# readme  For many years I've been curating a personal knowledge system. I started in paper notebooks and bullet journals in college, migrated to Evernote in grad school, to Roam early in my career, and then finally, to Obsidian several years ago. For the most part this has been my personal companion and second brain, and my diligence to form and factor has been very experimental and low-stakes. More recently (within the last 3 years) a coherent personal OS began emerging. This gave a more structured form to how I think and work, and with it, the opportunity to "think in public." Earlier in my career, as a GTM executive in growth-stage companies, I rarely had time to think about my work or writing in any other context than productive, polished (enough), and complete. And since I've never been fond of the posturing required for "thought leadership," these two things combined to keep me from writing meaningfully for many years. A few things came together to change my perspective. 1. In 2023 I read Tom Critchlow's missive on [[Writing, Riffs & Relationships - Clips|riffs]] and it fundamentally re-framed "content" from something I deeply resent to something I might be able to execute authentically. 2. In Q4 of 2024 I took a [[Why I took a sabbatical|sabbatical]] to reset and explore [[the future of saas]] and in that period of [[research as leisure activity - Clips|productive leisure]] I finally had the space to refine, refactor, and formalize how I "think in public." 3. In 2025 I founded [Greenhaus](https://www.greenhausgtm.com). I quickly realized that in the context of independent strategy consulting, projects and case studies only communicate so much. To effectively [[Show the Product, You Cowards - Clips|show the product (you cowards)]], you have to invite people into the process, sharing how you think early and often. ## If you've found your way here, consider this the disclaimer  I use this space as a digital garden in pursuit of "thinking in public." It's where I capture and nurture ideas and do my best to activate them. Here's a good write-up about [how to engage with digital gardens](https://www.swyx.io/digital-garden-tos). I find these ideas generally apply. >[!quote]+ Welcome to my garden >A Digital Garden is your very own place (often a blog, or twitter account) to plant incomplete thoughts and disorganized notes in public - the idea being that these are evergreen things that grow as your learning does, warmed by constant attention and fueled by the unambiguous daylight of peer review. All of this to say that thinking in public comes with caveats. My personal workflow pushes certain objects from my broader (and personal) repository via symlink into a smaller directory, then to a static site builder to generate what you're reading here. This means that along the way you may find some links in the graph that are dead ends, from both incompletion or omission. That's just how it be. Occasionally, some ideas don't immediately bear fruit. Rather than trying to force these into form, a digital garden allows these ideas to aggregate until they find form. Adjacent context is a superpower of an independent strategist and graph-based systems do a fantastic job allowing ideas to emerge and cohere. It also means that the lines between personal and public can get a little blurry, and from time-to-time those dead wikilinks are a matter of protecting privacy. For a little deeper dive into how I use this space, keep reading. ### My philosophy My gardening practice is built on a few foundational beliefs: - **Thinking is work.** This is especially true now, when [[what remains human|generative AI is fundamentally re-configuring knowledge work]]. It's never been more important *to think,* and to build structured systems that allow for better interface between how you think and how work gets done (be it others, workflow tools, or agents). - **Knowledge should be atomic, linked, and discoverable.** All of my years of experience have taught me that knowledge and experience mostly always [[emergence|emerges]] and [[coherence|coheres]]. To facilitate this I focus on building [[object-oriented systems]] in which every object stands alone, but meaningfully connects to other parts of the system. - **Systems must serve synthesis.