Logseq Times 2023-01-22: Reminders, Task Set-up, Weekly Review, Compounding Knowledge and Project Management

With a lot of talk on climate and the Was it Staged vs Not Staged debate about Greta Thunberg and her detainment at a protest in western Germany being part of a publicity stunt, what is certainly not staged is the fantastic content / posts / ideas being shared around Logseq (and other PKM apps).

From Discord to Discourse, via Reddit and Twitter, there is a constant stream of amazing content being published. In this week's episode, for the first time, I am including some Mastodon sources too. Something new for you all.  Thank you to everyone who takes the time to post content or answer questions from others or read this and other newsletters - it is you who are the true community of the PKM apps.

Also, a special thank you to the devs of these great apps. It is your dedication and passion for turning a side hobby into an alpha project into an amazing app. Whether this is Logseq, Obsidian, Tana, Capacities or OneNote / Apple Notes, your hard work allows us to have an easier life.

Happy Chinese New Year all.

Event

Just as a reminder, that next week there is the Unofficial Out of Office Hours Logseq Teatime.

Sunday 29 January - 16:00 Gulf (GMT+4) For info

In this inaugural session, I am not envisaging anything too taxing, grab a Tea (or coffee, heck, even lunch) and chat with fellow Logseq users about Logseq, other software or life in general. The session will not be recorded.  

Logseq News / Events

• Whan to know more about what Logseq has in store for 2023: Jakob mentions that "in about 2-3 weeks we want to present our vision, mission and near term focus more clearly to the community. hopefully that will give y’all a bit more transparency regarding our 2023 roadmap too".
• There is some behind-the-scenes work going on to improve communication and usage of Discord, Discourse (forum) and GitHub. The aim is to reduce duplication, improve interaction and have a clear bug / feature reporting process. I am sure an announcement will be made soon.

Releases

No new releases this week. With the Chinese New Year, the dev team is taking some time off.

The latest release of Logseq is 0.8.16, which can be downloaded here. For Android (Download the latest .apk) and for IOS, you can download or update Logseq from the AppStore.

Logseq In The Wild

Logseq sync vs iCloud - Sync has been out for a while now for backers. How has it been for y'all? Would you recommend Logseq sync over iCloud?

See the responses here.

Forget those important Birthdays? Mike has us covered:

Great thread by Ramses on using Logseq as a way to compound knowledge:

Start slowly to build the system that works for you. Logseq is looking at "Working on the onboarding atm we want to get new users to forget about building the perfect system from the beginning on but instead just write. Eg interstitial journaling, morning pages, meeting notes, just transient thoughts – without thinking necessarily about creating pages. Those users who stick with Logseq a certain time then like discovering more features or plugins, although we can do a lot to make them feel much slicker and fun to discover."

In light of the above Luhamm comments "When I first started Roam I read something that suggested I give myself a week or two to get used to doing journaling and not try to create an entire system all at once, but to build it organically as I start using the app for different uses. This worked well for me and is still the advice I give to new users."

Siferiax asks - How do you guys plan your next days?

I use Logseq for basically Life lol. So what I do now is I have a template for each day of the week. I divide my days into morning, afternoon, and evening blocks with children under them for what I do that part of the day. Tasks that repeat weekly are under each block for that day. (I don't use the repeater option here! There are personal preferences for this) So far so good! Now at the end of every day, I wish to plan for the next day.

What I do now is get the template for the next. For example today I would summon the Saturday template in today's journal. The first block of the template uses <%tomorrow%> and everything is indented under it. Then I will fill in my morning, afternoon, and evening planning with what else I have going on. Come the next day I move the whole thing from yesterday's journal page to the current day journal page. Outdent everything and delete the date block. The journal page also uses a day template that gets automatically inserted through the config file. It has some page properties and blocks I use every day.

I just feel like the whole moving from one journal page to the other could be... Better? So I was wondering if anyone else does something similar and how you go about doing this? I thought of making the journal page in advance, but that was also not really appealing to me...

Somewhat related to the above questions is the ability to do weekly reviews. @Viraj has a setup where in they bring up the 'Weekly Review' template only on Friday. For this purpose, they have set up a smart button in the journal template.

Great idea.

