[[Project Plan Outline Journaling]] # Project Plan Outline Journaling See my [blog post draft](obsidian://open?vault=joshbuker.github.io&file=_drafts%2Fcreating-a-project-plan-outline) (eventually I should update this link to the final blog post link on my website). ## Initial Summary When it comes to working on a project, it can be tempting to jump straight into the fray and work on whatever the first steps are that come to mind. For smaller projects, this strategy often works just fine, allowing you to get things done with minimal overhead. However for larger projects, there can often be project stalling roadblocks that could have been prevented with prior planning. This is why project planning can be critical to the success of more difficult endeavors. But what does a good project plan look like? How do you know you're working through what you need to ensure success? My hope is that gaming through this for my own work, and formatting it in a way to share with others, will help answer those questions and give a template from which to start any large project. ## Planning how to plan ### My initial plan - Use google-fu and AI to answer baseline questions and provide an initial rough draft from which to expand upon - Review my previous conversations and notes with others on project planning, incorporating some of those ideas into the rough draft to ensure I don't retread ground - Reach out to known experts with rough draft to fill in any remaining gaps and request their peer review - Finalize and publish the draft in the form of a blog post and/or Git repo, both to provide a reference point for myself and act as a portfolio piece and starting point for others ### The process See my Project Plan Outline Journaling. The first thing I did was run the following prompt through Claude Desktop: ```prompt I'd like to create a template for project planning, that features some of the same considerations you'd see in an engineering notebook for an engineering project. Things like project requirements, costs, risks, decisions made and information considered, etc. I'd be using this for building out projects to add to my personal portfolio and software engineering / information security career. Can you do some deep research on this topic, and provide your thoughts in Obsidian compatible markdown? ``` While that was generating, I ran into the question of how exactly I want to document my process, whether that's inline in the blog post I'm creating, or if it would be better to offload the bulk of that to another source to keep the blog streamlined, allowing readers to double-click on the process as needed. As a part of the latter, I was thinking of a Git repo, both for these musing, as well as storing things like the AI prompts and results, as well as intermediary documents such as the various stages/iterations of the draft. Then I started considering the idea that's flickered in my mind many times now, of expanding my website with obsidian notes directly under https://notes.joshbuker.com or similar, using [Obsidian Publish](https://obsidian.md/publish) or [Quartz](https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/). The benefit of creating that would be having a well known format to expand my ideas, linking to things directly and allowing for the interconnected notes nature of Obsidian to shine on a web-facing front-end. However, I would either open myself up to the risk of accidentally publishing personal notes if I use my primary obsidian vault, or fragmenting my notes across multiple vaults if I want added peace of mind that nothing could be published accidentally. I already have some things such as the [links page](https://joshbuker.com/links/) that would be better suited for an Obsidian style website, as well as plenty of ideas of how I could utilize either Obsidian Publish or Quartz for my website. So I think the decision is that I should just bite the bullet, and create my notes subdomain using one or the other. There are two equally important (and somewhat inter-related) decisions to make now: - Should I use my existing notes vault, or a custom vault for publishing? - Should I use Obsidian Publish or Quartz? For the former, I need to ascertain the risk level involved of the latter unintentionally publishing notes. For the latter, I also need to consider the cost to benefit ratio of Obsidian Publish ($8/mo) vs Quartz (free). What I get from Obsidian Publish for $8/month: - Supports Obsidian financially, helping fund the underlying tool I use most (Obsidian) - Easier to use, and more explicit with publishing method (additional layer of protection against accidental publishing) - Greater support for Obsidian features, such as Mermaid and Bases Considering the above, I think it's worth the additional cost, and went ahead with Obsidian Publish. For the former, Obsidian Publish reduces the risk to an acceptable level, so I decided to use my primary notes vault to avoid duplication and fragmentation. Let's hope I don't regret that decision. Circling back to the original question on if this journaling should be included in the blog post directly, or linked to in my notes, I think it makes sense to break it out to streamline the blog post. Especially because now I can use my standard dated notes approach for journaling, while being able to publish it easily. However, that does still leave the question of how best to capture the project specific files, such as prompts and AI generated files. I think for that, linking to a project specific GitHub repo would be appropriate.