#3 · Plain Text, Paper-Less Productivity
Being organised without to do applications, read-it-later services, and easy Markdown quotes from the web
Welcome to the third in a series of posts documenting my plain text, paper-less journey.
You can expect each post to be a 5-minute or less summary of what I’ve read, learned, and implemented since the last edition. Links to earlier episodes are at the end.
Today I’ll be talking about —
- Free Digital Garden — update
- iOS Calendar widgets
- A cool browser extension for extracting Markdown quotes
- Read-it-later services and media highlights in plain text
App-independent productivity tweaks
- Digital garden update: at last it works! I’m very happy to have a cost-free space to learn in public. It’s in a fledgling state with not much content, so I won’t share the link until it’s a bit further along. I’m torn between using this template, and the Digital Garden plugin. The latter is a much more Obsidian-like experience to put together, and can use any theme with the press of a button. The first has more features (sidebar, graph view) but requires some HTML tweaking to look pretty.
- My new favourite read-it-later service is Matter. Recommended by Ev Chapman in this story that explains why she changed her mind about Readwise. (More on this below, in the Adventures in Obsidian section.)
- Thanks to Ev I’ve embraced both Matter and Readwise, and feel like a kid in a candy store! I’d had an intellectual idea that it’d be a good idea to consolidate my highlights from all over the place, but didn’t realise how powerful it could be until I tried it.
- Take Ev’s advice and start adding your own notes to your Kindle (and other) highlights. What does that section remind you of? What does it inspire you to do?
- My favourite calendar widget on iPhone is Fantastical as it has the most information in a compact format of any I’ve tried. I’m not a subscriber so the travel time feature isn’t available, but Apple’s own Calendar provides that for free — yay!
Inspiration
- Future-proofing to me means setting up a system that can work well for saving and finding notes without needing a plugin.
- Eleanor Konik gave up on the daily note idea after hearing Leah Ferguson’s talk about daily notes. Eleanor has a place for everything in her home, and in her digital notes. She’s not like Ramses Oudt — he has ADHD — who relies on the daily note to keep him focused. -> We each have different note-making needs. Find a way of working that fits your psyche.
- Chances are, you need a forgiving notetaking system. Chhavi Shrivastava keeps her weekly and daily notes in a single plain text file.
- June Thomas eloquently explains why you don’t need to choose just one note-taking app, and the benefits of mixing things up with notebooks and pens, too.
- Jon McEwen tells us how he’s staying organised without a to-do application. Jon’s Mono Note keeps his work in context, and holds the key to avoiding feeling lost, cluttered or nervous about personal project management.
- Look at tools and other people’s setups and take only what you need. Everything else that doesn’t work for you is just noise. — paraphrased from Leah Ferguson
Apps and Extensions
- BrainTool is a plain-text-friendly browser extension that lets you assign topics and notes to links. Each topic can be allocated to its own window or tab group, making it easy to switch between workspaces. BrainTool reads from a locally stored plain text file, compatible with org-mode note taking apps. I’ve looked at it briefly, but haven’t dug in deeply yet. Looks very promising!
- Quotebacks lets you highlight any text on the web with a simple keyboard shortcut that places embed or Markdown code on the clipboard. The following quote was extracted using Markdown and pasted directly into this article. I love how the source is included.
As I think of the ways to improve the Mono Note, I dream up an automatically generated dashboard that parses the content and organizes it into analytics reports based on to-dos, completion dates, and volume. All told, the application would include two interfaces, one for your notes, and one for the dashboard.
— Source: It’s Time To Ditch The Cult of Personal Project Management by Jon McEwen
Adventures in Obsidian
Not much new this week for me in Obsidian, as most of my time has been put into figuring out the digital garden. I actually love this, that there isn’t a list of new things I’ve tried to report this week! It means that shiny object/plugin syndrome isn’t running my life.
- Every Sunday I change up my daily note, removing all visible references to projects, tasks, and goals. There’s a beautiful banner across the top of the page, which reminds me this is a day of rest and renewal each time it comes around.
- I have a separate template for Sunday’s daily note, and tend to generate a few months at a time as I have to change the target template in the Periodic Notes preferences to point to it.
- As mentioned above, I’ve started using Readwise and Matter, and have connected both to Obsidian. The Matter folder lives inside the Readwise folder, though I’m not sure this kind of separation is necessary. Matter formats highlights differently to Readwise, so it might be best to just feed everything through the one service.
Find past episodes of this Digest in my PTPL List.
Other things I’ve written about Obsidian live here.
Not a Medium member? Get unlimited access for $5 a month — or less, with an annual subscription. Here’s my referral link: you pay the same but I get a small (much appreciated) commission.
