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chrisnotes-io-ijc95x.txt (17774B)

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 [1] Notes from your friend Chris
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 Digital Notetaking Stack
 
 So I use a paper notebook. To be more specific, I use a notebook binder with
 three separate notebooks in it. Each notebook serves a specific purpose. The
 first one is for tasks and to-dos. The second one is just a scratch pad for
 absolutely anything under the sun: drawings, thoughts, somebody’s phone number,
 anything. The last one is a very regimented journal where I reflect on personal
 experiences.
 
 Sure, I could just use a single notebook for all of these purposes. Hell, I
 could use a stack of printer paper for all these purposes; but it would be
 clunky, it would be difficult, and I wouldn’t really want to use it because it
 wouldn’t be very satisfying.
 
 So, I’ve developed a system that works for taking paper notes. It’s custom
 tailored to my goals and how my brain works. And as a cherry on top, I picked a
 notebook binder and pen that I really enjoy touching and looking at, which
 makes the whole system just that much better.
 
 Similarly, I use a set of different apps for different purposes when I’m taking
 notes in my digital world.
 
 Yes, I could probably stick to just using the default notes app on my phone,
 but it would be clunky, there would be friction, it would not adapt to the way
 my brain works, and I would end up using it less. Plus it isn’t really that
 satisfying to look at… but that’s just my opinion.
 
 So instead, after nearly a decade of trial and error, I’ve developed a system
 and way of working with my notes in my digital world that brings me immense
 satisfaction and works well with the way my brain works and the way my
 lifestyle is currently set up.
 
 DISCLAIMERS:
 
   • This is not me trying to convince you to use the apps that I use. This is
     what works for me, and is very tailored to my brain and life. I’m not here
     to tell you what to use. But if hearing about my setup gives you ideas,
     that’s great!
   • This is something I will continue to change and improve. It’s been a long
     evolution to land on this setup. Trial and error was involved, and will
     continue to be. I think there’s an ebb and flow to changing your setup. If
     you do it too often, you lose productivity. If you don’t do it enough, your
     setup may stagnate and fail to match your lifestyle.
   • This is a values-based notetaking setup. I believe in owning my own data,
     having an easily exportable format (markdown), and using tools that are
     extensible & hackable. For someone who doesn’t share these values, this may
     seem overbuilt or convoluted or not native enough or something.
   • This is not written for the PKM enthusiast community. It’s a basic,
     balanced setup using tools that are widely known. If you’re a longtime
     Personal Knowledge Management guru, there won’t be anything new for you
     here. This is written for the layman who is dissatisfied with their current
     setup and looking for inspiration.
 
 Anyway, if digital notetaking is something that never really clicked for you,
 or if you currently have a workflow that you’re not pleased with, this might be
 a blog article for you. Let me know on [6]Mastodon!
 
 Overview
 
  i. Intake / Short-term notes
 ii. Long-term notes
 iii. Shared / Published notes
 iv. Collaborative notes
  v. Closing thoughts
 
 Intake / Short-term notes
 
 One of the most important parts of my setup is my intake app. I hope you’ve
 never had to experience this feeling:
 
     Your friend names a cool restaurant or book for you to look up later. You
     hastily pull up your notes app to write it down. But wait. Where should you
     make the note? Does restaurant fall under your travel folder? Or your food
     folder? What should you title it? Do you need to make a new folder? While
     you’re fiddling with your app your friend has already started talking about
     that other boba place you should explore. Should that go in a whole other
     note? Oh god.
 
 I feel like a lot of people give up after going through this a couple times and
 their notes app just ends up being a hodge-podge of unorganized, random shit
 that they dread looking back at later.
 
 This is exactly why I use an intake app, and my app of choice for this
 incredibly important role is, of course, Drafts.
 
 [7]✨Drafts✨
 
 Drafts is made for this exact purpose. By default, it opens to a blank new
 note. Whatever you type as the first line is considered the title. And it has
 this insane concept called Actions that lets you quickly process your notes by
 moving them elsewhere through deep interactions with your other existing apps.
 
