Reflection Workflow

A reflection captures thoughts at the end of an activity. This workflow suggests how writing and rereading reflections enhances systematic understanding.

Workflows describe productive activities that are well supported but not enforced by wiki. Here we use the hot word 'reflect' to describe and recall important writings.

Writing

Intense and focused work succeeds by keeping many facts and opportunities close at hand in short-term memory. During these episodes write quickly and copy freely addressing mostly your present self.

Use quiet periods to reflect on recent activities allowing yourself to summarize and interconnect experiences. Write slowly choosing words carefully. Start new pages and label them to be found later.

Label reflections with the word 'reflect' or one of its suffixed variants, 'reflection', 'reflecting', in the title or synopsis. You may need to add the word later if you don't realize immediately that you are writing in this mode.

Reading

Use quiet periods to review past reflections. This orients future work so as to benefit most from past experience.

Find reflections by searching for 'reflect'.

You may find it useful to lightly edit so that the insight and tone of the original makes sense within the context of your present self. Dramatic shifts or refutations are best written elsewhere and linked.

You may find it useful to write more reflectively in a particular wiki. That wiki can be identified as such in a site index by again including 'reflect'.

Example

I was thinking philosophically about my work at the end of our first federated wiki happening. I wondered how many of my thoughts were new and how many just older ideas remembered. I searched for 'reflect'.

String 'reflect' found on 4 of 331 pages from 2 sites. Text matched on no titles, 4 paragraphs, and no slugs. Elapsed time 3 milliseconds.

One of these results was about the success of a data structure and the other three were sites in sites.fed.wiki.org that were said to include reflections. I click to enlarge my neighborhood and searched again.

String 'reflect' found on 17 of 616 pages from 3 sites. Text matched on 1 titles, 16 paragraphs, and no slugs. Elapsed time 2 milliseconds.

Of the 13 newly found reflections two were directly applicable to discussions in progress as a consequence of the happening and a third was a look back over this wiki's first three years that trailed off incomplete. Now would be a good time to finish it.