Sunday November 7, 2021; 10:11 AM EST
- Steven Johnson wrote about keeping a "Spark File" back in 2012 and I started one of my own immediately after reading his article. I kept it going from 2012 through 2016 in either a text file or Tinderbox, depending on my mood.#
- After recently subscribing to Johnson's newsletter, I was reminded about my old spark file and so I dug it out of the archives (it's a Tinderbox file) and had a blast skimming through it. Some of the ideas in it are simply terrible. Some, now nearly a decade old, are depressingly valid and yet still undone. Keeping a file like this is a great idea so I'm determined to bring back the practice.#
- This time I'll keep it in Org mode since right now that's where all my "logging" goes. I set up a capture template to make sure I don't miss any million-dollar ideas. The template looks like this:#
("s" "Add to Spark File" entry (file+headline ,(concat org-directory "sparkfile.org") "Sparks") "* %?\n%U" :prepend t)
#
- I exported my old Tinderbox file into an outline, copied and pasted it into sparkfile.org and did a quick find and replace to convert all the history into a nice org mode format. Let the sparks fly!#