Today I will share a nice workflow I have
developed for stream of consciousness
journaling. The goal of stream of
consciousness journaling is to get your
thoughts on the screen as effectively and
efficiently as possible.
These 2 features when combined reinforce each
other and let you hear yourself think in a
very efficient manner,
increasing the number,
quality, and types of thoughts you can get
out of it. The tools I will be using for this
are Emacs, KL line from the Hyperbolt
package, centered cursor mode,
Olivetti mode, and optionally,
voice to text. Additionally,
you can see my commands and key bindings on
the right. I will start off by showing a
typing demo
about how my day went.
There are certain functionalities for stream
of consciousness journaling that are desired
or detrimental to the process.
Stream of thought functionalities,
things I want. The ability to optionally use
speech to text. I do this by using
Nerdictation, a Python program.
I am still experimenting with this as it
changes the quality and types of thoughts you
can get out of stream of consciousness
journaling. I am still looking for better
ways of doing this. The ability to easily
organize and split off my thoughts by
creating and manipulating outlines.
Creating them in real time is needed for live
journaling and allows for later editing
really easily. I showed off some of these
commands before. To just write words without
worrying about format.
To not worry about scrolling,
I use centered cursor mode.
To not worry about lines,
I use the KOutline auto-filling
functionality. To not worry about pressing
Enter, and to have a nice looking journal
with hard returns afterwards.
Manually filling is needed with spacing when
it is wrong. I do that with metaJ.
Counterproductive functionality.
Spell checking. While this is useful for
editing, it is not useful for stream of
consciousness journaling.
Having this on or off conditionally while you
are live journaling is a killer feature of
Emacs. Reading slash editing the journal.
Part of the value proposition of this is to
listen to what you are thinking,
so this is needed functionality.
You cannot listen very well when you are
speaking, and the converse is true as well.
You cannot speak very well when you are
listening, decreasing what you can get out of
it. Features when editing or listening to
your journal. Spell checking.
I use the Spackage Spellfoo,
but there are others. I use multiple panes to
read and edit. I use a combination of follow
mode and some of my custom functions.
These are what I use right here.
The ability to change the view specs of the
document. Stuff like, toggling blank lines.
Show the first heading of everything.
You can also export the KOutline pages to
HTML for other people to read or another way
to look at it. Easy manipulation of cells.
You use the Alt and arrow keys just like in
Orm mode to delete cells easily.
The ability to manually reformat KL9 cells in
addition to auto formatting of the cells for
when spacing looks off.
MetaJ is nice, and auto-filling is also nice
for having multiple pages.
Why do I use these tools versus other common
tools? K-Outline vs. Playtext Writing in
outlines helps me easily structure my
thoughts in a way that is easy to write,
read, and edit. Org Mode vs.
K-Outline Org Mode gives me lots of ways to
structure my journal slash document.
While this is great for a lot of things,
for stream of consciousness journaling,
this causes decision fatigue and loss of
concentration. Types of questions I get when
structuring an org-mode document?
Do I keep everything in a heading or below
the heading in paragraphs?
How do I handle new lines?
Do I just use visual line mode with no hard
returns? Or if I make hard returns,
on what line number do I do them?
More visual line nodes in org-mode documents
like a potential org ID in your property
stores. While a lot of the above is really
nice if you are making something like a
website to present to other people,
these features are counterproductive to
stream-of-thought journaling.
Org mode is also top-notch for other things
such as GTD. I don't think org mode has
bindings to create child,
same-level, and parent cells.
Centered cursor mode versus scroll lock mode
built-in. Scroll lock mode changes its place
when you move the cursor from the bottom or
the top of the page. Centered cursor mode
will reliably fix itself to the center when
the cursor position is not there.