A wiki for worknotes and meetings: What kind of worklows and adjustements do you have?

#1

Soon, I will start my first ‘real’ job out of college. I have used TiddlyWiki before for storing and taking study notes, but I imagine the context of working life asks for a different setup.

I am planning on using it to keep minutes of meetings, and creating a personalised wiki of sorts. I use todoist to keep track of tasks.

I was wondering for those who use TiddlyWiki to keep track of their work-life, what kind of workflows you have? Did you make changes to your Wiki? I am curious to read how people use TiddlyWiki.

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#2

I work as an elementary school science teacher. My (current) work wiki started off as a project to create a science curriculum for grades 4-6. It included translating a lot of books and adapting it to the national demands etc. Because it was such a complex and “permeating” project for everything I did, it quickly became the wiki I use so it has kind of absorbed the content of my previous wiki which was limited to various notes and ideas.

So workflow wise; I have the curriculum for all the classes and dive in on a grade (say “grade 6”) and the various science areas I teach at the moment (say “Evolution”). In parallel I work with a lot of documents in Google Drive, i.e assignments etc, so there is a bit of back and forth between these.

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#3

Hi @Odin,

Glad to hear you’re about to use TiddlyWiki in a work setting. From my experience using TiddlyWiki in a medical research setting for 5 years, I’ve always favored this setup:

  1. Setting up a Todo tiddler for all my todos and making it the home default tiddler whenever I open my wiki every morning. It becomes a routine way of clearing outstanding things. Make use of Eisenhower’s matrix (we should probably make a plugin for that) to decide what’s important enough for that list or you will overwhelm yourself.

  2. Make use of the journalling function to reflect on daily activities. Good for planning the following days.

  3. Choose a theme that sets your mind at ease and don’t try to make your wiki too sophisticated. I use JD whitespace theme for that. Sophistication leads to distraction and leads to busywork trying to improve your TiddlyWiki. This has happened to me on more than one occasion, but I find ways to cope :wink:

  4. Finally, during your spare time or weekends, you may take time to reflect on any deficiencies you may have experienced using your TiddlyWiki. This will be an opportunity to improve your workflow in TiddlyWiki by adding useful plugins that may help your work. Over the years, I’ve added many plugins and have created many custom solutions that help with my work. Stay problem oriented and you’ll reap the rewards in spades

  5. Finally, if you ever get stuck, feel free to consult this wonderful community. We’re always ready to help you out :relaxed:

All the best with your work.

PS: above all else, don’t be too dogmatic about workflows. Be as flexible as TiddlyWiki. You’ll be surprised at what you can gain when you look at what others use for their work.

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User Stories...?
#4

Concerning minute taking, if your meetings follow a well structured plan and are predictable, making templates can save you time. Having a good record of past minutes to refer to in-wiki would also be nice.

Thankfully, we always had someone assigned to make minutes for our meetings, so I just had to pick out my tasks, note them down and that’s it.

#5

I tend to use this a lot for my productivity wiki. It is a header, a button to create a new tiddler with a tag, and a list of tiddlers with that tag. Use it for more than just Agenda. Replace ‘Agenda’ with Work or Family or whatever, in all 3 places.

''Agenda'' <$button class="tc-btn-invisible"><$action-sendmessage $message="tm-new-tiddler"   tags="Agenda" />{{$:/core/images/new-button}}</$button>

<br><span class='indent1'>{{Agenda}}</span>

where the tiddler Agenda is the following

<$list filter="[tag[Agenda]sort[title]]"><span class="blacklinks"><$link><$view field="title"/></$link></span><br></$list>

The stylesheet for blacklinks is

html body.tc-body .blacklinks a.tc-tiddlylink {color: #000;text-decoration:none;font-weight:normal;}

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#6

Regarding meeting minutes, I find paper and pen to give me more freedom. Then after the meeting I convert the scribbles and arrows into a more logical or structured set of notes.

#7

Odin,

Congrats on the “real job” and best of luck. I have used TiddlyWiki for work for over a decade, perhaps the main things to remember are;

  • Tiddlywiki can evolve with you, start basic and add features going forward, make sure backups are reliable.
  • Develop the following skills to support evolving tiddlywikis
    • Tiddler naming skills - never over simplify or over “complexify” names, just ensure they are unique by including something meaningful in the title (do not use compound keys - see elsewhere)
    • Learn how to sensibly split work, projects and fun across more than one wiki. You need to know without much thought which wiki to record or search for what.
  • Remember however that a single wiki can store a lot, so as long as you are not using embedded media photos/videos and audio you can pack a lot into one wiki eg; encyclopedia x 10.

On your specific application meeting minutes look at using the Thomas Elmiger EditButtons plugin, because you can save tiddlers without exiting the text editor during the meeting.

If your minutes are for re-occuring meetings consider organising minutes under a meeting name with multiple meeting dates.

  • Personally I plan to build a solution for Community groups or project teams to have a single wiki to use for re-occurring meetings - Planning - Agenda - taking/publishing minutes - agreed tasks/assignment - task review, submitting agenda items or updates, next agenda.
  • perhaps you can collaborate with me based on your lived experience?
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#8

The plus with TiddlyWiki is that you can try to create a workflow that compliments how you already work and think, rather than trying to adapt to a tool… though continuous tinkering and tweaking can become a time sink.

Fellow Todoist user here. Streams and its keyboard shortcut driven workflow were actually inspired by an earlier version of Todoist, which has since moved away from some of those features as part of a UI update. You used to be able to layout tasks describing an entire new project without ever having to touch the mouse.

I have on occasion used Streams for taking minutes of meetings, at the end of which I either convert some of the nodes/tiddlers to todo items, or I merge the stream into a single tiddler.

