LogSeq and Others & Why I’m still using LogSeq
The Beginning
LogSeq, for you who don’t know, is a note-taking app used for personal productivity, journaling, and thinking processes. I have written some posts about it.
There are many similar products with more advanced features with the same category or objectives, such as:
And many others.
tl;dr, I’m still using LogSeq
To be honest, I’m also trying to look for other alternative tools and products out there, and I found many similar products as I’ve listed above. Many of them give their users a lot of more advanced features, some of them still free, and some of them need to pay or subscribe to get their advanced features. I’m okay if I need to pay or subscribe to something, but I just keep thinking about why I need others or what I really need from this kind of product.
The reason why I’m using productivity and journaling or note-taking-app like this it’s because:
- I need a place as my second brain
- I need a tool to plan and record my weekly and daily plans and activities
- I need a tool to help me visualize my thinking process
- I need a tool to help me thinking about some complex things
And the most important thing is:
I need a simple tool
I’ve already tried to learn using other tools or products. But what I’ve felt is I need to change my thinking to follow the new concept or a concept introduced by the tool.
Many other tools try to introduce a new concept or a new way to organize their content, and I’ve to admit some of them are really nice. But I’ve just felt that I need to change my thinking process and mental model to follow the tool, and for me, it’s quite weird.
Why do we need or use software? It’s a simple answer: to help us achieve our needs, whatever our needs it is. In the context of productivity or note-taking, I like a tool or software that is able to help me develop, evolve, and expand my thinking process and not dictate or even force me to change my thinking model.
With LogSeq, I can start writing right away without the need to learn a new concept or even change how should I write or visualize my thinking process and model, and I really like their outliners format, what is it?
An Outliner application is designed to capture ideas or thoughts quickly as a bulleted list
Source:
From it’s official website, the definition of outliner is:
Logseq is a tool to write outlines. Don’t try to make it behave like any old plain text editor, as the outline structure is fundamental to how Logseq functions.
By nesting blocks underneath other blocks, you create a hierarchy in your notes. Forget files and folders; in Logseq we organize things by branch
Source:
I feel comfortable with this kind of concept of outliner. It’s a really simple concept, and for the basic foundation, it is just like nested parent & child relations. The parent represents our high-level thinking part, and the child will represent more detailed explanations or thinking parts.
Example from my personal thinking notes:
We can visualize these kinds of note blocks directly into the mind-map model
What I like and love about LogSeq is that we don’t need to learn a new concept to start using this kind of format, it’s just a simple bullet list! We can start writing and typing what’s in our heads, and that’s it, it’s really simple, we don’t even need to “click” something.
The Outro
TThere are many tools and software out there similar to LogSeq with also the same objectives. I have, to be honest, many of them provide more nice and beautiful UI/UX, including for its more advanced features.
But for me, the reason why I’m still sticking with LogSeq is because of its simplicity, and it gives me a proven tool to expand and evolve my thinking process without forcing me to learn their concepts or even change my mind or thinking mental model.
I can start typing and writing whatever it is, and somehow, LogSeq gives me a simple and nice place to visualize my thinking journey and helps me to simplify a complex thing.
