In this video I’m talking to Ben Gordon, a physiotherapist in Boston with an interest in the role of machine learning in clinical practice. Ben and I have been working on the very early stages of writing an article together, and quickly became frustrated with the limitations of working collaboratively in Google Docs.
We started experimenting with a shared Dropbox folder that syncs to a vault in Obsidian, where we can take a more free-form approach to note-taking and drafting the ideas and inter-related concepts for our paper. This video goes through some of the ways we’ve been using these two tools to generate new ideas on our topic.
I’ve taken to thinking of this approach as ‘structured serendipity’ where we’ve set up some boundaries delimiting what we’re thinking about, but which nonetheless opens up spaces for each of us to be surprised by where the other is going.
Every time I see that Ben has made some changes to the shared Dropbox folder, I see how my notes and links have triggered his thinking, which sparks new ideas for me. This iterative and collaborative approach to non-linear note-taking has been a really powerful way for Ben and I to explore different ways of thinking together.
As usual, I don’t want to emphasise the use of any particular piece of software or service; this is about different approaches to how we think about thinking. Maybe you can achieve similar outcomes with Logseq or Notion, but Ben and I really love the way that Obsidian ‘feels’ and I can’t think of a better way to describe this process than delightful.