Fractal journaling and random revisit

I use Obsidian’s unique note hotkey to write individual thoughts as they come up throughout the day. This automatically creates a note with the prefix YYYY-MM-DD HHmm to which I may append a title that describes the idea.

Every few days I review these journal fragments and compile the salient thoughts. I then review these reviews monthly and yearly. Each time I pull out the most useful things, and draw connections where relevant. Yearly this takes the form of "40 questions to ask yourself every year". The result is a fractal web of my life that I can zoom in and out of at varying degrees of detail. I can trace back where individual thoughts came from, and how they bubbled up into bigger themes.

1/2

making /obsidian • writing stephango.com

Every few months I set aside time for a “random revisit”. I use the random note hotkey to quickly travel randomly through my vault. I often use the local graph at shallow depth to see related notes. This is helps me revisit old ideas, create missing links, find inspiration in past thoughts, and do a bit of maintenance, like fixing formatting based on my personal style guide.

Fractal journaling and randomization are how I tend my garden. Many people have asked me if this could be automated with language models but I do not care to do so. I enjoy this process. Doing this maintenance helps me understand my own patterns. I don’t want to delegate it.

2/2