PTPL 008: Paperless? Don’t Give Up Those Pens Just Yet
Plus Drafts actions, physical pens, daily notes living in a weekly log, Vim in Obsidian
Welcome to the eighth in a series of posts documenting my plain text, paper-less, Obsidian-flavoured journey.
Each post is a 5-minute or less summary of what I’ve read, learned, and implemented since the last edition. Links to earlier episodes can be found here.
Today I’ll be talking about —
- Formatting date variables in Drafts actions
- Needing more physical pens than I thought I did
- Daily notes in a weekly log, continued
- Using Vim in Obsidian
Productivity Tips
Drafts Actions
At least half of the notes that end up in my Obidian vault start life in Drafts.
This website is helpful for creating actions in Drafts that include date-based variables. I used it this week to change the format of the date in my Append to Weekly Note action in Drafts, to match the format I’ve set up in the Obsidian Timestamper plugin.
[[%Y-%m-%d %a, %H]]
[[draft]]The above tells Drafts to give me the date in this format: 2022–07–11 Mon, 14:37. In Timestamper the same format looks like YYYY-MM-DD ddd, HH:mm.
How many pens does a Paper-Less person need?
I’m using less paper these days, hence the Paper, Less in the title of these digests.
But what about the times it’s best to make marks on something that doesn’t require a screen to view? Do the tools matter, then? Am I pen-agnostic in the same way I somewhat half-heartedly claim to be app-agnostic?
While it doesn’t matter in theory, they make a difference in how I feel when recording things, so I choose the ones I like best. Do I really need 10 of them, though?? Perhaps it’s time to do a count.
Check out You Need 10 Different Pens. And They Are These, by Sophie Lucido Johnson.
I thought I only needed one pen to go with my favourite notebook, but reading Sophie’s story opened my eyes to the fact that I also wouldn’t want to be without the other paper-marking implements I keep around the place.
Productivity Inspiration
What do you look for when examining new apps or productivity methods? How do you know when what you already have, is enough?
This week I watched a video where tribal people were exposed to modern music, in this case, Pentatonix’ cover of Hallelujah. One man, when asked if he recognised the instruments being mimicked by the a capella voices, replied —
Their names are so complicated to remember, but these had none of those and yet their music turned out so great.
These tribal people, unfamiliar with the style of music and language they were hearing, had no choice but to seek the feeling it gave them.
What can this method say to us? If instruments are like apps, extensions, or plugins, do we really need them? Can we learn to make fine note-making music with just our voice? With plain text or the paper-written word, perhaps?
What is your foundation?
Remember not to confuse the icing with the cake.
Adventures in Obsidian
If captured gems (or your brain cells) are getting lost inside your daily notes, it might be time to consider changing to a weekly log.
Take a look at the whys and wherefores of my weekly log here:
Click here to copy the code and change it to fit your way of working. (link coming soon)
I’ve kept daily notes part of the system as an integrated option, should I ever decide to switch back. The Periodic Notes plugin generates all the dates, making this very quick to set up.
These are the main reasons I switched from a separate file for each daily note, to daily sections inside one weekly log:
- Short paragraphs and 1-sentence gems were getting lost in my daily notes
- Searching through a large number of daily notes looking for that one thing (the thing I was sure I’d written down but which didn’t come up in a search), was no fun
- Having 7 days of notes in one location is not only easier to scan, it’s also a great candidate for progressive summarisation
- It’s taken away the pressure I was feeling to write something everyday
- It feels closer to the level of simplicity of data entry and retrieval I’m striving to reach
My most used Obsidian hotkey this week was Command + Option + Up Arrow/Down Arrow, for moving paragraphs up or down a line. It lets me move to-do or to-done items (from my list of weekly intentions) to a higher or lower level of priority, and makes it quick and easy to move all completed tasks to their own Completed section.
I’ve started learning the basics of Vim key bindings.
Why?
- Obsidian has Vim built-in
- I like learning new things
- It’s a super cool, geeky club to belong to
- It’s a language that keeps your fingers on the keyboard, making the mouse obsolete for many text editing and navigation tasks
- I’m working on a project that involves making repetitive changes to a large number of text files. Vim can simplify this, saving a lot of time and hand strain.
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