morning writing practice | daily routine | Daily log | Note Taxonomy

Andy Matuschak's daily routine and content strategy appear similar, but much more complex, than my own. It starts with something we share: "When my days don’t go well, it’s often because something derailed me in the morning, and I never really got back on track", and manages his day so that he spends the first two hours of the day for "the most challenging work ... when I have the most clarity and focus".

He appears more disciplined (if it's true that he doesn0t even touch the internet before 10am), and does something I'll try adding to my morning routine - a Daily working log, exactly what Roam provides with its Daily Notes feature: "Each day, I start a note ... captures ephemera throughout the day... an intentional dumping ground, a release valve so that there’s always “a place to put that thing.”

This is the "lowest-fidelity layer... ephemeral by design" in his content strategy - or what he calls his Taxonomy of note types:

• "scratchings" in this daily log
• prompts and incomplete notes in his writing inbox
• evergreen notes, which come in several (sub) layers of completeness: stubs, definitions, declarative, higher-level APIs ...
• outline notes, in the traditional zettelkasten sense

These are only note types - the above spectrum doesn't actually include published work, nor other note types outside of it: "Proper noun notes" (several subtypes) and "log notes". It appears very, very complicated - I'm unconvinced I need this much overthinking. He himself stresses to not "over-obsess or over-formalize this stuff"(!)

Nevertheless, I like his 'writing inbox', which is a staging post between bullet points in the daily log to evergreen notes. It thus includes "Undeveloped ideas, excerpts from my Daily working log, notes from reading, one-line prompts, etc". It plays a central role in his morning routine. One challenge is that to achieve inbox zero one has to archive notes that don't seem that interesting.