Um, I, I think the, I, I recognize everything that you are talking about, and this is where I was five years ago when I started using obsidian. Um, it, it, it, it was, it, these things don’t like it. It doesn’t just come naturally. It certainly didn’t with me.

And it sounds like it’s not, not with you either. And I think that’s okay. And I think that’s like, I wanna reassure you, and maybe, maybe I reassure, reassure our listeners that this, this is, this is not something that comes so quickly and like my extremely complex use of obsidian running 80 plugins is not something that I, that happened at the start.

In fact, in the first year I stopped and started using obsidian all the time. Like I bounced off it. Like I, it didn’t, I thought it didn’t fit my brain and I went back to, to doist or org mode or, or whatever I was using at the time. And, but I kept coming back to it because there’s something, there’s something there.

There’s something in the app

Robin: I,

Tristram: and in

Robin: I

Tristram: Yeah,

Robin: I’m a step beyond that, right? Because. Obsidian is

Tristram: of course.

Robin: default place to keep information. I have it on my phone, I have it on my computer. I know how to put stuff in there, and I would have confidence that I know where it is, right? Like it’s not like I’m still in the phase of like, I’m half using obsidian, but I’m still not sure whether it, whether it’s whether it’s for me.

And so I’m half using this other

Tristram: Great.

Robin: I am using obsidian

Tristram: Hmm, hmm.

Robin: Yeah.

Tristram: Great. Uh, Avi then, so you’re, you’re sort of a year or two into, into it. Just as I was a year or two into it. And I still to this day have this problem of like the divine self and the mundane self, like constantly fighting like I imagine tomorrow that I’m gonna be super organized, that I’m definitely gonna follow this whole checklist that I’ve made and then tomorrow comes and the plan goes out the window.

But I feel like the exercise of doing it and, and trying to make the plan and trying to follow the plan every month or year even, it’s a very slow thing. The, the ship slowly moves a degree to the right. You know, I’m, I’m, I’m getting better slowly.

Robin: Well that’s my experience as well. Yeah.

Tristram: I, and I, I’ve, I, there’s a, there’s a metaphor that I thought of recently ’cause I’m writing the system for thinking video and I, I hope it is useful. The, the, the best, uh, the best. I, hmm. What am I trying to say here? The metaphor is that you are, you are trying to throw a ball forward in time to yourself tomorrow and.

You want your future self to catch the pool and carry on doing the thing that you’re hoping, or maybe it’s like a relay, you’re passing the relay bat on through time and you are, you’re hoping that the, your yourself tomorrow will pick it up and carry on running, you know, carry on

Robin: metaphor

Tristram: race.

Robin: it’s, I think it’s really good because, because the relay, I feel like it’s

Tristram: Yeah,

Robin: inevitable in the metaphor that it’s gonna happen. it might happen, it’s not,

Tristram: yeah.

Robin: as it should because then you, then you’ll lose to your, to your opponents.

But, but it’ll happen. Like it’s not her passing a bat on, it’s not difficult. Whereas catching a ball

Tristram: Right.

Robin: potentially difficult.

Tristram: Okay, good. That, that, the catch ball metaphor is the one that I’ve got, and I second guessed it when explaining it to you because you can drop the ball, you know, like you, you so forth. So there are two, there are two parts of this, this equation. And they, you, you’ve gotta have a lot of trust in both.

So the first one is that you’ve got to be able to capture things you want to do in the future, but you can’t do them yet. And that’s the capture side. Like in GTD it’s called the inbox in settle gas and it’s called fleeting notes and all kinds of stuff. Very similar stuff. It’s just like, write down the thing you want and trust that you are going to put it somewhere where your future self will at least look at it.

They will at least see it. That, that, no, you make this half of the equation makes no assumption that they will do anything with that, but at least your future self will see it. It’s on the calendar, it’s in the task list, it’s an email notification.

Robin: about, I schedule as calorie events now, like I was explaining,

Tristram: Right. Okay. Yeah, exactly. Because you, you don’t trust that this system will put it in front of the eyes of your future self, and that does slowly improve over time. The second half of the system is tomorrow’s self. Your, your future mundane, profane, whatever it’s called, the the problem self. That guy in the future who’s not gonna do what you want.

Robin: The bastard.

Tristram: Um, we all have Yeah, I know. Always ruining like, he’s spending all of my money. Wait, no. Am I spending his money? I forget how it goes. So the, it’s important, it’s important that, so they’ve, they’ve, they’ve gotta catch the ball and then carry on doing, doing the [00:30:00] thing that you want. So you need to have a system that not just stores the notes in carefully that you are sure, yes, this is categorized, right?

Or I’ve, I’ve, I’ve captured this. Wonderful. Then you have to be able to pass it over to your future self and it has to be surfaced. For me, this is quite a recent thing. I’ve got a combination of two techniques that seem to be working very well, and these are, this is definitely gonna be something that’s part of the video.

I take fleeting notes, which are just new notes in obsidian with a, a reasonable title. Like, you know, buy the milk, go out and get this call, Robin, what have you. Anything like that. Anything that comes to mind. And I put that into the system with a tag fleeting. And then I. My job is done, the inbox has been satisfied and I’m confident that it’s out of my brain and I can trust the system to work because it does.

The next day, every day when I sit down to do my morning writing, I start with one hour of admin. I can’t just start writing Lost terminal or no boilerplate straight away. Like I have to sort of get into it. And a way that I have found, I used to get into things by just like browsing the internet. Like we all like, like, like we all used to, you know, maybe I check my feet or check imager or check my email, whatever.

And that is very dangerous because it can take you down a rabbit hole. And then half the time I wasn’t writing when I should be

Robin: more than, much

Tristram: an hour or two had passed. Right? Yes, exactly. And, but what I found is that admin, specifically obsidian admin and making sure my inbox, my obsidian inbox of fleeting notes is like processed and I can optimize the process a little bit to do some tweaks, you know, like stuff like that to make it enjoyable.

Allowing myself to do that has been really good because I guarantee I’ve guaranteed to myself that tomorrow, the tomorrow tri is going to read every single fleeting note I write today. And not just that, but the way that I read these fleeting notes, I’m very proud of. I used, I use s uh. To solve the problem, uh, that Bob talks about in, uh, a system for writing the Ze Carsten book that I, I recommended.

And you have, you have read, in fact, if you’ve read the first third, you have read this, he describes some fleeting notes. Can’t be actioned. And so they must be, they must have a different category for like snoozing them. He calls them sleeping, sleeping fleeting nights. And every now and then you go through that list and go, oh, can I, can I do any of these?

Are any of these relevant yet sleeping? And I started off just doing that, tagging them, fleeting sleeping. But then it begs the question, well, how do you know when to come back to them? And this system, it already exists and is called spaced repetition. It’s usually used as I’m sure you and our listeners know for language learning or knowledge learning.

These are flashcards, anky, uh, Duolingo, the, these, these are all space repetition systems, but I use it for fleeting notes. So when I drop a fleeting note into my system over the course of the day, the next day I cram, uh, in the express, in the, the terminology of, of space repetition. I cram all of my fleeting notes.

And so I see every single one of my new ones, and then I decide on each of them, if I’m going to just do them. Or like get ’em out the way or send that email or whatever, or put them into a, to do or schedule them on the calendar for today. Like, something, something has to happen. And if I don’t do that, or I don’t want to do it today, ’cause it’s not super urgent, I just say I, I just, I just tell the, the space repetition system that, uh, I’ve, I’ve studied this and this was hard.

Remind me of this again tomorrow.

Robin: Oh, okay.

Tristram: Uh, which is what, uh,

Robin: you are

Tristram: we,

Robin: a difficulty metric out of how it’s like, it’s like things that are written but is hard necessarily. Right? So the thing, the thoughts that I’m having while you are saying this, is that one of

Tristram: yeah.

Robin: problems I think with, um, my task, you know, my, my task setting for myself in general

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: that I think of so many things like, like so many more things I could be doing that I never have time to do.

So it’s a, it is a version of

Tristram: Mm-hmm.

Robin: you know, when you’re working in a, in a software team. The backlog is infinite, right? The backlog is always gonna be longer than whatever you might have time for. So you need to have good prioritization because you

Tristram: Yeah.

Robin: sure you’re doing the things at the top. And

Tristram: Mm-hmm.

Robin: what I really like about, I really like what you are saying in the sense that like, um, you are, you are, you’re sort of skimming, skimming this long list so that you are refreshing your mind. So you’re keeping it like available to you. And then, and then you have the complete freedom to like, to like, choose the things that jump out within it to say like, oh, that’s actually something I’m gonna do.

