Part of what I've learned fulfills me creatively is basically "revisiting things." I used to struggle with this idea, but I've become quite comfortable with the fact that taking notes on things that I find or engage with - be it media, articles, or my own thoughts - is its own artistic endeavor. It's something that keeps my brain active and engaged and thinking, and building these notes and connecting them together only gets more fun the more that I do it. All of that is to say that the process includes a lot of figuring out how to grow my own ideas out of stray thoughts and turning them into something more tangible. If you're not careful, you just become a guy that collects 1000 links in [[Raindrop]] but doesn't do anything with them. The managing and growing of ideas manly focuses on moving along all the primary material I've collected so it doesn't gather dust. Because I'm silly I like to call this process "harvesting." It's the main motivation behind my idea of preserving knowledge and synthesizing it together for primarily my own benefit.[^1] The process of harvesting and processing all of this primary material includes: - Going through and acting on Raindrop links (i.e. if I added a movie, make sure to schedule in watching it, or testing out an app I might have added, etc.) - Taking notes on [[Categories/Books|Books]], [[Games]], [[Movies]], stuff I'm clipping directly into Obsidian, places I've visited and more! For more on this check out [[My Obsidian Workflow]] - Filling in "Empty Links" - I like to make pages in Obsidian like this `[[Example]]` as I'm writing and come back to fill them in as new connections later where relevant. Looking at it top-down it's basically a funnel - ideas and media and other primary sources pour in from Raindrop or YouTube or my RSS reader, etc, they get processed through the outlining and posts that I write, and out pops the cultivated final product. The media that I write about in this regard is self-explanatory, but if you've ever wondered how posts like [[Express Yourself With Writing]] come to fruition, it's because I wrote - and this is an actual quote - "writing is good and fun, explain why" in my notebook in the middle of writing something else, and then came back and turned that into a full outline to write about later. There's other stuff at play with this idea cultivation: I literally block the time in to do this on weekends to be consistent for example, and it's also important to know when an idea isn't worth turning into a full final product. But this is my process more or less. The tools can change, for instance I'm trying to phase out Raindrop and move to the Obsidian Web Clipper. But the core of it is to make sure that the two main categories - my stray thoughts and the primary material I collect - are actioned on in some way. [^1]: And of course for whoever's reading this if they were kind enough to do so!