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DeveloPassion's Newsletter #162 - New Experiments

Edition 162 of my newsletter, discussing Knowledge Management, Knowledge Work, Zen Productivity, Personal Organization, and more!

Sebastien Dubois

Apr 12, 2024 — 16 min read

Welcome

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

Hey. Where's the rewind button? Weeks come and go before I have time to realize! 25+% of 2024 are already behind us!

I missed our rendez-vous last week. Hopefully you're not too mad at me 🙏.
We've got a lot to discuss today! ❤️

Sometimes, even as I'm in front of such beauty, I can't help but feel anxious and kind of lost. It's a weird feeling to be working on things you love, knowing that if nothing extraordinary happens, it's bound to stop sooner or later...

Feeling under pressure for too long can be quite disastrous for mental health. From time to time, I feel like saying "Alright, I've failed. Time to call it a day and to stop dreaming. Time to go back to the 9-5...". I don't know what to do next. I don't know how to move forward. I don't know how to achieve what I'm trying to achieve. I feel lost in the dark.

But if you have followed me for long enough, you know that I'm not the kind of person that gives up easily. Sometimes it's even the opposite: I try too hard for too long...

At this point, I've lost my last consulting client a while ago, have very few PKM Coaching sessions planned, fewer and fewer sales, SEO issues killing organic traffic to this Website, etc. And I have little hope of turning things around in the coming weeks...

Still, I want to keep trying, because I have this deeply-rooted feeling that I'm working on something truly meaningful. Maybe I'm just being delusional, I don't know. But if a thousand people have decided to hit the "Subscribe" button to receive this newsletter, and if a thousand more have decided to buy my products and courses, and have not all unsubscribed or asked for a refund, then I suppose I have at least done some things right. And I dream of doing much more for the world.

Unfortunately, I have bills and taxes to pay, so my bank account is drying up. It's just reality. Dreams don't pay invoices (yet) 😂. And no matter how useful my products, courses, content, ideas and advice may be, I won't be able to continue for long this way. It's just reality.

The stats of this newsletter alone say it all:

Free vs Paid members ratio

No matter how much I love sharing my thoughts and discoveries with you, it takes me a lot of time. It's actual work.

The real challenge when you're a solopreneur like me is that you're alone. Alone with your problems, your thoughts, and ideas. And nobody is coming to save you. It's dead simple, nobody really cares. There are tactics, strategies, tips and tricks out there. But it's up to you to explore, learn, find what applies to your situation, how to approach things, etc. And there's no silver bullet, no magic tricks. It all takes hard work, time, consistency and patience. And as money becomes scarce, the possibilities shrink, I'm running out of time, and the window of opportunity closes.

For now, I'm trying to focus on delivering the Knowledge Management for Beginners course, but this thought keeps coming back to my mind: "What should I do next?"

The lab 🧪

SEO Efforts

I've spent almost two days trying to improve the SEO of my Website. As I've explained in the previous edition, visits are crashing, and it's a big problem as it's the main entry point to my content and creations.

Apparently, I could be yet another victim of Google's algorithms changes:

Nevertheless, I needed to try to do something about it. So far, I have:

Renamed articles
Adapted descriptions and tags
Added/replaced images and optimized their size
Added missing image captions
Fixed issues with structured data
Updated the signature on all posts
Disavowed bad backlinks
Added missing links between pages here and there
...

Knowledge Management course

I've recorded a few more sections of the course and have continued preparing the slides and videos scripts. But I've been distracted by the SEO issues. I still hope to deliver the course by the end of the month. For that, I'll have to fight against perfectionism...

Here's a part of the scripts I'm preparing for the "Problems" section:

Knowledge Retention is a real challenge. And our brains are not ready to handle the digital realm

Obsidian Starter Kit Upcoming Improvements

My goal is to keep the Obsidian Starter Kit as close to my own current system as possible. Recently, I've improved my vault with a few cool features that I'm soon going to add to the starter kit as well.

First, new plugins that I find really cool and useful, such as:

Second, improvements to templates, such as progress bars within periodic notes and the home note, showing the progress so far:

```progressbar
kind: day-month
name: This Month ({value}/{max})
```
```progressbar
kind: day-year
name: This Year‎‎ ({percentage}) ‎‎ ‎   ‎ ‎ 
```

A new "On This Day" section in Daily Notes, showing links to notes on the same day from previous years:

```dataview
LIST
FROM "40 Journal/41 Daily Notes"
WHERE dateformat(date(file.name), "MM-dd") = dateformat(date(this.file.name), "MM-dd") AND file.name != this.file.name
```

A "Notes Created Today" section in Daily Notes:

```dataview
TABLE tags as "Tags"
FROM "" AND !"40 Journal" AND !"50 Resources" AND !"20 Projects/YouTube"
WHERE contains(dateformat(file.ctime, "YYYY-MM-dd"), dateformat(this.file.day, "YYYY-MM-dd"))
```

If you want those, and more, then check out the Obsidian Starter Kit, the new release is coming soon:

Memes

I've tried a few things recently. After watching a cool Small Bets Live Session by Dagobert Renouf about Memes, I've created a few. I like the idea of sharing interesting thoughts and facts about learning, knowledge management and PKM as fun images...