 Let’s look at some pictures:
 
 [723b4f53-202a-41b6-981c-d1e2710d6e47]
 
 [896a49c3-ec20-4dff-89ac-33f9cf1e6120]
 
 [78912a4e-95cc-463f-af64-5e55f4ddb395]
 
 In the leftmost image, you can see where I keep Drafts. Front and center, only
 app in my bottom drawer.
 
 Middle image, you have the first thing you see when the app opens: a blank note
 to write that restaurant / song / boba place.
 
 Rightmost image, you have the actions pane.
 
 The actions in this pane are customized to my workflow. You are able to
 configure multiple pages, but I’m content with just one for now.
 
 Drafting a text to your mom? Send it as a text message after you’ve perfected
 it. Shopping list? Export straight into wherever you keep that (for me it’s
 Things). Deep thought that’s perhaps a little too deep? File it away in Day One
 where it will never see the light of day.
 
 Basic tagging, shortcuts integration, and an archive folder really tie
 everything together. Process a ton of drafts at once by selecting them in the
 app and then doing a batch operation.
 
 Drafts comes with a pretty comprehensive set of actions right out of the box,
 but the true power here comes from tapping into the [8]Drafts Directory: a
 massive repository of actions sourced from the Drafts community (as well as
 many written by the creator).
 
 Every app you could imagine is in this directory.
 
 And the best part: if your app isn’t in there you can write your own action!
 
 Drafts could honestly take up a whole series of blog posts so I’ll stop there
 for now. I haven’t even scratched the surface of what it can do, but you really
 don’t need to dive very deep to reap the benefits.
 
 Let’s table Drafts for now. It’ll come up later with how it pipes into my other
 systems.
 
 Long-term notes
 
 So you may have picked up on the fact that notes don’t stay in Drafts long.
 They either get exported or archived.
 
 Not every note is worthy of a permanent place in your note-taking kingdom.
 Embracing this concept was a huge step in cleaning up my digital world and
 starting to build a meaningful notes database for my life.
 
 As I continued to acclimate to digital notes, I noticed that certain note
 categories began to make themselves known.
 
 [11b85744-48ac-4c2d-a817-6e813929b837]
 
 The middle 3 folders are the important ones to note here.
 
 Core
 
 My core folder is where deeply personal stuff goes. Longterm goals, journal
 entries, guiding principles and personal mantras. I wouldn’t expect you to
 understand mine, but I’d encourage anyone to explore this category of notes for
 themselves.
 
 The notes in this folder don’t change much. But I recently started recording a
 daily voice note diary of my day that I then transcribe and summarize with AI.
 
 I also do yearly, quarterly, monthly, and weekly planning sessions, and the
 artifacts from these sessions often end up in here.
 
 Projects
 
 Projects is my favorite folder in my long-term notes.
 
 For me, this is a place for all kinds of things. Packing lists + itineraries +
 other details for an upcoming trip, startup ideas, potential blog posts, plans
 and details for my numerous hobbies.
 
 Notes in here often originate in Drafts and get quickly exported to my projects
 folder via Drafts actions.
 
 Projects are usually temporary, and get moved to my archive folder when they’re
 completed (or when I get bored and move onto the next hobby).
 
 Reference
 
 This is for lists and information that I will want to keep as reference.
 Quotes, wishlists, movie bucket list, books to read, etc.
 
 I used to maintain a personal wiki of information on different topics.
 Zettelkasten-esque, my knowledge wiki is currently in need of cleanup and will
 likely be featured in its own blog post if I continue to work on it.
 
 Other folders
 
 Archive is self-explanatory. Old notes go in here.
 
 Templates is for fill-in-the-blank templates for notes that I take often. Like
 those yearly/quarterly/etc check-ins and certain types of projects. There’s an
 Obsidian plugin that has some functionality to take advantage of these, but
 right now I just duplicate and move markdown files manually as-needed. Nothing
 fancy.
 
