Developing research notes on my writing process. Related: [[Writing as My Primary Tool]], [[the benefits of outlining]], [[In the Blink of an Eye]], [[How I Take Notes in the West End of Toronto]], [[My Experiments with Doing Things Daily]], [[Michael Pollan - Berkeley Writers at Work (Highlights)]], [[How I Use Obsidian]] [[2026-03-16]] My writing process is a combination of just the natural emergences of writing a lot, and then also doing a bunch of research into [[Michael Pollan|Michael Pollan's]] writing process vthrough parsing details together from specific interviews. I work from a single research file that is temporal in nature. It's a lot like the [[Meta]] file where I am noting the date and then writing my thoughts under that date about a specific subject or thing that I am investigating. I try to give each block of text (which could be a single paragraph or multiple paragraphs) some kind of bolded sentence which serves as a conceptual cue to tell me what the sections are about. Then at the top of the file I have a working outline, which is basically a kind of blueprint of my understanding and how it is developing. I use that outline to form the spine of my understanding. What are the category of ideas I am exploring? How do they relate to each other? This isn't the outline of the final piece I'm writing, it's just an outline of my understanding of the subject. The outline of the piece I am writing can be entirely different and once I transition to that step it's always stored in some other file specific for the creation of the outline or a file that represents the working draft of whatever I am writing. [[Michael Pollan]] has this kind of rule where he writes 50 single spaced pages of research notes in that single file for any article or chapter he is working on. I like using that as a proxy and maintaining the same kind of discipline if I can to make sure I have generated enough raw materials before I go about writing a draft of something. I should probably figure out how to merge this file with [[writing process]] because that's just a backlink that I don't really use for anything. It has no text or anything. This is probably the file where I'm gonna log this stuff. ### [[Futureland]] as an early version of a research diary, [[Agentic AI]], voice-to-text and backlinks as process tools In a lot of ways, I was using [[Futureland]] as a kind of temporal research diary across different subjects. I would create a journal for anything that I was investigating and then I would keep adding more and more notes to it every day, sometimes over years. The big difference with my process now is that I can use [[Agentic AI]] to fundamentally change what’s possible in terms of how I can make sense of all of these research notes, how I can transform the text in different ways, it basically changes everything that’s possible with that text. Now I have this new thinking partner that I can use to parse through different things, make connections I could not see on my own, more quickly connect my thoughts with other things I have written through Backlinks. The other big difference in my process is how much I use voice-to-text and how much more effective that is than free writing. For whatever reason, when I talk things through, my thinking seems to be far clearer than if I write things out. I still like to use writing to get the prose exactly the way that I want it to be, but in terms of just getting ideas out of my head, nothing is more effective for me than just talking it out into some kind of voice to text app. The way my mind works when talking, I don’t know, it feels like I have a stronger connection with my brain in that format, and my thinking is more divergent and interesting. So yeah, I’ll talk a bunch into a voice-to-text app then I’ll look through the text myself and then type it out, clean up every sentence and even add more details. That’s how this entry was written. I started by just talking it out into [[Superwhisper]] which spits out a bunch of text on the screen and then above that spit out text, I started writing prose that more specifically captures how I feel and what I’m thinking. The text from the voice-to-text session is something I keep looking back on while I am writing the prose to see if there’s any specific point I missed or should elaborate one, and then once I think I am done writing the prose, I delete the voice to text stuff. As a research file is developing in length, or any file in my [[Obsidian]] vault is developing in length, I’ll ask an agent to use the [[Obsidian CLI]] to form an understanding of the current state of my vault and then recommend any Backlinks that should be added into the file that would strengthen both the file and the interconnectivity within the vault. I try to be disciplined about this because I find this really improves how much assistance I can get from an agent in thinking through a subject and surfacing connections through my vault that I would not have discovered on my own.