I've written before on my experience trying to incorporate a "second brain" into my workflow, and how that didn't work for me. And I really thought I would be able to go the rest of my life not tempted by the thought of these productivity systems. Yet, here we are, a little more than 1 year into my experiment with LogSeq, and I have some opinions.
I became a manager last year, and as part of that process realized that I would need to "grow up" in certain ways. First, in the way that I communicate with other coworkers. Second, that I would need to actually remember what was going on around me. My first thought was to have a long running Apple Notes document where I could track my activities, but just a week in it was clear that wasn't going to work. I knew something about Obsidian didn't do it for me last time, so I decided to dive into something similar, but more focused on the relationship graph between documents: LogSeq.
LogSeq promises to make back linking more efficient than Obsidian... I think. I could make relationship graphs between my projects and my people, and verify that the right people were involved when they needed to be. The problem was that I was treating LogSeq as a task manager of sorts: people change, projects change, priorities change, and capturing all of that in a global view is overwhelming at best. My strategy quickly changed to simply capturing notes from meetings in one place. But when I'm just taking notes and not making any references to other things at the company, why not just use Google Docs or some other flat format?
That realization took me 8 months to figure out. I fought with myself for quite a while, and I hope you understand if I can't share the notes that I took. But the number of links decreased consistently over time, the number of notes I took in LogSeq vs my company's Google account decreased, and I basically stopped using the tool. History has 100% repeated itself: when I wrote that first post about Obsidian, it had been about a month since I'd opened the application. I am in a similar position with LogSeq, but even more extreme: when I did open the app, I didn't even write anything down!
The reality is, unfortunately, that not every well intentioned workflow will work for everyone. The limitations of the format that I observed before are still the same: the topics I think about and want to record are not well suited to this kind of note taking style.
One day, I'll have a use case for a knowledge system like Obsidian or LogSeq. Or maybe I won't. But I guess I'll never stop trying, and maybe one time I'll figure out how to make it fit my workflow.
Till the next failed tool experiment...