Now that’s actually important, but you, but, but you don’t need to worry about the fact that you will be reminded so that if it was something super important, you haven’t just like put it on a list, forgotten about it, and now you’re never gonna look at it again. And then three months later you’re like, oh my God, shit, I really needed to do that.

And I just never, never came back in. You know, I never looked at my list. Right. [00:35:00] So you are saying at least it’s gonna come back in

Tristram: Yeah,

Robin: and then you can choose, you can choose to highlight it. but presumably some of the things like firstly. has a scaling problem. Because if we assume that you are making more notes than you would you could ever do, this list is gonna get longer and longer and longer until presumably it’s not even skimmable. Right.

Tristram: sure does.

Robin: and then And then the other thing is, is if you just said every time you said, oh actually I’m not gonna do that now, it increased its difficulty. It’s not necessarily because it’s not difficult. Right. Some of them or, or because it’s difficult. Some of them it might be because actually they don’t matter anymore.

Or, or it’s like, you know, I over like I’m never gonna, in fact, I would say most of the things, like if you think about it in terms of like how you might work in a software team or how my, my software team works. Um, lots of things come in, we choose certain ones that are to prioritize anything we haven’t prioritized, probably we really should just close or delete or whatever because it’s not gonna happen.

’cause no one cares. Right. Like, so that’s, so there’s a lot in

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: I would imagine.

Tristram: So this problem of scaling. Is the problem that all inbox systems have. Like once you’ve got more than a screen full of text, of emails of to-dos you, it, it, it ceases to become a useful skimmable inbox and it just becomes kind of too much to handle and you declare bankruptcy and switch system back to something else, and then that system fills up.

And then there’s too many events on your calendar, too many tasks on your software, whatever system you chose. The, the reason that I think misusing spaced repetition for this purpose works geniusly is because it’s extremely granular. Snoozing something until tomorrow is a pretty good way of, uh, of managing your current day.

Uh, list snoozing things to next week. Yeah, that works too. Like you can decide, well, how urgent is this thing I’ll snooze in? This is an algorithmically perfect way of doing that. When you use space repetition, you get one card, like it show, it shows you one card at a time. If you’re using Duolingo, it’d be one word at a time or a phrase or whatever, but here it’s a fleeting note of a time fleeting note at a time.

And I look at that fleeting note and I, and I critically think to myself, what is this really, really urgent? Or is. Is this something I can put off and a little bit or put off a lot? And in the obsidian space, repetition plugin, which I use and recommend you, you’ve got, you get three buttons, easy, medium, hard, or it’s actually easy, good and hard, good.

Bit of a weird, what would word for whatever. And all those do is they say, oh, don’t, don’t increment the reminder day to a bit more in the future or increment it to be a little less in the future or make it really, really urgent. And I actually wanna see it again tomorrow. Um, this, this is obviously the space, uh, the space repetition algorithm where hard things you revise more often.

Easy things get pushed and pushed, um, exponentially into the future because you actually, you’ve already remembered you’re, you’re okay. Uh, I think that is the same algorithm that I want for my fleeting notes because if I want, if I look at a fleeting note and it’s not something that I really care about, it doesn’t seem very urgent, I’ll just rate it as easy and then I won’t even see it tomorrow.

I’ll probably see it the next day or the day after that. If, when I’m shown that again in a few days time, I also think, wow, this is not important. This is not important still, then it pushes it even further into the future and it might take a week. So it’s like, it’s a non date, date-based snoozing system that I don’t have to think when am I snoozing it to?

When am I, what am I doing? What am I, whatever. It’s just solved it. I think I could now have. 10,000 fleeting notes at various states of snoozing that the system is just keeping track of.

Robin: I like that. Um, but I, I suppose by thinking that it’s very, very scalable and it can hold a lot, I would suggest there, there probably is still a limit to how much it can hold you, you like, how would it scale? One way it could scale is that it, um, it, it starts to delay tasks longer and longer so that you don’t get the, you know, you, you could imagine it scaling in that way, right?

Because if like a thousand became 10,000, it’s just that you, that, that,

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: see each of them less frequently, but that’s not necessarily acceptable. Right. So, so it still has a scaling problem, I would say. And so the piece that I’d want to make sure was built into it somehow was this idea of deleting, closing, you know, getting rid of things that actually don’t matter anymore, but maybe you think that just happens automatically.

