This idea of a 'small brain buffer' is why I love writing small atomic notes in wikis [1]. It lets me break problems down into simple pieces that I can later assemble upward in abstraction, rather than try to hold complex ideas in my head and compile them together in one big document. The buffer waxes and wanes, and I need to be able to adapt my writing process so I'm productive no matter where it is at the moment.
I've been doing this too in Obsidian and really like it.
Notes can be as short or long as feels right. If they need to grow they can grow, sometimes they get split into sub notes.
I have notes with titles like "Cardboard furniture", "Staging patch changes in VSCode", and "Hilbert Transform".
Some are one or two sentences, some are more like essays with subheadings.
Small notes tend to have one or two links to other notes. Longer notes have more links and tend towards centralization (eg all booking info about an upcoming work trip).
Search makes it easy to find the notes that don't have links.
Yep, Obsidian is the best! Two patterns I use a lot to help with this small brain buffer problem are collections & streams.
Collections (sometimes called 'Maps of Content') are sets of internal & external links or resources around a particular topic, e.g. 'Self Deception', 'Creativity', 'Air Quality', etc. The page names represent the topic so they're easy to name, and if I can't find a page I go to these first before search.
Streams are pages with date headers that contain small notes around a broad topic. For instance, 'Passing Thoughts' are random ideas, 'Story Prompts' are ideas for stories, and 'Inbox' are links to read and any notes I have on them. Streams do three things for me:
1. I don't know how big an idea is until I write it, and this stream pattern lets me optionally break ideas off into their own pages if they get to a certain level of size/complexity.
2. I can quickly capture without having to create a new page, since I'm at ~2000 now and each subsequent page makes search less effective.
3. I can avoid the challenge of naming pages, which is often harder than it seems. For instance, I've taken to naming certain pages like Andy M's evergreen notes style of declarative claims/statements, like 'Recognizing our influences empowers our creativity', 'The curiosity driving information addiction may be due to a sense of deprivation', and 'Good ideas deserve good stewards'. To do this clearly, concisely, and scoped correctly is its own challenge and worth the time investment because it really lets me build on strong foundations, and it prevents similar pages from proliferating in search by being easy to find.
It's been a game changer for me. I always did this anyway in other Notes apps, but Obsidian just does a great job of making it feel like it almost prefers you to write notes like that.
I use the Waypoint plugin with folders to create auto-generated maps of content within folder hierarchies. Works nicely to give me an index to use as a first port of call in a subject and works well with graph view.
Yeah definitely! I don't trust that my writing energy nor my memory will continue into the future, so I have a few tactics I use:
If an idea flashes into my head, I quickly write it shorthand anywhere. See my other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36726680) on having 'Streams' pages that offer an immediate working space to write. I let the idea expand with that progress & velocity, and once I've reached the end of my writing juices, if it's important enough I copy/paste it into a better place. Organizing is one task that can be done when the winds of flow state calm.
Similarly, breaking ideas into small bite-sized parts helps because those are easier to complete with less energy. Better to make incremental forward progress than keep trying to do the same big thing over and over.
Also, I try to start with a summarized version of what the thought is. Again, shorthanding the key points is helpful. It's easy to have a big thought that has several constituent parts and immediately dive into some details on one of those parts, only to find that the big picture sort of disappears. Better to capture the TLDR first.
Finally, I'm okay with abandoning ideas, I trust that the important ones will come back, and I make sure to leave affordances for myself so I can always return to what I was doing later. Some things I do to make revisiting ideas easier include:
1. I'll review my 'Passing Thoughts' stream at least once a week to see if my new context or a new perspective allows for the ideas to come back.
2. I keep track of work-in-progress work with a #WIP tag and new pages I've made in 'What's New' stream.
3. I keep track of my thought process with occasional self notes in 'Whats New', e.g. "I dove into X by expanding Y and Z but think I have to reorganize section A to fit it in"
4. In the organizing step I think carefully about how I name pages (including using aliases)
5. I densely link all related ideas so there's many ways to find them.
That's similar to how I organize my ideas as well. I personally use google keep for this, or just plain text files. I don't try too hard to connect them, maybe I should though.
What I do is: Not feel in the slightest guilty about it, because I just came off a stretch of real 10x productivity, and then go do something else for a half hour or so that exercises a different part of the brain - grab one of the many musical instruments around me, for instance.
[1] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes