@User "being the best at an intersection of multiple things" made me think of long tail keywords used with Google search and the fact that it's near impossible to rank on the first page for a 1-2 word phrase, but with focus, one can achieve top placement for longer phrases. And coincidentally, that is the best place to find ideal visitors for your page anyways. Your statement just feels... so natural to me. - My 2nd thought...a rough eBook title "Life Lessons from Google Keyword Research". @User ""filter" my interests" is a remarkable perspective! Thanks, that helps me a lot. I can never prioritize my projects (INTP personality flaw). Depending on the lens that I use to compare and contrast, I can always reorder my priorities. This gives me a lot of anxiety. So, applying a filter on my TODOs and Projects doesn't necessarily mean that one thing is more important than another, just that in this current context only, it would be best to do things in this particular order.

short blurb about specialist vs generalist. particular pertinent to some of the things we were talking about @User

As an ADHDer, this is the story of my life. I'm using Dendron with PARA to organize the things I think about and do to keep them aligned. I review my 'Projects' to organize them within my 'Areas' or trim them and move on. The visual nature of Dendron.graph gives a decent approximation of the borders of my own knowledge tree, which gives me a idea of what others knowledge trees might look like so I can plan which questions to ask.

I use my graph titles as topic cues for self-review. If I cant's explain it to someone, I know I dont know it well enough.

Im thinking of making "why" and "how" note stubs to delineate the borders of my knowledge and think about what I don't know

Here's my current PARA dendron.

Here's my Dendron graphing out the borders of my knowledge and mastery for the DAT standardized exam. At a glance I can see by the empty space what I have yet to cover and flesh out.

If I understood correctly from the GTD readings also a

someday

list or vault needs to be reviewed regularly. The main difference between it and your projects or active interests is that it carries no obligation to achieve or close anything. I use this approach to fight being overwhelmed with things to do or learn: putting topics deliberately on that list gives me the freedom to feel good about ignoring them for now while I pursue something else or simply need to work on other stuff. This doesn't answer your question on specialist vs. generalist though

Thanks for all the responses 🙂 My week is a bit too hectic to absorb all this in one sitting but I'll slowly get to these. With other PKM tools I was too busy trying to find a perfect method / structure for my knowledge base but with Dendron I'm completely opposite; I let my mind keep flowing. Adopting the ameoba pattern was a breath of fresh air. However, it also meant that I couldn't contain my everflowing random thoughts and focus on the task in hand. I didn't want to be bound to a well known/popular project management methodology because I never had good results in the past, but I think it's time I find a middle ground and have free flowing thoughts but also have a semi-structured method that can ground me to reality 😄

no middle ground

should be my middle name because I don't have one haha. I am fairly content with the immediate tasks (pocket note book and a pen. I will never give this up 🙃 ), my self-reflections mostly end up setting meta stuff about my life as a whole. but I lack at managing/executing near-future projects. This creates a lot of disconnet between the ideal "spec" and "implementation" of my life haha. Stuff like PARA and GTD I have resisted to adopt for way too long, but I'm gonna start revisiting them slowly.

I am just going to throw this out there and see if it resonates with others... Building on some of the concepts from "Thinking, fast and slow", I am wondering whether it is time to apply these concepts to conversations, communication and collaboration, within the context of knowledge refinement? "Fast" conversation platforms, such as Slack, Discord, Twitter etc... have their place but there does not seem to be any alternative for a "slow" conversation platform. A platform that would allow a group of people with common interests, to communicate together, with the aim of refining their (individual and collective) knowledge. The word "platform" might be misleading. I have been looking into whether we could piggy back on some existing platforms, like GitHub, to achieve the desired outcome. (Using open formats and being fully distributed (de-centralised) are important requirements. i.e. Each person would be able to keep a record of the conversation on their own computer.) A slow conversation starts with a note, a post or an article that has an "id". Other people can read it and reply to it with their own note, post or article with its own "id" as well as the "parent id" it relates to. The idea is to eventually be able to build a graph of the conversation and allow people within the group to reflect on the conclusions or the decisions made, at a future date, in order to refine and adjust the knowledge based on their experiential feedback. This might take weeks, months or years. (I did mention this would be "slow"....) Being able to record and accurately log the evolution of an important conversation could be valuable, especially if people take the time to reflect on it and refine it over time. Are others interested in exploring this further? In actually planning and experimenting to see what works and what doesn't, and keeping good records that we will refine in the process? (Does a solution like this already exist?)

