I have a place to plan my week and day. I have a place to learn. I have a place to plan projects. But something is still missing. I’m missing a place for my random mind, for scattered research.
While wasting time on my phone, I sometimes also come across interesting insights, inspirations and concepts. Right now, these only get saved away and I go back to scrolling. They don’t really fit in any other system I currently have. The closest one would be the learning system, but there are only intentional, structured learning units — nothing random.
Maybe I need a random mind note-taking place.
I want a place where I can store random insights, inspirations, and concepts. The notes should be short, tagged, and linked to other notes. There should be no folders. Everything should be in one place.
Since I love Obsidian, maybe Obsidian is a great tool for such a random mind place.
making it a game
Maybe I can also make it into a “game”. Once I come across something interesting while scrolling on my phone, I pause, add it to my random mind place, add tags (I like to use links as tags), and connect it to at least one other relevant note. Maybe this can replace my forever-scrolling.
how to find notes?
Since I don’t want to organize everything into folders, I’ll rely on search, tags, and connections between notes. For searching, the Obisidan plugin Omnisearch should be fine.
For tags, I actually like to use pages and links instead. The reason is, that by having a page instead of a tag, I can open the “tag-page” and inside the note, at the bottom, all backlinks will appear. This way I quickly can scan and find relevant notes regarding a certain topic/tag.
purpose of random notes?
The best part is that if I want to think about a specific topic at some point, I can open up an Obsidian canvas and add all relevant random notes to it. Like a big note-playground. I can then think about them and restructure my understanding. At this point, the randomness would become something intentional which I probably wouldn’t have predicted before.
what about books?
Maybe this is also a great place to save a few notes from books I read. Just to allow book notes to connect to random notes. So, the plan for reading a book would be to read the book, create an Excalidraw canvas to mind-map my understanding, and, based on the canvas, create a few random notes about the book. (There is a great Excalidraw plugin for Obsidian).
Will this work? A random place for idle research. Planting seeds. Connecting ideas. With the goal to slowly understand, slowly discover and untangle vague ideas.
