Alex wrote about his productivity stream, which is something I’ve been thinking about for myself a lot lately. This kind of stuff is a bit like catnip for me, so I couldn’t really resist writing about my own tools and workflow, despite the fact that I’m experimenting pretty heavily with some changes to the process at the moment. I’m not sure how these things will work out, but I also know that there were several ways in which I felt like what I have been doing up until recently weren’t working all that well for me. Anyway, here’s a quick run-down…
- RSS
- Readwise Reader
- Read Later
- Readwise Reader
Bullet Journal
I started keeping a bullet journal a little over a year ago after my brother mentioned that he’d been using one for some time and it was working well for him. It shows up in a lot of places in the above list because it is one of my primary tools for capturing anything, whether that’s a task I need to do, or just an idea I have that I want to write down.
The thing I love about the bullet journal is that it has no automation. I’ve written before about how I find manual migrations to be helpful because it forces me to review my tasks and make decisions about what is worth copying and what isn’t. And the flexible nature of the bullet journal makes it easy for me to capture anything from fleeting notes to the notes I take while reading a book. Plus, creating collections in my bullet journal for the books I’m reading creates a nice record of what I’ve been reading—at least for the non-fiction.
I think what I still struggle most with in my bullet journal is actual journaling. As a productivity tool it works pretty well for me, but I’d really like to be better at journaling.
Signal
Signal has a handy “Note to Self” feature that I use for capturing stuff that would normally go in my bullet journal when I don’t have my bullet journal with me. It’s basically just texting yourself, but when you send yourself a text, Signal automatically titles the conversation “Note to Self.” I combined this with Signal’s ability to automatically delete messages in a conversation after a period of time, so after a week these messages disappear. Every couple of days I go through the messages here and copy them to my bullet journal.
Proton Calendar
Nothing particularly special about Proton’s calendar other than Proton’s focus on privacy and security. It’s fine. It’s a calendar.
Obsidian
I love Obsidian because it is privacy-focused and portable. It’s based on the idea of keeping Markdown files (with support for wikilinks) on your computer. Keeping plain text files on my computer gives me a great deal of confidence that no matter what happens in the future, I will be able to access these notes. I pay for the Obsidian Sync service, which is end-to-end encrypted, in large part because syncing with multiple computers and my phone is important, but also just to help support the project.
Candidly, I find all of the plugins and the community a little overwhelming, and after trying to get my bearings on the Discord for a while, I eventually gave up. The only non-core plugin I use is the Excalidraw plugin. And despite what you may think based on the existence of this post, I do not want to spend loads of my free time tweaking my note-taking setup. Much like with the bullet journal, I prefer something simple and flexible so that I can focus more the work the tool supports, rather than the tool itself.
I am pretty bad at Obsidian, though.
I’ve been trying for a few years to develop a note-taking habit, but it’s a struggle. Like Alex, I have the PARA folders set up in my vault (plus a number of extra folders). I find it to be a useful framework, but my note-taking has been so unstructured that my Resources folder in particular became something of a mess. After this experience, and because I’ve been reading How to Take Smart Notes (finally), I’ve begun rethinking my approach to note-taking, and it’s changing how I think about what constitutes an “Area” versus a “Resource”. I’m in the process of cleaning out my vault, so we’ll see how that goes.
Obsidian is also occasionally a place I begin writing. Usually this is because I’m writing a draft somewhere I don’t have a checkout of my website, like on my work computer or on my phone. Because Obsidian is for Markdown files, and Eleventy uses Markdown files, it’s pretty easy to move the draft out of my vault and into my website when it’s ready.
Typora
Typora is a cross-platform Markdown editor. It’s often a nicer writing experience than firing up NeoVim when I don’t need Obsidian to sync a draft across multiple computers.
Readwise
I originally started using Readwise to sync highlights to notes in Obsidian (before they launched Reader), but I have uninstalled that plugin from Obsidian. Automatically syncing highlights from Readwise was just turning my notes into a large collection of quotes instead of a place where I was developing ideas and really building knowledge and understanding from what I was reading. It was just too easy to highlight buckets of stuff that I read, let those sync automatically to Obsidian, and then forget about them. This is a recent change for me, and I’m still working out the details, but I plan to manually go through my highlights periodically in Readwise and write up notes in my own words in Obsidian to (hopefully) create a more useful set of notes.
But even without sync I am still using Readwise Reader for my RSS and read later needs. It’s a decent enough application, especially given it’s still in beta, and it’s definitely convenient to pay for one service that can be both an RSS reader and a read later service. I’m not really on board with the emphasis they seem to be putting on their “ghost reader” feature, which uses GPT to summarize an article for you. I have a lot of issues with these large language models (LLMs) and the people leading the development of these applications, so the emphasis on this feature makes me a little queasy. But for the time-being, the switching cost is too high, and the app itself has a lot of promise, so I’m not migrating any time soon.