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GTD: My Personal Wiki

Posted on August 10, 2008
Filed Under gtd | 3 Comments

I’ve been using wikis for a long time now and have a certain way of using them. There are things as a newcomer to wikis that you always do but as you become more familiar with the collaborative, read/write web-based environments there are things you just don’t do. You start learning the don’ts when you realise a wiki is not the knowledge base but more a shopfront to knowledge. The better your shopfront, the greater access you’ll have to your knowledge, and ultimately the more use you’ll make of your wiki.

Selecting the Wiki

My personal wiki had to be small, fast and above all work offline. You’d be amazed just how many, twikis, blikis and wikis fall short of that cut. By small, I mean in both features, footprint and essential complexity. Fast is obvious. And offline means that I can enter some stuff in the same way regardless of whether I’m online or not. Given that I didn’t want to go through the hassle of installing a local web-based application on my machine I quickly honed in on TiddlyWiki – a client-side wiki. I’d used this about a year ago and was in talks with the then head of the team Jeremy Ruston about adding server-side syncing support. It appears they added it, so now we’re good to go.

Set Up

This made be laugh. To install the TiddlyWiki just right click here and save as the file (the wiki ) to your hard drive. You done. Open up the file in your browser and you’re away. TiddlyWiki is a single, self-contained HTML page that is small, fast and works offline!

Wiki Usage

The wiki is my shop front to my world, so here’s how I use it:

• I found a home for the TiddlyWiki file on my machine and made that file my home page within my browser.
• I start creating content home pages, for work, research, personal bit’s and pieces, weekly reviews, and other stuff.
• Content home pages contain links to external sites or internal links to pages that I write.
• My personal wiki content is organised more like a forest, shallow and wide and not like a mutated inheritance tree that is narrow and deep.
• TiddlyWiki allows you to refer other TiddlyWikis (keep the links relative), so I quickly pull out work from my wiki. Don’t let your wiki get wide and deep!
• I’m not a fan of stuffing attachments into wikis. Attachments are like the weights you place around on a hot-air balloon. The more put on, the more likely your wiki will remain grounded and not take you to the places you really ought to see. I prefer to keep the wiki light and link to attachments hosted elsewhere if possible.
• Backup and multiple machines. It’s possible and there is support for this. Still fiddling about with this but given the wiki is a single file. My options abound.

With my wiki in place I am a pretty happy guy. I trashed a lot text files, stickies and gtd actions and put the good stuff in my wiki. Also, with the wiki as my home page, with searc, tagging and a well-design front page, access to my current knowledge portfolio is just a click away.

Sitting back, slightly pleased with myself, I looked started seeing redundant bookmarks in my browser. Upon closer inspection, and a little thought, I’m trying to think of a good reason why I’d ever bookmark a page within my browser. Damn, time to eliminate more waste…

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