I started using Logseq a couple of weeks back when I was introduced to it by a coworker who was new to Microsoft and was struggling with Onenote. He was all praises for Logseq and convinced me to give it a try. So, I did.
Now about two weeks in, I am kind of loving Logseq.
Onenote provides amazing sync capabilities, plus Onenote is something that I used for over a decade. So, I spent some time earlier today to see if I could go back to using Onenote. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s possible anymore. For me the main reasons are that Logseq is just simple and easy.
Onenote requires me to think how I need to organize, and Logseq does not.
You could argue the same simple experience is available in Onenote by just adding a page per day to a section, but that isn’t true. For this simplest use case, when thinking of Onenote with one section with a non-ending list of pages just feels overwhelming.
Now this might just be a UI thing, but it does change how you perceive and use a app.
Onenote conceptually emulates a physical journal and thus needs to be organized. Whereas Logseq is what I will call as a more native digital experience, one that is not even possible in the physical world.
Logseq takes away the need to organize for the most part. Every day you get one new space and that’s it. You don’t ever have to wonder where I should put this new note so that I can find it when I want. Every new note goes into the same place.
That brings me to a fundamental question. Why do we need organize our notes?
We need to organize to be able to look things up when needed. In the physical space this meant having multiple diaries with multiple sections and then often organizing the content chronologically. Organizing helped with looking up things when you needed.
I am myself a big proponent of organization, but sometimes you get to a point when manual organization just doesn’t scale anymore.
Let me give you an example, think google photos for instance. If you are a google photos user, you will know what I am talking about.
Before digital photos happened, people would organize the hard copies of their images in hard-bound picture albums. These albums would be labelled and organized and would sometimes have special names like “Our first anniversary”. It kind of worked well because most people in the world would probably accumulate a few hundred images in a lifetime.
Of course, this changed drastically with digital photography, people now had a lot more images. Let’s say about 100x growth, which meant an average person could accumulate about 10,000 photos in their lifetime.
Most people would store these in physical external hard drives organized into a folder hierarchy that allowed you to find what you are looking for when you needed.
But in mid-2000s we had the smart phone revolution. I am not an expert on the estimates here, but I think a person who is a teenager today will likely accumulate ~100k images in their lifetime.
You can only imagine what it will take to organize and find what you are looking for in that heap. There is no way you can use an image folder hierarchy to organize them.
Luckily for us, services like google photos, iCloud photos etc. have built solutions that don’t need us to organize all the photos anymore.
These services use AI to automatically index all your photos, so that you can easily say something like “driving a car” and the service would quickly provide you a chronologically organized list of thumbnails from your image store where a car is being driven.
In fact, I get a lot more from my photos and relive more memories using google photos. I still have some hard drives lying around with photos on them, which are just collecting dust.
Prior to google photos, digital photos were just going into the digital blackhole. While digital empowered us to create more photos than ever, but the sheer volume of photos just buried everything, and I think people almost wanted to go back to the plain simple hard bound physical albums of pictures that they could actually use.
Now, after using Logseq for about 2 weeks, I think that Onenote (and other similar services) provided us the capability to have as many notes as we wanted but with the organization constructs from the non-digital world.
I have been using for Onenote for over a decade and have accumulated 1000’s of pages of notes and ideas. All these years, every couple of months I ended up creating a new notebook(s), because the way the notes were organized in my current notebooks made me feel that the notebook was full and I needed to start out with a new notebook, just like I will have done if I were using physical notebooks.
And thing is that up until now I had been ok with this, I had accepted that every couple of months I will have to either spend time organizing my notes again or start fresh on a new notebook.
But just like I can no longer go back to downloading my images from the cloud and putting them into folders on a hard drive, I think using Logseq for just 2 weeks made me realize that it doesn’t have to be the way it has been. I can just capture all my notes in an interface that is not overwhelming, does not need to me think where to put my next note and still have the capability to find everything I need and when I need it.
Note: I know that Logseq is not the only one and there are others like obsidian that allow for similar organization.
I talked about all the upsides, there are still a few other things to consider.
The only major downside of using Logseq for me right now is the ability to sync and use across multiple platforms specially if you use a windows pc.
I am using Logseq on my work machine and thus I put the graph on my One Drive for Business folder.
The problem I face is that the Logseq IOS app can’t open graphs stored on OneDrive. On the other hand, I also wanted to transition my personal Onenote into a Logseq graph, so I created that on my iPad and stored the graph on iCloud, which just kind of works. That’s because iCloud is quirky.
With my current setup, my work notes are stuck on my work laptop and my personal notes are stuck my IOS devices. Now, this likely sounds ok from a work-life balance perspective, but the reality is that the boundaries between work and life are a lot more fluid these days. Having a hard divide between the devices makes it rather inefficient.
I haven’t found a good solution for this yet and my work notes cannot leave OneDrive for Business.
This one inefficiency is why I was still looking into using OneNote again earlier today. But here is the thing after spending some time thinking about this and weighing the pros and cons, I don’t think I can go back anymore.
For now, I will take the inconvenience of the work and life device divide, and rather keep the ability to organize my digital notes in the digital world way.