Notice Patterns And Garden Your Private Wiki Notebook

After you've had some experience writing in the ways suggested in the previous sections (of Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook Getting Things Done And Other Systems), you'll notice that the same/similar ideas come up repeatedly in your thoughts. This relates to Why Use A Wiki For Your Notebook.

Reviewing your notes and refining them gives you a FeedBack loop of creating a Shared Language with your Future Self. I think this is the essence of Sense Making and future-StoryTelling. What I mean is that:

• as you write about your thoughts, ideas, and feelings, you start using WikiWords;
  • you might want to start by just using Category buckets, as discussed in Add Your Readings And Ideas To Your Private Wiki Notebook;
• as you use a certain WikiWord-s repeatedly, you make a page for it, then you follow the BackLinks to review the details of your various thoughts about that Word, which helps you notice patterns, spot gaps, raise new questions, etc.
• as you realize that you have multiple WikiWord-s that are similar to each other, you consider whether you should edit things to just use one of those Words, or pick a new Word that encompasses the multiple things you've been thinking about, or keep the multiple words and clarify the distinctions between them. (Many of the words on my Meaningful Life Roadmap are very similar, but they have slightly different emphases and "flavors" for me, so I find it effective to keep them.)
• I think this Wiki Gardening (Digital Gardening) moves you beyond Wanking to Reflective Thought. And then to Iterative Lifestyle Design, so you Do Something different.

Your life will probably not get simpler. It will not end up as an elegantly flawless tower of logic. But it can be nudged/hacked/grown into something rich, like a coral reef.

Happy hacking!