Just in time for Halloween, allow me to introduce you to Scarecrow Weekly. Why Scarecrow Weekly About half a month ago, I migrated all my notes to Logseq (I don’t know how many times I’ve migrated my notes). Before that, my notes were scattered all over the place – I tried to practice the card-box note-taking method on Obsidian, I managed ad-hoc notes by project on Notion, and I used flomo to collect ideas, reading notes, excerpts, and so on, because of the convenience and simplicity of flomo’s design. I used flomo to collect ideas, reading notes, excerpts, etc. The result was a disaster. The result was a disaster. Because of the paranoia about the “atomicity” of notes, the cost of note-taking has increased dramatically, and my Obsidian note library has been collecting dust for a long time. Since I don’t like the loading speed of Notion and find it inconvenient to write down notes, I want to write down all the notes in one place and organize them later, which increases the cost of organizing the notes again. Since flomo is so smooth, I wrote down all my temporary notes in flomo, and later put them into different note-taking software according to the categories of “Knowledge”, “Project Notes”, “Reading Notes”, and “Tasks”. Since I’m used to handwriting notes in classes and meetings, I use memos and Prodrafts on my iPad to keep track of impromptu notes – so I have to take time every day to organize notes in flomo, memos, and Prodrafts… … I don’t think I need to go on. When you put too many eggs in one basket, you get yourself scrambled and end up not learning much in the end. Ironically, the so-called efficiency tools slowed me down in the end. While this iteration of the note-taking system didn’t reduce the amount of note-taking software I used – I just dropped flomo, used Obsidian as a writing tool instead of a note-taking tool, used Notion for personal data management without over-complicating the functionality, and then got on board with Logseq — but the change in my knowledge input and output has been dramatic. The subtlety of Logseq is that it really allows me to realize that “don’t worry about where you put your notes at all, just write them”, and that I can safely and boldly put any unrelated note on a page without fear of not being able to find it, as long as it’s appropriately tagged. Even though Obsidian also has a journaling feature and supports double-linking, its UI design just doesn’t give me that ‘you should be on a page to see its backlinks’ feeling. Here’s the backlinks section at the bottom of an Obsidian page, which has a larger font size for headings, smaller body content, and only shows content near the link. This is the backlinks section of a page in Logseq, which shows the context more completely and allows you to view your notes here as if they were on the original page, as well as edit them directly. And Logseq doesn’t have the file view that Obsidian has, which means that most of the time, users don’t feel like they need to manage a lot of note files, much less organize folders. All you need to do is tag, and when you write a link or a label (by the way, Logseq’s labels and links are actually the same thing, they just look different), a block of notes will be added below the corresponding link. If the link doesn’t exist, Logseq will automatically create the page. That’s a bit of a tangent, but in short, I now have a much more convenient note-taking system, and I can intuitively feel that I’m writing down more every day. The problem, though, is that I don’t have a system for reviewing my notes in a timely manner after writing them down. Even though Logseq has a memory card feature, I don’t need to memorize everything, I just need to look at it more often to deepen my understanding, and I can’t turn every block of notes into a memory card, right? So, I wish I could review and recap the week’s notes once a week, so I started writing my own weekly recaps, and I stuck with that for about three weeks. I categorized my reviews into “Professional Learning Notes,” “Reading Notes,” “New Knowledge Review,” and “Action and Thinking Review,” which can be said to include almost every type of note I’ve ever taken on Logseq. The problem, though, is that I don’t seem to have much motivation to write a weekly review. Yes, I summarized and reviewed all the notes I took down this week, and for whom? It’s not like I’m going to be able to turn to the review notes I’ve tucked away in a corner somewhere and read them from time to time, and even if I did, the content would be so dry that I probably wouldn’t be able to read it. Might as well turn periodic summaries into periodic outputs, then!