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144 sats \ 11 replies \ @didiplaywell 13 Jul \ on: What productivity tools do you use? tech
After years of trying hundreds of different options (I'm not exaggerating, I'm for sure around the hundreds), dozens of them thoroughly and for long time periods, I finally settled with Obsidian. Files on the left, text in the middle, table of contents on the right. Perfection. And everything is just a render of your folder structure and your markdown files, so Obsidian can't lock-in anything: if it dissapears tomorrow, I'm left with my folder structure and universally readable markdown files. And it's blazing fast, which is really important for taking notes.
Coming first from using Google Keep, I now take notes viciously directly in the google Calendar, exclusively. It's cumbersome, but I make sure I don't forget anything because I know everything is there, and reminders are a default trait. Then I go by checking out notes once I transcribe them where they belong, which is now for sure going to be a markdown document, through Obsidian. It's the most stable and safe workflow I have ever had, but there's room for a good note app regarding the way I use the google calendar, I would love to implement something like that in a future.
Searching for a productivity tool can hinder productivity?
The irony
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Productivity Youtube is a HUGE rabbit hole. It's easy to get completely lost in videos about optimizing Obsidian or Notion.
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I have gone that far sometimes just for the sake of completeness, to be as sure as possible that I'm not losing something that's a breakpoint in how you organize things. But I learned that if a method relies on being way deep to be functional, chances are it's way too rigid and impractical. I do engineering projects that require hundreds of doc pages, and obsidian with markdown, a simple table of contents and a file browser just collapses all back again to manageable levels.
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You will learn about new tools possibly better without actively searching
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In practice that's what happens. The one tool I settled with, obsidian, is the only one that was brought to me directly. But I like to deplete possibilities, at worst you learn other ways to not to do things.
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Non ironically yes, indeed
That's why finding one that works is so relieving!
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And it may or may not be the best but in this case something that works is good enough and stop the search
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I feel you. I've tried so many things too.
Obsidian just came "too late" in this journey of trying things out. I had already somehow settled with Vimwiki. I briefly tried Obsidian, but I am somehow at a point now where I don't want to learn a new tool. What I have now just works. Vim is an extension of my thoughts. I get frustrated when I see a colleague or student trying to navigate a file with his mouse. But they get frustrated too when I give a hands-on tutorial and they can't follow what I'm doing on the screen.
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The proper method is the one that just works, no questions
The table of contents in obsidian solved a long time ordeal of navigating long documents by endless scrolling and wishing you remembered where that specific subject was. Now it's a quick scroll on the right, click, bum. And if that doesn't work right away, it means the document is messy, so I proceed to refactor and indeed that solves the problem and makes the document better. I can't believe this workflow isn't more common among text editors.
I tried vimwiky but it was way too packed and with time I realized I needed something barely above a txt. For a time that's what I did until I got to know markdown.
But anyway, the definitive answer is the one you said: "What I have now just works". Period.
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To be fair, I barely use the wiki part of it. It's mostly one central text file, from which I sometimes branch out to a separate file using
[[other page]]. The searching to find something I wrote months agao happens mostly on the main file using vim's /. I'm not really using it much as a Zettelkast.reply
Obsidian allows to use wiki links natively, but I found out that I never use them in practice. I do refer in the documents to other files by name, but I found out that if you keep a proper structure, even for very long projects, you will hardly need wiki links, and if you ever do, chances are you are doing things wrong. Unless you are making an actual wiki, but that's at company-level, can't be at personal level.
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