** A good garden is a productive garden, and productivity is an outcome of cultivation. I focus on [[reification|reifying]] ideas in a consistent way and anchoring them to structured processes in my workflow so that I'm prompting myself with what's growing, and what's withering on the vine. ### System design One of the best critiques I've read of [Evergreen or Zettelkasten notes](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes) is that they [aren't actually that great for learning a practice or domain](https://engineeringideas.substack.com/p/reflection-on-two-years-of-writing), which is a sentiment I tend to agree with. It took a fair bit of iteration to land on a process that gives me the best of the evergreen process that also supports my day-to-day work, writing, and long term growth. I organize my work in four broad domains (projects, areas, resources, archive) in support of three meta-patterns: thinking, periodic notes, and initiative-based efforts. - **Thinking objects** are conceptually organized and exist in a lifecycle. Rather than relying on folders, they are driven by metadata, relationships, and typology. Notes like Ideas, Questions, and Concepts are discovered and developed through interlinking, not hierarchy. - **Periodic notes anchor time.** Daily, weekly, and monthly notes provide scaffolding for reflection, pattern recognition, and forward momentum. They serve as a crucial bridge between abstract thinking and concrete execution. - **Daily Notes** = raw logging, tasks, quick capture - **Weekly Notes** = integration & planning, surfacing of thinking, seeds, project links - **Monthly Notes** = synthesis of patterns, idea evolution, strategy-level insight - **Projects or Initiatives are connectors.** They link the conceptual depth of thinking objects with the executional rhythm of periodic notes—organizing work into thematic arcs oriented toward a shared goal or deliverable. The combination of these dimensions allows me to create structured feedback loops between deep (and sometimes self-indulgent) conceptual work and my daily/weekly reflection, as well as my project planning and execution. Consider the thinking objects in my system: | Type | Description | Path | | ---------- | --------------------------------------- | --------------------- | | `idea` | Any discrete thought or hypothesis | `thinking/ideas/` | | `question` | Guiding inquiry or problem framing | `thinking/questions/` | | `concept` | Canonical definition or mental model | `thinking/concepts/` | | `artifact` | Framework, tool, template, or GTM asset | `thinking/artifacts/` | These objects move through a lifecycle (seed -> sapling -> evergreen), the progression through which is discretely defined. From here, it's a matter of a simple dataview query and a thoughtful prompt embedded in my templates to surface conceptual thinking in the context of my day-to-day, week-to-week, etc. This forces me to engage or not, but also means that anything that lies fallow does so by choice. ### Linking strategies Thinking in public presents a sort of "two-sided marketplace" challenge in which you need to optimize for the most powerful ways ideas emerge for you in your practice, but also explicit organizing principles for how you present work in context. My personal practice heavily relies on dataview queries of frontmatter properties, and I use explicit backlinking strategies to build my graph. Additionally, I've been experimenting with [[self-governing systems]] more recently, working with [smart connections](https://github.com/brianpetro/obsidian-smart-connections) to embed my vault into a locally-hosted LLM that surfaces relevant notes dynamically, without explicit tagging. All of this is extremely powerful for the way I think and discover, but largely incompatible with how I can efficiently publish those ideas in context, and context is king in conceptual work. Rather than trying to fit my publishing methodology to my pure thinking methodology, I make a few concessions to how I format notes for public consumption. 1. Firstly, where it makes sense, I try to use inline body links to directly link notes, even though it's often redundant. 2. Secondly, where styling allows, I recreate some of my dataview queries as markdown tables, which is automated by dataview publisher. Sometimes these break and it may be a while before I notice, depending on how alive that work is. 3. Third, I organize my work explicitly around [[04 - questions|lines of inquiry]] to develop conceptual density and improve wayfinding. 4. Lastly, I use "wayfinding blocks" to create thoughtful breadcrumbs for continued exploration, in the spirit of a "no dead ends" philosophy. At the bottom of most notes (I'm still refactoring here) you'll find a wayfinding block that lists: - they typology of the note (which also includes lifecycle stage) - the origins -> what was I reading or what has contributed to its spark? - ideas -> what was this developed alongside? - concepts -> foundational ideas or frameworks that are related As ideas become more and more established, they become discrete outputs either here or in my newsletter. In aggregate, I think about all of this as a structured process to make meaning over time, both for myself and for the people in my life. If you've made it this far, I'm hoping you're one of those people! --- ![[footer#^a63e8e]]