Like obviously if something really doesn’t matter, we’re gonna get rid of it anyway. So it doesn’t really need to, it doesn’t need an extra solution because I do already do it,

Tristram: Yes. Yeah. That, that, that’s, that is, that is the workflow. Like one, after I’ve done something, let’s say the fleeting note is, is like a, an interesting turn of phrase that I think might work really well in one of my podcasts that I’m writing. I will just copy it, put it into the, the podcast note and delete the fleeting note.

Then I’ll never see it ever again.

Robin: no, of course. You would delete fleeting notes. I just meant, um, it’s the action of like having a brain fart one day and being like, well, what about this? Throw it into the system tomorrow [00:40:00] or next week. It comes back up and I’m like, actually, you know what, I’m realistically never gonna do that. Get rid of it.

And it’s that, it’s that, that I’d like to reinforce. ’cause I think there is a lot of value in, uh, it’s, it’s like, yeah, it’s, it’s a yny philosophy. That’s not exactly what Yny means because Yny is about building software. But it, but to me it’s important for the same

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: right? Like you could build an infinitely complex software system.

You don’t do that because that’s terrible engineering and it’ll probably never be released. So you design it or you don’t undersign it, but you design it right down to the basics in an.

Tristram: Okay. Well, I mean the

Robin: System. I, I’m loving the sound of, I particularly love the sound of, um, uh, yeah, like being able to snooze without thinking when like it’s really annoying to have to like decide when.

Tristram: yes, it, the problem, the, one of the problems that Zettelkasten solves is. Uh, in a separate, a separate, a separate problem that Zeen solves is when you’re taking a note, you shouldn’t have to think hard about where it goes when you’re just writing something down on the back of an envelope or you’re just quickly putting something in.

Any friction is bad friction. Like you’re just gonna get that out of your brain on there and then forget about it because you trust the system to bring it back at the correct point, which for me are these morning, these morning reviews. And that’s, that’s what this does. Um, ze is a bottom up, bottom.

Excuse me. Zein is a bottom up system where instead of saying, okay, like in Dewey Decimal, this goes in science, natural science, chemistry, organic chemistry, we, these are already way too many decisions. Like imagine if you had to do that every time. Nightmare. Whereas in Ce Castine, because it’s bottom up, you clip it straight to, let’s say benzene, and you put the note right under there, you don’t have to go all the way down through whatever hierarchy you’ve got.

You just go straight to the, to the edge. Uh, and I think this achieves the same sort of goal because you’re not thinking, well, when am I snoozing this to? And that question is actually very complex and requires knowledge of your calendar or at least thinking of your calendar. No good at all. So,

Robin: I mean, so, so you see what I find interesting here is that you are talking about Ze Carsten, is a system for ideas and,

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: and talking about task management, and we seem to sort of naturally fallen into an idea that they’re the same thing, which I had not considered before.

That they could be the same thing really.

Tristram: They, they, they, they aren’t, but they’re very related. They’re related. The reason I’m conflating them is because we’re talking about the input, the inbox, the fleeting notes, and, and that is, that is unified in my system. And in fact, I would recommend that anyone who is building a second brain or a PKM system for themselves only have one inbox.

Doesn’t matter whether those are fleeting thoughts or tasks to do, your inbox must be just one place because two places is one too many already. This is a very old idea from, from David Allen’s GTD book. The, uh, the, the grandfather of this inbox idea is that if you have two inboxes, let’s say your email, ancient ancient history.

Ancient history, the like before YouTube, therefore it’s very old. The, if you have two inboxes, your eyes can only look at one at once, which means you cannot fundamentally trust what your eyes are telling you. If your eyes are saying, oh, my inbox empty, but I’ve got this other inbox here, lemme just check that, oh, that’s empty too, but maybe I’ve got a new thing in the first inbox, you it, you’ve got this subtle like subconscious unease that actually maybe you’re supposed to be doing something.

So one inbox genius idea. That’s why I’m unifying these two.

Robin: Yes, except it, that almost makes it more interesting. Are you saying that notes Zettelkasten are tasks or not? Because if you

Tristram: No, no. Fleet. Fleet?

Robin: you have a Zettelkasten inbox and you have a no.

Tristram: No, no. Just, just fleeting notes are just strings. Strings of text. Those strings of text have to be interpreted by, uh, by Tris tomorrow, and then he will decide whether or not to make a task in my task management system or to write up something else or, or what have you. It’s,

Robin: so they are the same

Tristram: it’s not up to me.

Robin: thing.

Tristram: Yes. The inbox is unified.