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 
 I find this setup to be just enough. My main folders allow plenty of
 flexibility within them for me to develop all kinds of systems to match how my
 brain works.
 
 Apps and stuff
 
 Yes, yes, we’ll talk about the app I use, but that’s much less important than
 the underlying foundation.
 
 My long-term note-taking system is really just two things:
 
   • A collection of markdown files
   • A syncing service that circulates these files between my devices
 
 If you commit to using the first, you can choose whatever you want for the
 second and migrate between syncing providers at-will with minimal headache. I’m
 not going to say much more on that, since others have covered it very well ([9]
 File over App from one of the people responsible for Obsidian).
 
 And as long as you have these two, you can access all of your notes on all of
 your devices with whatever Markdown tools you’d like. Ultimate freedom,
 extensibility, and hackability.
 
 That said, I use Obsidian.
 
 [10]✨Obsidian✨
 
 My go-to sync tool was Dropbox for a long time, but after committing fully to
 Obsidian as my default app across Mac / iPad / iPhone I’ve switched over to
 Obsidian Sync for the E2E encryption, longer note history, and seamless
 integration with Obsidian.
 
 It basically works like Dropbox used to before the weird Apple OS integration
 stuff. Obsidian Sync downloads all the files onto your device, so you still can
 access them with any markdown editor that has access to the filesystem.
 
 Drafts can export to my longterm notes via both the OS filesystem and Obsidian
 app urls. Same for Shortcuts, which I’ll get to later.
 
 Obsidian also plays nicely with iCloud, and supports Dropbox / Google Drive / 
 S3 through its community plugins. I have it connected to my Dropbox for
 publishing / sharing notes, which I’ll get into in a bit.
 
 My main reasons for using Obsidian are:
 
   • It has command palette
   • It has quick open
   • It’s hackable & has community plugins
 
 Honestly, the specific app here doesn’t really matter as much as the underlying
 system. I could switch to using Ulysses or 1Writer or Byword or nvAlt or
 something else entirely if I wanted.
 
 I will say, like Drafts, Obsidian is a product of thoughtful design. You don’t
 need to dive to deep to reap the benefits. But if you want to be a power user,
 there’s a LOT it can do. For me, the important thing is that I can open files
 and do stuff with them easily, and I can hack it to accommodate to pretty much
 any use case my weird brain comes up with.
 
 Obsidian really knocks it out of the park for me, so I use it almost
 exclusively right now (for long-term notes).
 
 Published / shared notes
 
 I’m not going to shit on Notion in this post (not much, at least), but one
 thing I really missed from migrating from it was the ease-of-sharing.
 
 I would put together an itinerary, packing list, cost breakdown, and
 car-pooling plan for group camping trips in minutes, hit the share button, and
 fire it off to my group chat of friends with no hiccups.
 
 I had been craving that functionality in my new note-taking system, so I built
 it. Kind of.
 
 Before we get to that, let’s talk about my workflow for posting blog articles.
 
 Publishing blog posts
 
 Remember how I said I use Dropbox still for sharing / publishing?
 
 I do that with help from a service called Blot.
 
 [11]✨Blot✨
 
 Blot turns a folder in your Dropbox account into a fully functioning blog.
 
 Their website explains it all, but basically to publish this article I
 literally just dropped it into a folder in my Dropbox, which I can do without
 leaving Obsidian.
 
 I wouldn’t say this is anything groundbreaking, but I find it immensely
 satisfying.
 
 Sharing notes
 
 Okay, back to Notion-esque sharing.
 
 Let’s say I put together a travel itinerary for a camping trip in my Projects
 folder. It has a list of everyone attending, cost breakdown, directions,
 packing list, and pictures of the campsite to drum up hype.
 
 It’s all ready to go, but I need to share it out to my friends.
 
 Enter Blot. Same service, different folder. This time, instead of having Blot
 publish to chrisnotes.io, I have a separate domain I use only for this purpose.
 I move the note to the shared folder and shoot my friends the link.
 
