It has happened.
Yet again.
Yet again am I struck by the curse of the engineer.
I have seen some existing product and though
“It would be fun to understand and design one of those for myself!”
or even worse:
“I understand how that thing is working,
how hard can it be to design one of my own?”
This time it is a small planing hull boat, which could be used for fishing.
As a Naval Architect, this regularly happens to me when I watch a beautiful small craft powerboat, sailing yacht and everything in between. I regularly go down the route of obsessing about such a design, but never really getting anywhere because life and my normal day job takes all the available time I have. As someone with above normal interest in anything remotely technical it also happens with most other engineering subjects (Actually it can be almost anything physical. I have literally thought myself how to build leather shoes using age old shoe making techniques).
I like to call this “The Curse of the Engineer”; the wish and want to understand or design something, but never finding the time to do it. You end up with all these unfulfilled wishes, thoughts and ideas for what you would like to achieve, only to find yourself 10 years later with nothing more than some scribbled notes on a piece of paper. If you are structured in your approach that is.
So what can you do about it, shy from inventing a time-stop watch?
It took me far longer than I care to admit to
- Realise I am not getting anywhere
- I need a system that allows me perform micro work whenever I have both time and motivation to think about something.
By some kind of miracle, I came across the note taking software Obsidian. With it I can have a set of notes written in markdown, that are synchronised between my phone and my 2-3 computers running both windows and Linux. Obsidian allows me to tag and connect different notes, in theory making it the perfect application for trying to organise various different subjects.
Obsidian comes with far more features than I have yet to put into good use, such as canvases to map out ideas, “bases” which can treat notes kinda like a database of information, embedding webpages and videos etc. It has a large community, which writes plug-ins to extend the base functionality. Some of the community plugins allow me to write math equations using LaTeX, while others makes it simple to create a bibilography to cite.
I then discovered the concept of Zettlekasten, which essentially boils down to small notes which may be linked together directly or via tags/category groupings. This allows me to quickly jot down notes or thoughts I have on a subject so that I do not forget the idea, and I can revisit it later when I may have some time.
My way of using this is to allow me to make some notes on a topic, and then next time I have an interest in the same topic, I can continue where I left off the last time I had time to explore the subject.
Does this mean that I am now always remembering to jot down notes in my archive? Definitely not
I do however on average structure way more my thoughts and ideas in a step by step manner, slowly building a repository of knowledge to be revisited later. Some things are forgotten, to be rediscovered by a future me, but generally I am better off.
As an added benefit, and a use case I had not thought about in advance, is recipes. I realised that many times I want to re-make something that I found a recipe for online, but I struggled to find it again. You then spend minutes to hours trying to find it on the ever growing part of the internet of recipes.
As such I have now started to jot down my own copy of recipes I like, gradually building my offline library of recipes (and my adaptations to existing ones), making it infinitely easier to re-make a dish that the family enjoyed, without first spending an hour googling for that perfect recipe.
The draft of this blog post was written in obsidian, and since it is just using markdown, I can just copy the file over to my source code repo for the homepage, commit, and republish. It hardly could be easier.