Moving on From Logseq (Kinda)

I have been using Logseq pretty much non-stop since September 2021 for my daily notes and various forms of note-taking. I have 4000+ pages in there now, and that’s even after having taken out some really old notes.

But, I am genuinely sad to say that I no longer use it everyday because I have replaced the journal with Day One, as I like how it brings my location, photos and events in without me thinking. Whilst Day One is great, I am genuinely sad about leaving Logseq.

Something I will forever talk about is my love of “essence”, which is the life practice I have of making a textual, visual and even aural time capsule of what my life was like at previous points. That means tracking what food I like, who I speak to, cultural references, viral songs, trends, and even the PKM apps I use. I want to give my future self enough information to feel like I can go back in time to see what life was like “before”. Holding onto these bits of information informs how I use my PKM system, it informs the pictures I take, the instagram stories I post, how I view the world etc. The main way I captured the essence of the everyday through writing was in my Logseq daily journal. It was easy, quick, and connected to knowledge I had through other notes.

Given I’ve been journalling since Sept 2021, I now have a cool ‘On this Day’ query for me to review daily. Re-reading them now shows me the struggles I was facing post-university. I had no idea what I was doing. I spent a lot of time watching documentaries and wanting to learn though. I sought connection in my notes and those simple square brackets in all those markdown files gave me it. Logseq made me think about connection, about structuring information, and how simplicity can be great sometimes. It was exactly what I needed at the time. I felt so proud of all the knowledge I had accumulated and I had a thirst for more.

Except, it wasn’t quite knowledge, it was just a lot of backlinks. Fun to search through like a personal block-level (not book-level) library, but it wasn’t quite knowledge in the way I intended. So I started looking elsewhere and I ended up on Capacities. However I still kept my daily notes in Logseq because of that On this Day query, and my full Capacities workflow hadn’t yet developed. I felt so connected to this past version of myself that nostalgia and the will for some daily self-reflection on my past self and personal development brought me back to Logseq every morning. I loved seeing the essence of that previous time of life.

But I think now my life has changed completely, and I have started using a whole host of new apps that I’m really enjoying, unfortunately the enjoyment I get out of Logseq has decreased, and I’m less excited to open it every day. As a result, I decided I need to move my journal away from Logseq. You can do some incredible things with Logseq and its plug ins but I don’t have the skills for that, nor do I want to rely on plug ins, except for the Zotero connector which is really a pillar of my master’s note-taking system.

Speaking of, I will still use Logseq for my literature notes for masters or personal non-fiction reading. It is so simple to use and like second nature now with the indentation and the useful self-closing brackets etc. The PDF highlighter is lovely and makes my life much easier, so I have no reason to leave that.

But yes, it is time to move my daily notes on, which Beth from September 2022 would be shocked at. Logseq changed my life, but it’s no longer the place I will write about what my life looks like. I wouldn’t be doing my masters without the love of knowledge, connecting, and understanding that Logseq facilitated for me, and my masters inspires a lot of my PKM Beth content. It’s very strange to think what I’d be doing or even thinking about now if I hadn’t found Logseq.

So there we go, I am weirdly attached to a note-taking app. The apps will come and go with the seasons and the trends, but Logseq will certainly stick with me forever, as a way that helped me capture the essence of my life at a really interesting time, and as the app that set me on the path I’m on now, which I will be forever grateful for.

Anyone else weirdly attached to a note-taking app? Asking for a friend 👀