The Cedar Prince posts - If you want an example of how I outline and write pieces with my Zettelkasten, here is one example -- see how I referenced the notes I used in each section and then further explained each point particular to the thesis of the blog post? https://jacobzelko.com/05152022174848-structure-revolutions/

Very cool tip to enlighten your future self:

Wonderful post by Luhmann on "A new approach to project management in Logseq" - https://luhmann-logseq.notion.site/A-new-approach-to-project-management-in-Logseq-8b36dd5eb25d4b9e9882742b5ee4368e

Hopefully one day it will be possible to showcase such articles in Logseq

Central Place to Store Queries - Hi together, is there a central place where one can store queries such that they can be reused in different places? I have a query that gathers all the TODO tasks in a special way and could be easily adapted to work also with DOING tasks. Currently, I copy-paste the code and slightly adapt it, but it would be great if I could call the query from two different places and pass it in some input parameter (in this case either "TODO" or "DOING").

#Tana really assumes too much structure and time spent to refine it. Instead in #Logseq you can just start taking notes in the journal without thinking too much about the structure but letting it emerges. Then later the information can be retrieved with queries. https://qoto.org/@post/109728402064459861

An interesting comment, do you agree with the OP?

There is good reasoning for this user's post and a few pointers in the replies.

A post on Twitter by https://twitter.com/slow_is_better - "Notion is fully customisable (like Lego) and quite structured, that style of system building is what I resonate with and work well with. Obsidian and Logseq I believe are more network thinking tools which are still great but very different. "

Do you agree?

Logseq Feature Requests

You can check out the full list of Feature Requests here.

• ​How far off are properties 2.0 and more “views”? Notion vs Logseq - I remember seeing back in November 2022 a brief preview/tweet showing properties 2.0 in Logseq. I’m wondering how far off this may be.
• Add Logseq Block Reference Counters on ALL Instances - One minor but useful feature of Roam’s block reference implementation (and Obsidian’s Strange New Worlds plugin) is a concept I’m calling a ‘Reference Peek.’ In both Obisidan and Roam, you can see the reference counter on ALL references, not just the original block. It’s very useful to peek into where a given reference is being used without navigating to the original block.
• Enhancement of aliases - The aliases are not powerful enough to be completely replaceable with each other. However, they are neither “simple nor stupid”, so there are no “source of truth” and confusion arises.
• Logseq - development strategy and quality control - Logseq is a powerful and versatile software that covers a wide range of features and combinations, making it difficult to ensure that all potential issues are identified during testing. To improve the quality of our releases, Logseq has implemented a variety of strategies aimed at identifying and addressing potential bugs before they reach the public.
• Search ranked based on relevance - Hello. I’ve noticed since I started using Logseq that the search doesn’t handle multiple match criteria being better than one match criteria. For instance, if I have a page on Vim containing a block about special registers, that should definitely be the first search result for “vim register”. (If this is Greek to you, pretend I searched for “wine temperature”. I may have other pages that mention wine or temperature, but only one Wine page (or tag) containing a block about temperature.)
• Option to show line numbers - I would love to have the option to show line numbers next to your texts. Similar to other editors / IDEs. Also Obsidian has this feature:
  

Logseq Plugins

• Small update to the logseq get-youtube-captions plugin. It now splits up the captions into multiple blocks and adds timestamps so you can jump to the point in the video where the text came from.
• updated Logtools to v0.1.1 - fixed: kanban used to have their own scrollable container - they are now back, numbered lists layout issue when numbers > 10 - now works > 100 in two sub levels. Added: a new #.v-columns-(2..6) option
• TOC Generator got a new feature for dynamic TOCs. Now if you give a height to the TOC, it will scroll in sync with the page's content. Refer to the README for a demonstration (the 2nd one under Scenario 1).
• Version v1.11.0 of the logseq-omnivore plugin. Bug Fixes: sync articles to the right graph only and show an alert if the active graph is not matched. Features: add command palette for sync and resync Omnivore articles, fetch content in markdown format
• Sawhney teases us with a potential new Plugin to deal with "why hasn't anyone made a plug-in to have folders and subfolders?" The release is "Closer than ever..." (link)
• Looking for a Dev to build an integration to LogSeq with Otter.ai. Roam had integration and it was really great. I would import the note and text into my graph and write so much faster from the note/thought I had left. Is anyone down to help me out here? Happy to pay for it.
  

Until Next Time

I hope you found this blog post helpful. If you have any comments or questions, please do just let me know.

Thanks again for reading.