The Thinking Graph: How a Shelf of Notebooks Turned Into a Living Web of Ideas
The Thinking Graph: How a Shelf of Notebooks Turned Into a Living Web of Ideas
This was originally ideas created a few years ago and I refactored for my new blog/site
I. From Paper to Pixels
My shelves are still lined with them, dozens of notebooks filled over the years. Graph paper, sketchbooks, moleskines, pocket-sized pads. I loved the tactility of writing, the illusion of permanence ink brings (Analog is needed in life sometimes). But over time, I realized something was missing: connection.
A single notebook could hold great ideas, but they stayed trapped in their own pages. I’d lose track of where something lived. Re-discovery became accidental. There was no memory system, no map.
II. The First Migration: Lists and Tasks and more
I drifted to digital. First to-do list apps like Remember the Milk and Todoist. Then the beautifully designed Things app, which still holds a place on my iPhone’s home screen.
They helped organize my life, but not my thoughts.
These tools were made for tasks, not thinking. You could check something off, but you couldn’t grow it.
For years, I used Jira in animation and VFX productions, tracking assets, milestones, bugs, and feedback loops. And while others found it clunky or overstructured, something about it just clicked for me. It wasn’t about tickets. It was about connections.
I saw how tasks depended on one another. How epics branched into subtasks. How blockers created cascades of delay. And how every item had a history, a relationship, a place in the bigger picture.
That’s when I realized:
Jira wasn’t just project management. It was a thinking model.
And it was exactly how my brain wanted to work.
III. Outlines and Markdown
Then came outliners like Workflowy and Dynalist, which gave me a glimpse of structural clarity. Nesting, zooming, unfolding ideas. I liked it, but it still felt like I was sketching in someone else’s notebook.
So I built my own.
I started writing exclusively in Markdown, first in Kate, then Sublime Text. It was raw and personal. I built what I needed: my own pseudo-toolkit. It felt close, but still lacked something.
I needed something that didn’t just hold thoughts, but connected them.
IIIa. The Archiver: Enter DEVONthink
Before Roam. Before Obsidian. There was DEVONthink, my first real attempt to build a digital brain.
Unlike the clean constraints of Markdown or the elegant minimalism of Bear, DEVONthink was messy by design. And that’s exactly what I needed at the time.
It became a massive dumping ground, not just for notes or ideas, but everything:
- Academic PDFs
- Bookmarks from animation, VFX, and coding sites
- Old email exports
- Screenshots of inspiring layouts
- Reference images
- Entire folders of research rabbit holes
It wasn’t built for writing, it was built for gathering. It was the digital equivalent of sweeping your desk into a vault and knowing you could find that one thing again, if you remembered even a hint of it.
For a while, DEVONthink acted as my personal archive. Not a place for finished thought, but the raw material that thought could be made from.
Later, when I moved into Roam and Obsidian, I found myself returning to that archive, mining it for fragments to connect, tag, and expand. DEVONthink wasn’t replaced. It became my well.
IV. The Turning Point: January 12th, 2020
That was the day I logged into Roam Research for the first time. How do I know? It was the first day that I created a note. The idea of landing page or Daily Notes changed how I used notes apps for ever.
I didn’t fully understand it at first. But as I started linking pages, tagging ideas, and watching backlinks auto-generate, something clicked.
It wasn’t just note-taking anymore. It was thinking in a new form.
Every time I created a link, I was forging a connection, between story development and curriculum design, between animation workflows and pipeline reflections. My notes weren’t sitting still, they were growing, evolving.
Roam was freeing. It didn’t ask me to organize. It asked me to connect.
V. The Rise of the Graph
Soon, new tools followed, each one using the idea that your thoughts could be more than folders and files.
But one stood out: Obsidian.
Obsidian gave me local control, graph view, and vault (their version of projects) level flexibility. Where Roam felt like jazz, Obsidian felt like architecture. It let me build long-form thinking, tag with intention, and step back to see the shape of my ideas.
Now, my vault includes:
- Curriculum transitions and workflow plans.
- Reflections on animation storytelling and production.
- Technical breakdowns of pipelines.
- Career retrospectives from film to academia.
And they’re all linked, not just stored.
VI. From Storage to Reflection
Backlinking isn’t about productivity, it’s about meaning and clarity.
Every time I revisit a note, the context expands. I see what I was thinking, what influenced it, and where it might go next. I don’t just remember, I reflect.
The graph becomes a mirror: a memory system outside the body, but deeply tied to how I think.
VII. This is Personal Knowledge Management
People use different terms, PKM, second brain, Zettelkasten, but at its core, it’s simple:
- Capture your thoughts.
- Connect them.
- Revisit and build on them.
Whether it’s in Roam, Obsidian, Bear, or raw Markdown, the idea is to create a living system of thought, one that grows with you, not apart from you.
VIII. Why I’ll Never Go Back
This journey, from notebooks to todo apps, to outliners, to Markdown, to Roam and Obsidian, isn’t just about note-taking.
It’s about evolving how I think.
It’s about building my own interface for memory and meaning, a graph where ideas aren’t filed away, but actively in conversation.
This is where my best ideas are born. And more importantly, where they come back to find me.
Post - Reflections
So many pieces never made it to this post, a few that keep coming back again are Notion and plain old notebooks and pens.