I will probably publish one from time to time on X 😂

TikTok

This weekend, I also took some time to dive into TikTok... After getting mad at my kids a gazillion times about the crappy content they consume and that melts their brain, I thought that I might as well publish more interesting things on TikTok and make it a better place. I was also curious about its viral aspect. Contrary to many social media platforms, TikTok doesn't require you to have many followers before your content is shown to others. It just sprays the content pseudo-randomly and sees what sticks.

I watched a few videos, and read tutorials about how to record videos for TikTok, the "codes" of the platform, the video length, etc:

Then I ran a few experiments. A few with Text + Audio only. Then a few videos:

I was surprised by the number of views I got with the first one, so it motivated me to experiment a bit more. I don't know if I'll continue sharing over there, but for now it's quite fun. My hope is that I can help even just a few teenagers to learn more about learning and modern tools/techniques for managing knowledge. The real challenge is (1) reaching them and (2) not looking as boring as I do 😂

If you're curious, you can follow me over there:

@developassion

Although, my prefered channel will remain X.

New Geekery

Recently, I decided to buy a Elgato Stream Deck with dials for audio/video

I mainly intend to use it for video recording and auditing.

MentorCruise rejection

Last week, I also applied to become a mentor on MentorCruise. I thought it could be an interesting way to grow my activity as a Knowledge Management coach. Unfortunately, my application was rejected:

It's sad that they don't want to create a "space" for people to learn about Knowledge Management. The demand may be low right now, but I believe that it's bound to increase over time. Information overload is going to get a lot worse in the coming years, and Knowledge Management has tons of potential to help people grow.

I'm disappointed of course, but since I have a positive mindset, it also motivates me to create more content centered on Knowledge Management. If there are so few people aware of the potential benefits, then it means that I still have tons of work to do! ❤️

WhatsApp PKM Community

I've created a PKM Community on WhatsApp. I'm curious to explore that platform to develop a community. This is certainly not going to replace our community on Slack, but I think it's interesting to explore alternatives.

Ghost Explore

I've added my Website to Ghost explore:

I've also added my Website to Ghost Explore. It feels similar to the way Substack lets people explore publications. Ghost also allows adding recommendations, which is again similar to Substack:

Ghost supports Recommendations, just like Substack

This might bring a few more visitors my way, so it's probably worth it...

New articles

Here are my latest articles.

The first focuses on the value of templates and templating for Knowledge Management. To me, those are key to creating a maintainable and scalable system. More people ought to know:

In the second one, I argue in favor of centralizing knowledge to simplify your life and enable connecting ideas.

Quotes of the week

"There are no rigid disciplines in the universe, only concepts"
"You don’t imagine something first and then write it down. It’s through the act of writing that ideas make themselves known" — Austin Kleon

Thinking and learning

I enjoyed this post by Ron Ghosh about how algorithms damage the quality of knowledge that spreads:

It's clear that, over time, many creators, including top notch ones, end up doing whatever is needed to satisfy the algorithms. On one hand, it's a question of business survival, but on the other, it keeps lowering the bar. Worse yet is the fact that Large Language Models are clearly going to consume worse and worse content, leading to complete "enshittification" of the Web...

I also enjoyed this one written by Morgane:

She makes great points about the limitations of classic note-taking approaches, including sketchnoting, Cornell notes, Mind Mapping, etc.

Knowing something means that you have built a relationship to the information, not just written it down in a notebook — Morgane

I agree with Nick Milo about the fact that Obsidian is one of the best, if not the very best note-taking and Tool for Thought application out there:

He mentions four main reasons:

A custom home for your notes
No one else owns your notes
Improves your thinking and creative work
Your notes will last a lifetime

And that last point is so important. While your memory will continue to decay, things you store externally will still be there in decades, assuming you have proper backup procedures in place. Obsidian is not the only application enabling this of course, but there aren't that many, and very few that are as powerful.

Another piece I recommend this week is this discussion about the Knowledge Pyramid, also known as the DIKW pyramid:

Do We Still Worship The Knowledge Pyramid?

In it, Ivo Velitchkov argues against it, pointing out the incoherences and flaws of that model. While I agree with many points that Ivo makes, I still find the DIKW pyramid interesting in some ways. There's really a lot to be said about the relationships between data, information, knowledge and wisdom...

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid#/media/File:DIKW_Pyramid.svg

Excalidraw keeps improving. Zsolt shared this video, recorded with Nicole van der Hoeven right after the PKM Summit. In it, he explains and demoes all the new features of Excalidraw. I particularly like the idea of being able to "flip" any note between text-mode (Markdown) and visual mode (Excalidraw). This adds an interesting dimension to explore knowledge.