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#9

Thanks for all the replies!

Yes, this sounds very familiar to me. It is just so much fun tweaking and I’ve found myself tinkering with TiddlyWiki instead of studying many times in the past :stuck_out_tongue: I think allocating time in the weekend is smart, so it doesn’t get in the way of work.

These are the things I want to implement. Handy buttons for things you’ll use often. Thanks for the example!

@TW_Tones Thanks for the pointers. These are good to think about. I am planning on keeping work and personal interests separated, so that shouldn’t be much of a problem I think. I’ll check out the edit-buttons plugin!

That is why I love TiddlyWiki so much! I will have a second look at streams. I’ve tried it out in the past, but was worried that the amount of tiddlers would become overwhelming/cluttering. Merging seems like it can prevent that. I do make heavy use of you editor autolist plugin, which is why it is standard in every wiki I make :slight_smile:

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#10

I recommend installing it via the SQPL plugin library and installing the Streams Fusion add-on as well which makes it easier to merge nodes.

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#11

I also support the use of streams. I combine it with Projectify plugin to drive my key todo wiki now days. It, streams, is well designed to allow customisation and integration.

The key change I make to Streams is to change in its settings Template wikified for node title to contain $:/s/<<now "[UTC]YY-0MM-0DD 0hh:0mm:0ss 0XXX">> so ALL stream nodes are stored under $:/s/ with a timestamp so they do not “pollute” sidebar and recent lists. If desired they can be renamed (using relink) into a regular tiddler title if desired.

#12

A few observations based on over 15 years of relying on TiddlyWiki to help maintain my sanity:

  • I gradually migrated to maintaining multiple TiddlyWiki’s: one for personal notes and several for work life: one for projects I supported and another for general, things-I-learned-today, notes. Among other benefits that helped with maintaining work/life balance, plus it kept my wikis from ballooning to ridiculous sizes. Many times over the years TW helped me recall lessons observed: they aren’t learned unless you can avoid - and help others avoid - observing them again and again. Being able to search my wikis when I had that “I’ve encountered something like this before” intuition really helped me and others.

  • Over time I evolved to using the node.js version of TW so that my tiddlers existed as small text files. That also evolved to maintaining my wiki content as a git repo, because having backups and conflict detection/resolution should be as easy as possible. That later evolved to a way of sharing tiddlers between personal and work TWs, to avoid duplication, e.g., lessons observed about TiddlyWiki itself.

  • My usages gradually evolved to adopt/rely on only the simplest of plugins and community contributions. Several times I experienced breakages or got stuck on older versions of TiddlyWiki until I was able to address issues with contributed extras that I had grown to depend on or in some cases adopted for a while but then moved on from, leaving me with baggage. It is great fun to play and learn from the community, but when something nifty stops working that would put a serious crimp in my productivity.

I credit TiddlyWiki with vastly improving my work and personal lives.

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#13

@jwd thanks for sharing your experience. I just wanted to say I have followed a very similar path to you. With a few differences.

  • I have always had one key organisation wiki, which may point to a project in another work, home or tiddlywiki focused wiki, but it is where I lurk and can task myself or leave messages to myself.
  • Like you I have largely divide my life into personal, work, projects but also Tiddlywiki where I have a reference wiki, a plugin repository and experiments.
  • In recent years I made a wiki I call “Blog to self” within which I have the ability to quickly capture ideas and thoughts on anything regardless of its home wiki, That is I have dozens of sub-blogs. eg Tiddlywiki, Health, Philosophy, Science etyc… I also use it to list tiddlywiki ideas/discussions and more. This is where I capture and jump off to another place to do the detailed work (sometimes).
  • I also have a “Daily Focus” which is effectively just to read and keep guides on how to operate my day but I continue to fail to stick to it.

Warnings

  • From a productivity perspective one must be careful to separate improving productivity tools (Future productivity) from actually being productive (work and play). Since I have tiddlywiki as a strategic goal I find this very difficult.
  • There is a danger that TiddlyWiki can cause what I call “infinite list syndrome”, you build todo lists quicker than you do them, then when overwhelmed start a new list such that duplicates, and missing lists or tasks are not completed. Perhaps this deserves a thread of its own?
    • There are positives with this quick “brain to tiddlywiki” and can be a stress reducer
    • There are negatives such as “infinite list syndrome”, distraction, divergence, getting lost.
#14

I would second that. In the context of todos, you can either use Eisenhower’s matrix to classify todos in terms of priority to avoid needless busywork, or you can focus on following a less stressful pathway of goal oriented approach.

#15

I will have to look more at that matrix.

I recently found a metaphore thay may bare fruit. The idea that tasks can exist both above and below the horizon. Those that are above the horizon are visible and need action or at least management but all things rise eventualy. Also we can concider some tasks have a sunset date.

In someways this idea is a triage system.

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#16

I use the Eisenhower Matrix in my work To Do manager (TickTick). I’d love to implement one in TW.

#17

@DesertDwarf it’s something worth doing imo.

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#18

Oops. Re-reading what I wrote, it can be implied that I will create it. I don’t (yet) have the skill or knowledge to do it. I was hoping someone had already done it.

#19

In some ways yes it has being done because as long as you can indicate urgency and importance on your tasks you can apply this method. Perhaps using something like projectify, adding an importance rating to tiddlers and use the existing due dates to rate urgency. You can then generate lists that place tasks into the four quadrants.

The Eisenhower matrix has possibly being superseded by other classification and sorting methods by now. I know I can imagine my own more powerful methods.

#20

I didn’t do it, but I did think about it. … The main problem I have is, that I can “delegate” to myself only … So the whole process gets more complicated :wink: … Would it be worth to start a new thread about that?