森 Mori
Mori (written: 森 lit. "forest") is my personal knowledge management system.
Philosophy
Mori exists to quickly absorb knowledge, store it for future ruminations and referencing. Usually that includes things I've read, learnt or observed. Mori is envisioned for search, tracking and organization purposes. As ideas mature into well structured thoughts, they are often put up onto other public channels like my website or art page.
Structure
Mori as a system could be better understood in terms of its inlets, processing(second brain) and outlets.
Inlets
Mori's inlets of information:Commonplace books These are 'notebooks for sketching, jotting down ideas, journaling, storyboarding, taking notes, unraveling complex ideas and emotions, collecting interesting quotes, making lists, planning things and thinking out loud - with a pen' (Preface, Commonplace book 2024). I manually type out everything I've written in my commonplace books. I work upon a lot of my ideas here.
Messengers like whatsapp, which act as a substitute for my commonplace books. Often used to capture important web links. Could be replaced with other notes apps.
Obsidian apps across mobile or pc through Google Drive sync. Android files synced with Google Drive through FolderSync app.
Second Brain
Mori uses Obsidian as an interface to simplify ingestion, organisation, search, tracking and referencing of information. Obsidian store data as plaintext files. Plaintext ensure the ownership of the data with the user and prevents vendor lock-in. The second brain derives its implementation from other note-taking methodologies mentioned below, the resources for which could be found here: Vicky Zhao's PlaylistZettelkasten: Each idea stored in only a single note.
Idea compass: North-South-East-West ideas that point towards Upstream-Downstream-Transformative-Reinforcing ideas in the second brain.
First Principle Thinking: Reductionistic way of thinking that breaks down and question each individual component of the idea.
Outlets
Outlets of Mori include:Website: Publically available for posterity and longevity of data through Wayback Machine. Web provides flexibility of information representation.
Art boards: Instagram. For reach and shareability within existing popular medium.
Blogs: Still under consideration. Substack/ Medium type newsletters. I might just end up creating an RSS feed on my website itself.
Usage
Mori is an essential part of my everyday systems of understanding the world. It keeps track of my long term and short term goals while aiding me with my daily musings. It captures and saves my fleeting thoughts, for me to later resume my chain of thoughts from where I left off. This habit of letting ideas marinate over time, or put otherwise, sleeping over your problems is a game changer. It enables having a fresh set of eyes and perspective to tackle the same idea from other angles. I cannot think of a better way to efficiently process my thoughts without it.Other side benefits of this daily cadence of updating my journal on Mori is tying up newer habits that I wanna pick up. For instance, gratitude journaling as a daily activity could be added to daily note's template to become just another field I need to fill in my checklist of things.
Future
I plan to track my financial health. However I haven't found any easy implementations to use for Plaintext Accounting that would go well with this system, yet. I'd ideally like to have very visual dashboards for myself along with good budgeting practices.I also want to bring in my art explorations from pinterest boards and my own artwork into the system.