 The end. No fuss, no need for them to have an account, it’s just published to a
 non-indexed domain that I use as an external file/note-share.
 
 ”But it’s not collaborative!” Yeah, and it’s not meant to be.
 
 Collaborative notes
 
 Okay, so once in a blue moon I have a valid reason to collaborate on a note
 with someone. It’s incredibly rare, and usually a very niche use-case.
 
 If it’s like a Resume or something, I use Google Drive, because the output
 artifact is a document.
 
 If it’s for brainstorming or something, Figma.
 
 If it’s project tracking, Notion.
 
 These aren’t really notes anymore. This is a one-off collaboration with a
 specific outcome in mind, so it doesn’t really fall into the purview of this
 post.
 
 To be honest, I don’t think my personal notes database is something that would
 ever require collaboration. My notes are deeply personal, and I like it that
 way. I can publish if I need to, and there are plenty of collaborative tools
 that work for other tasks. But I have yet to need real-time collaboration on my
 actual notes.
 
 My gripe with Notion
 
 Okay fine, quick note on Notion. While it’s a powerful tool that sparks
 creativity in a very attractive interface, it goes against my core values. You
 don’t own your data, it’s on their servers the entire time. Offline mode barely
 works. Exporting is a mess because while they present themselves as
 Markdown-esque, their stuff is so custom it’s a mess to port to other apps.
 
 You get punished as soon as you try to leave.
 
 Best of luck to anyone entangled in that system. It took some work to get my
 notes out of Notion, and I will not be going back.
 
 Closing thoughts
 
 You made it to the end!
 
 Personally, after having tried a lot of tools with varying levels of depth and
 complexity, I find this setup very balanced.
 
 It does just enough. I haven’t gone too deep into any of the tools. It’s still
 portable. I could still switch stuff around with very little overhead if I
 wanted to.
 
 Being candid, my sync system is the one thing I am considering changing. I
 don’t like that Obsidian Sync has no way to run headless, and has no API access
 for other apps to tap into. If I wanted to change editor, I’d need to switch
 back to Dropbox. It wouldn’t take much to make the switch: maybe 5 minutes to
 update the config across all my devices.
 
 But that’s the only thing I’m really not happy with right now. I find this
 system pretty seamless to work with. It has structure and organization, without
 being so confined that it limits creativity.
 
 Bonus goodies
 
 If you made it this far, you’re either really into notetaking systems or you’re
 friends with me. Either way, you might get a kick out of some of the cool
 functionality that comes from a system like this.
 
 Custom share sheet actions
 
 Any time I’m browsing the web and come across something I want to buy later, I
 can instantly append it to my Wishlist note using a share sheet action that
 uses Obsidian’s deep-linking.
 
 I could easily replicate this functionality using the OS filesystem in
 shortcuts.
 
 Or, if I was using Dropbox, I could do it with Dropbox’s shortcut integrations.
 
 I have a similar shortcut action for prepending selected text to my Quotes
 note.
 
 If I wanted, I could have an automation that downloads the current weather and
 top news stories to a daily note for me to review when I start my morning.
 
 With a little scripting, you can really bend any of these tools / files to do
 whatever you want because of the format.
 
 Anyway, thanks so much for reading this far. I hope you got something from it.
 And if you have any input, please let me know. I’m not going to pretend I’m any
 kind of guru, and I love learning new things. If you have suggestions or ideas
 or feedback, please send them my way on [12]Mastodon!
 
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 
 Date
 
 September 4, 2023
 
 References:
 
 [1] https://chrisnotes.io/
 [2] https://chrisnotes.io/
 [3] https://chrisnotes.io/archives
 [4] https://chrisnotes.io/search
 [5] https://chrisnotes.io/feed.rss
 [6] https://mastodon.social/@chrisnotes
 [7] https://getdrafts.com/
 [8] https://directory.getdrafts.com/
 [9] https://stephanango.com/file-over-app
 [10] http://obsidian.md/
 [11] https://blot.im/
 [12] https://mastodon.social/@chrisnotes