The Open Garage Door

I have created folders in my main (private) Obsidian vault called Lifelong Learners and MakingHistory. I'm going to gradually shift content into these vaults that I think is ready for others to see, and publish those folders. These will not be places that I put my personal stuff, but it may be where I test out content that will go into publications. I have obviously become less enthused over time with the efficacy of Substack to be anything but a newsstand for whatever is most current. I'll probably continue to post new stuff on a fairly regular basis (I’ll announce a posting schedule at some point). But I don't think I'm going to maintain a big archive. Contributors will get access to the published Obsidian vaults, instead of me just paywalling everything over a month old on Substack. There they’ll be able to interact with linked information in a way they can’t on Substack.

I do think it's valuable to post freebies. There are millions of people who don't know me who might become interested if I made an effort to attract them with samples. I wonder whether there's a market for my journey through history over the years, refined and massaged into outward-facing statements. Things like the historiography reviews, but edited and with links that would allow people to follow the trails of associations I have made between ideas.

This is an interesting process for me as well. In addition to getting stuff ready to be seen by others, I'm sort-of forcing myself to finish the job of integrating ideas into an actual finished Zettelkasten format. This is an interesting twist for me: typically I have thought of "working with the garage door open" as a way to show off what I'm doing or to provide previews and teasers of what might be coming in a book or course. Now I'm thinking of using it as a way to hold my own feet to the fire and make me produce the well-linked set of notes I have talked about.

This will necessarily be a gradual and sort-of sporadic process. I think it will involve diving deeply into ramified sets of links, as I add a page and then need to also prepare the linked pages and the additional pages those pages link to. I'll probably have to leave off, sometimes, and make "to-do" notes for myself to go back and continue expanding the links where I left off. I imagine there will be some areas I'm actively pursuing that will fill faster than others.

I hope I'll be able to make this a project I'm excited about returning to on a nearly-daily basis and continually add content. I think this linking will lead to additional insights, which will become blog posts or essays. I also think this will help me convert the new content I'm making for my students into linked pages I can easily incorporate into online courses. It might be a bit messy at first, but I can imagine it might be very useful in the long run.

I've created a new work item in my Tyme app, where I can track the work I do on these vaults. I think that will also be useful for me, allocating time specifically to this project and being able to review, at the end of a week or month, how much time I put into it and what came of that. As part of my LL Substack, since it's partly about demonstrating these techniques, I'm thinking it might make sense to report on what I've done each week, in addition to sharing my thought process and some of the blog posts that result from my work (I imagine some will also end up on MakingHistory). That's also working with the garage door open.