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notetaking

General

  • Take simpler notes!
  • For years, I used a sophisticated combination of three Notion databases to track all my research and writing. It was highly successful at collecting links to things I’d read. But had a negative impact on actually writing. I spent far more time organizing my notes and the relationships between them than actually new content, let alone publishing it.
  • I switched to an old school single folder of markdown files and my writing and publishing took off.
  • Post drafts and notes side-by-side in the same folder
  • Posts distinguished from notes by having a date property in their frontmatter
  • File names prefixed by topic (and any subtopics)
  • Copilot super helpful with inserting repeated patterns (e.g. inserting author names, emoji format indicators, etc)
  • Apple Notes vs Obsidian:
    • Pros:
      • can easily share a note with someone
      • device sync is built in
      • never any merge conflicts since not syncing via git
      • includes iOS widgets
    • Cons:
      • no vim, which makes typing experience on desktop pretty painful compared to what I’m used to in vs code + obsidian
      • no markdown, so locked into limited formatting options
        • e.g. no inline or block syntax highlighting
      • more limited organization options
      • can’t publish notes
  • How I refactor notes in Obsidian • Nicole van der Hoeven 📺
  • The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Plain Text • Makes a strong case for using nothing but Markdown files in GitHub repos (helped by GitHub features like Projects, PRs and Actions) for all documentation, project and task management • No Boilerplate 📺

PARA

  • how to balance PARA notes in Obsidian + tasks in things? How should Things be organized? (I far prefer Things on mobile for quick task capture and sorting compared to Obsidian, which is slower to capture in, uglier to look at, and lacks a clear way to sort and calendar-block a day)
  • in things, how should work project + area tasks be represented? As separate projects that are separate in Today view? Separate projects that are mixable in Today view? One flat “Projects” area task list + “Areas” area task list?
  • I prefer capturing in Things on mobile but in Obsidian (via Alfred) on desktop; problem = if I’m capturing a note about something I just learned in Obsidian, which makes me think of something I want to do, should I be capturing the todo in Things? I don’t love the duplication and disorganization of the same idea recorded in two places… But if I just tag the idea as a todo in Obsidian, I don’t love the mobile “what should I work on right now” workflow Obsidian offers compared to Things…hmm

Notion

Inbox

  • obsidian: try three tag taxonomies:

    • type of note (e.g.)
    • state of note (e.g.,,,)
    • what set in belongs to (e.g.-project-name)
    • try to avoid using tags too often or creating complex nested tags
    • Jorge advice, author of Duly Noted

  • Hookmark – Links beat searching - add deep links to apps to any app in macos

  • Capacities - an interesting Notion alternative that focuses on organizing notes as “objects” rather than in database tables and folders