Robin: one inbox, which has a list of notes, and a note

Tristram: Mm-hmm.

Robin: a task or it may be a thought, a idea.

Tristram: The reason I’m pushing back against this is I, I deliberately don’t decide at this point whether or not it is a tasker of thought

Robin: but so it’s, so, it’s so, it’s quite, so I suppose, I think you are saying that they are the same thing in every, like as far, just about as far as I could possibly imagine they might be, if you see what I mean. Um, which I like. I mean, it’s a nice, uh, it’s a nice idea. Um, the, the, the bit where I’m gonna

Tristram: tasks start off as ideas, right.

Robin: the bit where I’m gonna fall down is that you say the place

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: are gonna, where you bring these things back up to your future self is in their morning routine of, of, um, going through the inbox.

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: Um, but that [00:45:00] doesn’t mean, you know, I mean, I do have an inbox. I do go through it every now and then, so I’m, I’m, I’m not gonna

Tristram: I don’t think you should go through the inbox. I think you should set up this, the space repetition system to go through this inbox for you.

Robin: system for you, the point where you read the things that have been brought back up by our space repetition, uh, repetition system is

Tristram: Yeah.

Robin: down and looking through the list of things that your space recognition, uh, repetition system is bringing up.

Tristram: Right. That doesn’t happen for you.

Robin: Uh, I have. Yes. I don’t think I’ve ever had a routine like, you know, just about managed to brush my teeth daily. Um,

Tristram: Yeah.

Robin: but my wake up and sleep times don’t tend to be regular. And I, yes. So I don’t think I can ever say that I’ve had like a string of as much as like a week or two weeks where I have at roughly the same time every day sat down and done roughly the same task, per se, apart from standup at work, which you don’t really have, have any choice. Um,

Tristram: Mm-hmm.

Robin: yeah, so I mean, I, I, I don’t think, obviously, you know, you can’t solve all the problems with, of my life with one system. Um, and as I say, I

Tristram: I mean,

Robin: I

Tristram: maybe.

Robin: and I do still manage to live as a, as an adult. Um, just about, so I. this wouldn’t be worse. Right. Um, but

Tristram: No, indeed. No indeed. I, I

Robin: than I am,

Tristram: only, only recently, Robin, only recently, like in 2020 before Lost Terminal, I had no morning routine. Like as you say, I like, I, I, I like cleaned my teeth and I probably had breakfast at some point because my body was hungry. But like the start of this was my, my first habit, which was I’ve got to write lost terminal before work.

If I don’t write it before work, I’ll work. I’ll be too tired after work. So it must happen before work, therefore it must, must, must happen. It’s like you taking the, your, your kids to to school. Like it can’t not happen. It’s the, it absolutely must happen. And I, my baby lost terminal had had the same scheduling problem that it, these things had to happen every day.

So I was actually forced into that. And then after a few, after like a year, I had this morning routine of like sitting down and writing and then I could like hang things off it. You know, you just need that one thing, you know, that first little habit.

Robin: the, but the interesting thing there is you described Lost Terminal as your baby, uh, with, with an implication that that’s part of how you managed to do it, which is, which is very insightful. I mean, you know, you’re absolutely right that the most routine things that I do successfully are my children’s routine because they need

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: and I know that and I care about them. And it’s that caring that I’m really sort of curious about because I also feel like, you know, my life has, is, is, is improving significantly recently. Um, and it

Tristram: Great.

Robin: in taking charge of it. Which is a version of caring. It’s like caring about myself. It’s like I’m taking the time to think what is it that I really care about?

And, and so that makes a

Tristram: Mm-hmm.

Robin: difference. So, so, so really it just needs the, something to trigger me into believing this routine supports my core values. Right? Like, like that’s

Tristram: Hmm.

Robin: and then I would do it. Right. So, so it’s not, probably not as far as, as we’re saying. So anyway, I really like the system.

Um, I, I am curious, I don’t think you should maybe go into it further now ’cause we, this will get long, but I’m, I’m

Tristram: Yes.

Robin: how you configure your, um, scheduled something, whatever you call it, that system

Tristram: Yes, the, the space repetition system. Well, you and I can talk offline about it, and the listener will eventually be able to watch my video on it.

Robin: that’s pretty cool. Oh, yes. Well, so will I, so maybe, maybe I can just, if, if we don’t manage to follow up on it, I can just watch a video and then I’ll know.

Tristram: It’s perfect.