[Journal] Knowledge Work - Sascha

Sascha

Entry: 2025-10-20 Experimenting with turning a private practice into a social practice.

When I was still active in various online forums for training, it was part of the routine for many athletes to keep an online diary. Interestingly, a lot of the most interesting discussions branched off from these diaries. So, I like to start this as an experiment.

Back then, it was part of the forum member's post training routine: Cool down, drink the protein shake and then check the diary for comments and submit your last session there.

Scholarly journaling is a practice that seems to become trendy occasionally, but seems not to stick. I wonder if it is because of the implementation problem: Whatever isn't self-reinforcing has to be implemented carefully by developing habits and maintaining them.

What if it becomes a social practice? Social practices are indeed self-reinforcing.

This is at the core of this experiment: If scholarly journaling becomes a social practice, will it become a more stable practice? And if yes, what are the effects of it?

Sascha

2025-10-20 The conventions of a public journal in a forum based on fitness journaling

This is just from my recollection:

• The owner of the journal sets the goal and objectives of the journal. There is no hijacking allowed. If the owner of the journal feels that something should be put in another thread, he asks the moderators to separate discussions from the journal.
• The journal is half-public. The audience is the community. That means that you can't expect to be completely in control or that your journal is kept super tidy. For this, you have private journals. In the forums back then, typical practice was to keep a private version of the journal and copy each entry to the respective thread.
• There is a tension between the activating nature of public journaling and access to content in a forum. If a lot of interesting stuff happens in the diaries, they become the centre of attention and topic-centered organisation suffers a bit. Everybody of the community takes responsibility of resolving the tension by sometimes opening another thread and linking to the journal's entry that sparked the idea.
• A journal is more intimate than typical forum communication. That means that the tone should be softer and chosen more careful.

Sascha

2025-10-20 The Start of a Morning Practice

This week I am starting a morning practice, similar to Andy Matuschak's morning practice. I am more comfortable with lots of interrupted hours, sometimes pushing 8-10 hours with 8-10k words. This is no longer available to me. My day is fragmented and time is scarce.

That means I have to make sure that I hit lots of birds with one stone.

The current thread of my morning practice will be processing Edward de Bono's How to Have a Beautiful Mind.

My first concern is that I will have a hard time mixing reading and processing in the same time slot. I thrive with mono-mode working. Just reading or just processing. But I'll have to read on some days, when I process books that are less easy-structured than this book.

Chances are that I will be less thorough with my processing?

But the benefit is that I might get into the habit of journaling regularly after the session.

GeoEng51

@Sascha I don't properly understand what you are suggesting here. Is it to take one theme that you are studying and entering into your Zettelkasten (zettel by zettel) and post it here, to see what feedback you get on your process from the forum members?

Sascha

2025-10-21 Slowly building the structure notes on debate and discussion

This morning was the second morning thinking practice. As I expected: I have a hard time to get into deep thinking mode. But it is too early to tell if it is just a habit thing or if I have to add some techniques to the morning practice to make it work.

Today, I processed the section How to Agree in de Bonos How to Have a Beautiful Mind. Short, very clearly written, yet felt like a slog. My major criticism is the beauty framing. It feels like a shortcut, skipping a more careful justification.

But I got some material for the scaffolding of the structure note on debate and discussion.

Some of the key terms:

Empathetic Exploration: Exploring the other person's position for anything that you can agree with the goal of building rapport.

Coherence Exploration: Exploring the internal coherence (coherence is more than just consistency and I like it better than that term) of the other person's position

Later: Record a podcast on the hero's journey. There is an interesting overlap between self inquiry and knowledge work. There is good reason to say that self inquiry is nothing else than knowledge work, though I don't go that far.

Today, I will have to push myself to get this right. The problem I am facing is that possibility slips into orthodoxy quite easily. In the quest to live a good life, it seems to be easy to submit to an all-encompassing approach and mistake a useful tool as gospel.

The major struggle will be to make sure that I don't leave the concrete steps in the fog. I have the tendency to think that the practical implications are obvious, when they aren't.

@GeoEng51 The idea is even less structured.

This is a sample entry from a training diary:

Morning II: Easy run, 25 min

**Morning II:

A Boxpistols 8x3x15
B Ringdips 8x5x20

Noon:

A1 Lateralflexion, neck 3x10-20
A2 Cuban Rotation 3x10-20
A3 Torture Twist 3x10-20
A4 Leg Curls 3x10-20
A5 Calf Raise 3x10-20
A6 Sup-Pron, Hand 3x10-20

Comment: The easy run went as planned. The strength block was way harder than it should be because of muscle soreness from yesterday's workout. I think the next weeks will be better, since I won't deal with soreness any more. The stability block was very good and I felt strong. However, I might change the leg curls because I can't progress here more.

This is roughly the structure: A what you did and B what you think about that.

I don't think I can be as pure in structure as in fitness, but the idea is the same: I report what I did and what I think about that. And whatever interesting sparks based on that is welcomed. The dynamic kicks off when a couple of people start their journal.

Sascha

2025-10-22 A slog

Today, everything feels like a slog. For some reason, I woke up at midnight and couldn't fall back asleep. Strangely, I had a tension headache, which is quite uncommon for me.

Monades and Holons. I made the grave mistake of not jumping right into the morning practice, but became distracted by Monades and Holons. Not the baddest distraction. However, it can become a problem in the long run. My morning practice needs to be aligned with the rest of my work.

This morning belongs to the translation of the book.

I created one entry for my party manifesto. I pretend to write one to alleviate the tension I feel when reading about politics and the urge to engage in political communication, which I detest.