Do not edit too early – resist your #adhd and let those typos be.

I've thought of my writing style as "incrementally editing paragraphs into existence", however this is not a harmless matter of preference. It may stifle potential, because Ahrens speaks of two writing modes: a creative mode, with floating attention, and a critical mode, with focused attention. Trying to please the critical reader all the time means you never have floating attention.

Vartanian 2009: Exceptional scientists are distinguished by a flexible focus, i.e. alternating between extraordinary focus and playful exploration of ideas.

Suggestion: as a training wheel, disable the backspace key while writing a new note. Or write on paper first, for later transcription into your computer.

Writing in a slipbox lets us leave the note and come back later without fear of losing our thread. This grants us the freedom to explore side threads, one at a time.

• For therapist
• How I live
• Always-good advice
• Self-training
• Stuff to meditate on
• Things I struggle with
• #ADHD
• Aliefs
• Understand my memory issues

And these ever-growing lists :)

• Movies I've seen
• TV-shows I've seen
• Fiction I've read
• Books I've read
• Games I've played

#slipbox

An issue with org-roam and many other digital slipboxes: titles are mandatory.

Maybe this suits Jethro and the other developers, and it suited me when I first started. Coming from a world where all files we ever create must be given a title, it wouldn't have occurred to me as something I'd want to live without. Besides, the title was how I used to find those files in the first place. But I found advice by a zettelkasten blogger (maybe it was Alex Keyhayias or Andy Matuschak) to try the original pen-and-paper Luhmann system for at least a while.

With the Luhmann system, most notes lack titles.

Freedom from titles means:

• You avoid the mental work of titling things
• Notes really do stand and fall with their connections

I used to worry about whether to title notes as nouns or as active statements. Matuschak even has ideas about titles as a kind of API…

But suppose that all new notes just got a random number as title unless you deign to re-title it later. And suppose we modify all our commands such as org-roam-node-insert to use ripgrep for matches in body texts instead of a title search. In a way, we'd treat the bodies as titles to themselves (kind of Logseq-ish!). Any titles matter less since we'd not depend on them to find the right note.

That boils down to a couple of lessons we can learn right now, if we still use mandatory titles:

1. Don't sweat the titles – write the first title that comes to mind, and think of them as near-random slugs that only maybe incidentally say something about the content
2. Rely first of all on the presence of interlinks to find any note – so refer to topic notes when you're looking for a note you remember. Rely second on ripgrep or filesystem order (both date created and date modified have analogues in the pen-and-paper system), and last (or never) on org-roam-node-find.