[[Home - Notes]] Haiii!! Thank you for sharing your interests in me sharing my personal notes! ### Who am I? I'm [Q](https://jonquach.com/)! Designer, maker, and systems thinker. I love crafting and scaling **Design Systems** to make things better, **together**. I currently work at [Webflow](https://webflow.com/) as a Staff Software Engineer on the Design Systems team. ### What are these notes? These are my daily personal daily notes. These are notes I take when I am learning something new and reflecting on those ideas. These topics (ranging from animation to leadership to zen) center around my core values and core interests - the perspective of which I view myself and the world. Ultimately, I see this as an exercise for me to understand myself better, understand the world better, and understand myself in the world. ### Handwritten notes For my 2022 entries, I always started with handwritten notes. It's an exercise of intentionally slowing down and being mindful and present with myself and my notes. Handwriting also forces me to articulate and express myself in a way that is very different that typing on a computer. It is a way for me to understand myself through a different medium - a different perspective. These notes are as raw as they come. I don't care about spelling, grammar, or sentence structure. What I do care about is the process of capturing ideas as they come and the expression of those ideas. With that said, there are some things I've standardized my notes around. ### Note structure The structure for my handwritten note borrows techniques from the [Cornell note taking method](https://medium.goodnotes.com/study-with-ease-the-best-way-to-take-notes-2749a3e8297b). Specifically, I try to: - Break up ideas into sections, indicated by headings - Highlight key words - Summarize the note at the end in my own words. Overtime, I've evolved some methods on how to organize and highlight ideas: - Hashtags - These are reserved for the title of the note (borrowed from Markdown). - (Left) Bold line - Highlights the most important ideas. - Boxes - Highlights parts of the note. - Arrow and bullets - Sub notes to expand upon an idea. - 1 -> 2 - Pagination between multiple pages ![[How to read notes - 01.png]] ![[How to read notes - 02.png]] ### Digital notes [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/) is ultimately where all of my notes go. I create digital (markdown) files for my notes, categorize them, and file them away in my "vault" (an Obsidian convention). When I can, I will transcribe and refine those handwritten notes into digital text, which often spawn smaller sub-notes and newer ideas. The most important thing I do is to link ideas together. Within Obsidian, this is the "physical" act of "connecting the dots" - something that can be visualized through Obsidian's graph view. ![[Obsidian vault graph view.png]] ### What to expect This is all new for me. My goal is to send out an email every day that includes the digital transcription of my notes as well as a photo of my original hand written notes. ### Thanks Thank you for expressing your interest! (Seriously). Please send me any thoughts or feedback you may have, or even questions about my process / workflow. Always happy to chat. Have an amazing day!