One of my favorite books to read is...the dictionary. No, I don't consider it "light" reading, nor am I reading it for hours on end, but I love finding new words and exploring their meaning. Especially the etymology—the study of word origins and evolution over time.
I've recently run into a problem with my love of words: the "appeal to dictionary fallacy."
In my mind, dictionaries were supposed to be the law-givers: This word means this concept. You may or may not use (insert word here) like this...
The fallacy in appealing to the dictionary is a misunderstanding of what a dictionary actually is. It describes how words are used to mean certain things. It does not prescribe what they mean.
That’s why dictionaries are updated, why they change—because language changes. The way we collectively use words changes.
It turns out, definitions are much more difficult to arrive at than it sometimes seems. The act of naming something is, at its core, a practice of defining something.
Today’s newsletter will focus on PKM and creativity regarding this naming problem. Next week, we’ll take a look at how naming has implications in our technology that range from complicating to dangerous.
PKM Problems with Names
I’ve noticed that when I start a new note in Obsidian, I’m immediately limited by the very first action: giving the note a name.
“Untitled” is the default, and it not only bothers me to leave it like that, the keyboard cursor is also automatically focused to the title of the note—just like any other note taking app.
It seems like the right flow: Title it, add content, done.
The problem is that in a note-taking or creative context, this approach is exceptionally limiting. I have not yet processed my thoughts. Sure, maybe there’s a theme, or something generically cohesive about what I’m trying to write, but starting with that puts a cap in mind about where I am going—or where I might go.
It's all psychological, because I can always change the title, but something about defining it upfront makes it feel final; determined.
When I start a note, I want to be able to put down my thoughts: uncensored, unedited, and unorganized. It's a collection and discovery phase of thinking. This is where things are added.
Creating a title is part of an evaluation phase. That's where things are subtracted or divided. I don't want to start with subtraction or division—remember your math classes? Dividing with zero is really bad ;)
Personal SEO
Naming a note or a file is more than just a creativity barrier. It provides an organizational issue in an environment that is no longer scoped to folders. Now that I have many hundreds of notes and references, the titles become a barrier to finding the content that I want.
I have to make sure the titles are unique. I also try to insert keywords so that I know how the note applies to certain concepts at a glance.
It’s an SEO (search engine optimization) problem. We’re now in analytical mode, trying to make sure we don’t lose this note in the mess of hundreds of others.
We have a few tools to help us with this optimization: content, links to other notes, and keywords.
Obsidian’s graph view allows you to visually see connections between notes through links, similar to websites. This is another search method that supplements search results involving titles.
Most apps come equipped with decent search tools that don’t just look at the title of files. That means you can use techniques like adding keywords to your note content that you’re pretty sure you’ll use in the search bar to find the note again.
The real trick here is to be very intentional about getting the content on the page first, and having a review phase afterwards as part of the note-taking system’s maintenance.
Alternative Options
After-the-fact Update
To break the pattern of starting with a name, you can always just make it part of the process to ignore the title (let it be “Untitled 27”) and then just start typing your note. You can always change it when you’re done.
If you’re really bad at remembering to change the title, set a reminder every month or so to just do a search for “Untitled” and go through each file to rename it.
Daily Notes
If your PKM software has a daily note function, you can use it to stay creative and avoid naming until you’re ready. When I open Obsidian for the first time that day, it automatically opens a new note, titled as the current date.
The trick here is to use these daily notes not as a journal or a record, but as a scratch pad. I dump my thoughts, my notes, my references.
Clean up the content and move it into a real note—this way you stay in creative mode when creating the content, but move into editing/analytical mode when cleaning out the queue of daily notes. The goal here is to delete each daily note. Always be on the look-out for how to move content out of the daily note and into your real notes.
This has worked well for me in my personal Obsidian system, but it does mean that I have a separate processing day, usually a Sunday, where I look through the daily notes and rename or move them out. It can add a bit of extra work when I forget and have many daily notes piled up.
Different Input System
I really want my Obsidian vault to be a useful, creative, productive tool. That means sometimes I prefer to collect random thoughts and scratches of ideas in an entirely different system. Physical notebooks were my go-to until I got a reMarkable 2 tablet. Now that’s my companion for capturing things that don’t make sense or aren’t fully developed yet.
It does add a few extra steps, similar to the Daily Notes flow. I have to review it at some point, use their handy handwriting-to-text conversion (which is pretty good, even with my handwriting), and copy the text into new notes.
However, slowing down like this helps me work through my ideas and make it ready for future use. It also allows me to delete things when I can see they really aren’t useful to me.
Splitting up the creative process of brainstorming and building up ideas from the analytical process of evaluating the ideas has monumentally changed my ability to write better, create more interesting content, and even build better code.