How would this be different from a comment section, forum, Usenet, ...?

The difference is, important conversations (to you) would live in your own knowledge repository. You would have full control and immediate access to them. They would not be hosted by a third party, like most forums are. One of the requirements is that the solution would be fully de-centralised. Each person interested, or participating in the conversation would have a copy of the conversation on their computer. Another aspect of the solution, which is a little different to other existing solutions, is the time and thoughtfulness that would go into a reply. i.e. The "seed" of a conversation would be agreed upon ahead of time amongst interested parties. The context, purpose, and objective would be established upfront. Once agreed, the group would go to work on growing the seed into something useful by documenting their learnings in the process. The conversation and the findings then become part of your own knowledge bank, and get filed into your own hierarchy.

Anyone, at any point in time could join the conversation and add a new branch, and choose to save the whole conversation to their knowledge bank (if they feel it deserves it)

Overtime, people can choose to join the conversation, to either consolidate the trunk or work on growing (or pruning) the branches

I think there already are de-centralized forums, and the amount of detail that goes into each post is up to the poster and participants in the conversation to agree on. New replies can stop to be accepted after a time or not. And everyone can decide for themselves what they want to save from the conversation and how they want to save it. It would still be helpful if you could provide a specific example.

@User tangetially realated but have you heard of argdown? helps map conversation and arguments https://argdown.org/

That sounds like a beefier version of mastodont. People bring their info with them and can hop easily between nodes. It also evoke to me the idea of a bigger, decentralized mailing list.

chris aldrich's website https://boffosocko.com/ is a bit like this (exemplifies this https://indieweb.org/POSSE)

so I am currently on Roam, and playing around with Obsidian, Logseq, and now Dendron. I like Roam a lot, but all my reading recently across the web about all our "2nd brain" note taking tools, the idea of not being vendor locked, and how Markdown is really the way to go. So looking at these more "open platforms". In particular, I was zoning in on Logseq, which acts a lot like Roam, but has some great differences in paeticular to task management, in particular some org-mode support, and built functions derived from org-mode as "first-class" citizens for blocks (A/B/C priorities, SCHEDULED, DEADLINE). Then I got exposed to Dendron. And @User concepts on hierarchy vs. backlinks was interesting. And one very interesting piece of Dendron is that it can leverage much of what the VSCode ecosytem present. My use cases are mostly task management, much of it comes from meetings and work-related information. I do research various technical topics, but am not operating as a "student" working on a degree. I am currently a software test director at a medium size company, and have A LOT of meetings, and am pulled into a lot of directions. So constantly jotting downing meeting notes/minutes, actions and agendas to follow-up. Project notes/ and links etc.

@Elessar while you are at it exploring, you could look on vimwiki too, its quite feature packed as well

vimwiki was one of the inspirations for dendron 🙂

Org mode is amazing. It's is sad that it's so difficult to fully extract it from emacs

Yeah, a couple years ago I put forth a valiant effort to learn emacs so I could use org-mode, but alas, I gave up...it was too much for me... my fingers could not get use to hitting the right key sequences....seriously...my hands would hurt after while 😆

I'm still using it because I have a lot of customer info and TODOS in org agenda, but dendron has a "don't know what" that makes me feel I want to stick with it. Even not being a markdown fan

Yeah... That's the org mode problem, it's learning curve. But it is so well integrated with the ecosystem that makes the editing experience really satisfying. If dendron could work in emacs with org, I would use it there for sure 😂

I'm a long time emacs and orgmode user but I recently moved to Dendron for the most part as a part of using vscode rather than emacs. While you can do everything in Emacs I'm tired of fighting with it and enjoy that a lot in vscode just works. Orgmode leans more towards fewer larger files and I find that Dendron helps me to achieve a balance between lots of small notes which leads to disorganisation at least for me and few large files which makes it difficult to find stuff fast.

Yes you are right, I was using org-roam to find that balance. And honestly I have a config I'm pretty comfortable with and I love emacs, the typing experience is great. But in the long term I have the feeling I would have problems to find or use my notes If I have no access to emacs. I've tried almost all options there and I believe dendron is the one that makes it better imho

Even I'm not a fan of longass links, but I'm trying to get used to it