Hey y'all! I've talked to one or two of you about knowledge bases before, but when you are working on a project how do you manage it and progress? Do you have a cohesive "place" to put information or thoughts or tasks, and if so does it depend on the exact project?
I talked to a friend about side projects once and he said the big things for him was using a useful issue tracker for his particular work, and then to have all of your projects fit into a cohesive "theme" (for him, it was particular type of coding work in a particular language). Do you feel this fits with y'all?
Project management tools
Re: Project management tools
I switched from org-mode to using apple Notes for everything. I keep notes and todo lists on whatever I have closest to me, either on my phone or on my macbook, and hand-rewrite stuff to transfer between devices. I always liked the idea of a commonplace book, which was like a precursor to zettlekasten in a way, but instead of your database being a 'place' its an object you can carry around. I try to keep myself able to write stuff down when it hits me, so it has to be easy and avalible. Im so stubborn
are the party rockers in the room with us right now?
Re: Project management tools
i'd definitely be interested in any suggestions for time/task management, if anyone has any! i guess for me the project-planning part isn't too bad – at least at the scale that i usually work at – but i've gotten really bad at structuring the spare time i do have toward completing them.
for handling the knowledge side i've always just stuck with notebooks – originally evernote, and after a few hops now obsidian. it's easy enough to make a folder and start dumping thoughts in there, and as the idea starts to congeal you can start organizing the pieces from the notes you've already written by linking them together. i like how obsidian makes this extremely convenient, though i remember using roughly the same approach back when i was using evernote too.
on an abstract level, notetaking methodologies do fascinate me and i like learning about new ones, though i find it hard to subscribe to any of them absolutely. or, i find it hard to believe that structuring my notetaking slightly differently will be the thing that turns me from country bumpkin to richard feynman, despite what the sales pitches claim. the one i've found that resonates with me most is the linking your thinking approach, and i really click with the concept of MOCs (maps of content). though i just call them maps, because MOC felt too buzzwordy and matome is a touch weeby and nothing else quite seemed to fit. but i've found these to help a lot for keeping a top-down view of a project at-hand.
for handling the knowledge side i've always just stuck with notebooks – originally evernote, and after a few hops now obsidian. it's easy enough to make a folder and start dumping thoughts in there, and as the idea starts to congeal you can start organizing the pieces from the notes you've already written by linking them together. i like how obsidian makes this extremely convenient, though i remember using roughly the same approach back when i was using evernote too.
on an abstract level, notetaking methodologies do fascinate me and i like learning about new ones, though i find it hard to subscribe to any of them absolutely. or, i find it hard to believe that structuring my notetaking slightly differently will be the thing that turns me from country bumpkin to richard feynman, despite what the sales pitches claim. the one i've found that resonates with me most is the linking your thinking approach, and i really click with the concept of MOCs (maps of content). though i just call them maps, because MOC felt too buzzwordy and matome is a touch weeby and nothing else quite seemed to fit. but i've found these to help a lot for keeping a top-down view of a project at-hand.
Re: Project management tools
It's a broad question for me. There's a few dimensions to getting something accomplished and it overlaps with our own lives a lot.
Let's start with tasks. I use a lot of GTD in my life -- OmniFocus on Mac, and I have an Android app that syncs with it, though I haven't found something to overlap on Windows. I organise things by project and try to ballpark an expected time for things to be done at the latest. Obviously if something can be done in a few minutes, it should be done now; but if something is just looming over my head, it needs to be put away in a system somewhere.
For projects across teams, there's subtasks and processes. The whole project has aspects owned by somebody, but they can be parallelised, and the key is just knowing how to best sequence everything so that ideally it's done as quickly as possible, right? So if I can write a section while the asset sheet for the previous section is being dealt with, then I can prepare the next asset sheet at the same time as I'm implementing the assets I just received, and the game fills out. But there's a constant crosstalk that you need for a creative project to be done well. People need to see what's there, and what other people are producing, in order to best get a sense of the tone, of the feel; so there's an ongoing process where you have to share what you have and get a reaction from everyone else.
Otherwise: I like to use bibles, whether in TiddlyWiki or Notion or whatever, so that there's one area where people see aspects about characters, the timeline of the story, what overlaps with what else, appearances of characters in different scenes (numbering scenes also helpful!), etc.
For what I'm working on now, I wish all of these things were in place; if it were my full-time job, it likely would be. But as we're all just doing this in our spare time, it's more loose, more act-by-act...
Let's start with tasks. I use a lot of GTD in my life -- OmniFocus on Mac, and I have an Android app that syncs with it, though I haven't found something to overlap on Windows. I organise things by project and try to ballpark an expected time for things to be done at the latest. Obviously if something can be done in a few minutes, it should be done now; but if something is just looming over my head, it needs to be put away in a system somewhere.
For projects across teams, there's subtasks and processes. The whole project has aspects owned by somebody, but they can be parallelised, and the key is just knowing how to best sequence everything so that ideally it's done as quickly as possible, right? So if I can write a section while the asset sheet for the previous section is being dealt with, then I can prepare the next asset sheet at the same time as I'm implementing the assets I just received, and the game fills out. But there's a constant crosstalk that you need for a creative project to be done well. People need to see what's there, and what other people are producing, in order to best get a sense of the tone, of the feel; so there's an ongoing process where you have to share what you have and get a reaction from everyone else.
Otherwise: I like to use bibles, whether in TiddlyWiki or Notion or whatever, so that there's one area where people see aspects about characters, the timeline of the story, what overlaps with what else, appearances of characters in different scenes (numbering scenes also helpful!), etc.
For what I'm working on now, I wish all of these things were in place; if it were my full-time job, it likely would be. But as we're all just doing this in our spare time, it's more loose, more act-by-act...
We don't care what you say but we care what you do.
We’re the invisible entity that looks out for you.