Interstitial journaling is just so powerful
Interstitial journaling is just so powerful
It was just about two years ago that I first shared the concept of interstitial journaling, and I’ve been at it ever since. If it’s new to you, that old post (which includes a short video) helps explain it.
In short, it’s just taking quick notes (often time-stamped) as you go through your day. If you’re using a linked note system like Roam Research, Obsidian, or Tana, those notes become wildly more powerful. As you take those notes, you begin to build a network of notes about various people, topics, and activities in your life.
While I’ve done it to some degree every day over the past few years, I’m finding that I’d benefit greatly from doing even more. Instead of quick notes as things come to mind, an intentional 30-second recap makes the notes wildly more useful.
These notes are useful to me in two ways:
First, they help me with this blog. By connecting ideas together, I can often find some new insights in there.
Second, they help with future meetings. If I end a call by jotting down a quick recap, it’s easier to get back into that mindspace for the next call with that person.
Looking forward
I’m also trying to build better notes into my outline for the day. I have a day coming next week with calls at the top of each hour for five straight hours — that was poor planning on my part, but now I need to execute. By building better notes into my daily plan (and then simply adding to them after the call), I should be able to jump from call to call more easily. Even better, having those notes to get me in the proper mindset for each one will allow me to be more present, rather than scrambling to remember why this particular call was scheduled in the first place.
As I’ve said before, if you do any kind of daily journaling then you’re doing a great thing. If you can keep up pieces of it throughout the day, I think you’ll find additional value in that, and if you can do it with a system that helps tie pieces together semi-automatically, your own words will become more valuable than you thought they could.
Good advice to motivate me. One thing I have become adamant about is my contact directory. When I even consider a scientist or journalist I might want to contact I immediately take the considerable time necessary to create a contact and fill it with email, phone, snail mail and urls of their social and professional presence and relevant papers. This often spreads to their coauthors on a paper of interest, not just the lead. Even capture a headshot.