In this conversational Q&A, Tiago and Tomas discuss how Tiago treats a personal Ayahuasca retreat as a comprehensive project, detailing the extensive logistical planning (flights, lodging, diet, habit tracking) and subsequent reflection phases. The dialogue pivots to a deeper exploration of how Tiago separates actionable tasks from informational knowledge, using tools like Evernote and Things. He describes tasks as linear, short‑cycle, left‑brain activities, while knowledge resides in a non‑linear, long‑cycle “primordial soup” that can be linked to tasks when needed. The conversation also covers the practical implications of linking versus embedding knowledge in tasks, the handling of completed tasks (archiving vs disappearing), and the importance of maintaining discoverability of insights after a task is checked off. Metaphors such as a knowledge graph and primordial soup illustrate the dynamic, unpredictable relationship between tasks and notes.
Chapters
Hey, Tomas, good to see you.
Hey, Thiago, good to see you too. So I saw you have in your project list, you have one project called Ayahuasca Experience, and I was wondering, how do you manage to develop a project that I think it's an holistic project that is not so much needed of, uh, intellectual, intellectual work? I don't know.
I didn't understand. You mean like, how do I do projects that are not purely intellectual?
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess I see everything as a practical project, you know? Okay. Like, let's say ayahuasca. Okay. I mean, so much practicality that goes into it. I had to do all the preparation. There's the, the flights. It was in a different state. So I gotta get the flights, gotta get the rental car, gotta get the lodging, gotta coordinate. I was there with a few different friends. So all of our joint plans, their contact information, I had to do, there was a lot of preparation. You have to have a special diet. There's certain, all these certain things you can't eat. So then I had to track, I'd have like special grocery list for like a month before that was happening. That is a whole thing within itself. Things to buy, things not to buy. Then I had to like, then I wanted to like have a meditation practice going into it. So I was kind of grounded, right? So then I'm habit tracking my meditation sessions. So that was all, that was all before I even did it. That was all just in the lead up, right? And then after, there's a whole bunch of other things. There's a, there's a different set of dietary restrictions. There's all my reflections, both during, right after, and still it's been more than a month and a half. I'm still having insights. Well, where do I put the realizations, the epiphanies, the breakthroughs? They all go in there. Uh, now also I'm getting personally interested in the background, so I'm going to start reading books on ayahuasca. What's the history? What's the etymology? What is the biochemical part? Oh my God, it's about to explode into a whole research project, which many personal interests do, right? So that little folder is just the default repository for all that stuff, all of it.
So it's kind of like every, every project you make, uh, all the notes are, and the actions are itself actions and knowledge that are actionable.
Well, not exactly. Well, yes, but so in Evernote, you know, it's this is sort of knowledge, you know, like things to avoid. It's actually, it's actually literally non-action. Don't do this. But in my task manager, I also have an ayahuasca thing. Oh, actually this is not a good, good example because I did the exact opposite. I kept all my notes in my task manager and all these to-dos in my notes app. I did the reverse. It must have been the effect of ayahuasca on the brain. But generally, no, like you said, as you were saying, knowledge is a never know, because knowledge is sort of unclear what it's for. It's like, it's sort of uncertain, it's tentative, it's prospective, it's not really clear what is going to come of it. Whereas tasks, you know, are very succinct, direct to the point, actionable. Which is a much better fit for my task manager.
So it's kind of like the building blocks, the actually IPs are the actions taken through the lenses of the task management that you have, that your tasks are nested on.
They're just sort of in parallel, like The way I think of it is, it's like, it's like there, there's, it's like a mirror almost. On one side is the tasks, which are very like left brain, you know, linear, hierarchical, structured, logical, all those qualities, just like the left brain, right? And then there's basically knowledge or notes, which is kind of like, it's like nodes in this nonlinear, you know, knowledge graph that's like very nonlinear, non-hierarchical. You know, things can connect to each other in any direction, in any order. One thing can connect to multiple things or can just be floating out here, connect to nothing. So that's kind of just like this chaotic soup of just things happening, right? But then often a task needs knowledge to support it, right? So like, you know, to buy my flights to go on this retreat, I need to know where it is, when it is, all the details, what time I need to arrive, what time checkout is, all these different things. So I'll want a link from this task to one of, one or more of these notes. I could actually link to multiple of them.
Right.
And the reason I want the separation is what else, how else would I do it? I, I could theoretically save this content in the little notes section right under the task, but then what happens the second I check this off? The discoverability of that information, like I'm talking about, if I go to my, uh, Say my today section, you know, uh, like this. See, I have a link. This is an exact example. See, there's a link to the further context that I need in order to take this action. I could have this content pasted right in here, right? But then the second I am done with this task, there's no way to find this. I guess I could do a search, but it's kind of lost. So instead, I want this external link., right? Uh, yeah. So it's like, it's almost like I have the ability to, to sever this if I want to, right? In a sense, when this gets checked off, it almost kind of disappears, right? Technically it goes into like an archive or logbook. So it is findable, but it kind of, you kind of want things to disappear from your to-do list, right? In fact, I, in Things, I hate it. Because it, when you check something off, it actually just moves it to the bottom here until you do log, uh, something like log, like, what does that say? Log completed. And only when you log completed, it actually gets rid of them. But I'm always hitting log completed because when I finally reached the finish line and completed that, I never want to see that again. I never want to think about it for the rest of my life. Uh, and so what that does by checking that off is it severs this connection, right? These links, I guess they still work, but I would never follow them because this thing is gone. Well, that's okay. These can just disappear and the knowledge in these nodes remains visible, findable, searchable, rediscoverable, and all these other links to whatever other notes remain intact and any links that I have from, from other tasks to those, even those same nodes get intact. So basically there's this thing where like tasks tend to be on a very short cycle. They're kind of turning over really fast. Knowledge is on a very long cycle. So you don't want to force your tasks to be on a long cycle or else you're going to constantly be missing deadlines. You don't want to force your knowledge to be on a slow cycle or on a, on a fast cycle because you're never going to get that long-term compounding effect of your knowledge growing over time. It, it's like two completely different paces of thinking. This is like daily and this is like weekly, if not monthly. Yeah. What'd you take away from that?
I take away that the knowledge is like a primordial soup, like taking the image of the ayahuasca itself. It's a primordial soup where it nests the knowledge that it's needed, and eventually it pops out for the task that I need in the daily life.
Yeah, that's a good way of thinking of it. Yeah, it's a nonlinear relationship between tasks and notes. There are relationships, but it's not one-to-one. It's not that the oldest tasks link to the oldest notes and the newest tasks link to the newest notes or vice versa. It's, it's totally nonlinear and unpredictable. You can't impose any, you know, any top-down thing on that. You just have to notice when there's an action that you're trying to take and there's a piece of knowledge that, that would support it. And then right then and there, for that use case only, make the link. That's it.
Yeah. It's kind of, I don't know, it's like the ayahuasca experience itself, kind of being able to have the perspective that you need to see all of this.
