Making a Life Timeline ⏳
So despite being someone who works pretty hard, I sometimes get the sensation that I’m not really progressing.
I’ll try to think back on what I ‘achieved’ in a particular period, and if concrete achievements don’t come to mind, I’ll half-conclude that I didn’t really get much done.
A similar thing happens with positive experiences. For example, I spent 2 months in Japan in 2014 and it was one of the most fun trips I ever had. But if I try to recall what happened, only a handful of memories come to me effortlessly.
I had an idea recently which I think can help.
A timeline of my life 🕰
I’ve created a note which lists everything I was doing in different phases of my life.
In each phase, I’m putting:
The ‘primary’ thing I was working on (e.g. my medical degree)
Other projects
Experiences, memories and reflections
I’m hoping the second point will help prevent the feeling the stasis, while the third will ease my anxiety about forgetting (both positive and negative) experiences.
I’ve half-made documents like this in the past, but what’s changed is that Obsidian makes it effortless to build this document over time.
Obsidian lets you easily make new notes and link to existing notes. If I recall a memory and want to write it down, I can easily embed a note and write as much as I want, while still keeping the central note pretty clean. I can also easily link to existing notes on projects or to past reflections or journals that I’ve written.
This is still a work in progress (and is very much incomplete), but an example section is the following:
(the pink text links away to the ‘central’ note for those respective projects / jobs / reflections.)
I’ve enjoyed doing this so far, and I’m fairly confident that my future self will thank me.
I’ll be doing a live walk-through of this, and other aspects of my personal digital infrastructure on Thursday, here.
Interactive Obsidian Tour and Discussion
I’ll be doing a live walk-through of some of the things I’ve set up in Obsidian on Thursday at 3.30pm (UK time).
Specifically, I’m planning to go through:
my database of health-tech companies (which can be extended to anything 'profile-able')
the approach I used in my machine learning Master's degree (I believe Obsidian was a big factor in me getting a distinction)
how I use Obsidian to learn new skills (such as chess)
a timeline of my life (as described above)
how I save time with Obsidian templates
I’m keen to make it a two-way thing, as I’m always learning ways to improve my current systems :)
Here’s the link:
Links
[ARTICLE] Should we all be monitoring our blood glucose? Peter Attia suggests there’s benefit to this - glucose variability affects healthy, even in non-diabetics, so understanding what food makes our glucose vary more could help us eat healthier. Different food affects different people, though, hence the need for personalisation.
[PODCAST] I checked out the Talk Therapy podcast this week and loved it. It’s two co-founders reflecting on their experiences of building a business together.
[BOOK] I finished reading Montessori from the Start, which lays out the ‘Montessori method’ for parenting. It places an emphasis on building autonomy in children from a young age, using tailored tasks which are matched to ‘sensitive periods’ of development. I found it a refreshing perspective, and have seen a lot of value in what I’ve implemented from it so far.
Last week’s Q+A / Ask Me Anything
Thanks for coming to the Q+A last week, and for all the great questions!
If you missed it, the recording is available here:
Until next week!
Chris
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About Me
Hi! I’m Chris Lovejoy, a Junior Doctor and Data Scientist based in London.
I’m on a mission to improve healthcare through technology (particularly AI / machine learning), and share what I learn along the way.
In this weekly newsletter, I share my top thoughts and learnings from each week, as well as links to the best things on the internet that I come across.