[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:

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[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!

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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
