PTPL #13: Task Management Inside Your PKM, and the Notenik App
Document everything, learn by doing
Welcome to the 13th in a series of posts documenting my plain text, paper-less, Obsidian-flavoured journey.
Past Episodes live in my PTPL List. Other things I’ve written about Obsidian live here.
Today I’ll be talking about —
- The importance of documenting your processes, no matter what they are
- How learning by doing is usually the best path to mastery
- Notenik — a free, open source way of working with text files
- Task management in your PKM — pros and cons
- Life summary, and why you need one
Productivity Tips and Inspiration
Document it!
No matter what you do, document your processes — Sébastien Dubois. [link]
I’ve come to see the wisdom of this over the past few years. There have been times I’ve spent hours pondering and experimenting before arriving at a solution, only to forget how I got there as time goes by.
Had I taken a few minutes to write down the steps I took while it was still fresh, that information would be there to guide future efforts, without the need to start from scratch.
Start where you are, learn by doing
Sebastian Herold left the following comment on my Weekly Template story, about his journey with note taking (emphasis added):
For months, the tool sat virtually untouched on my Mac. I read a lot about different methods and which of them would be most effective and useful for me. The result: I didn’t stick to anything. I didn’t continue using Obsidian. Until I started to “just use it” and wildly threw all thoughts, notes, drafts, and concepts into my vault — and the handling of the tool and the structure slowly emerged quite organically. I wrote that I was surprised. I was surprised because it was so obvious: that a tool that cultivates networked thinking is itself best learned by independently forging one’s own individual path.
We’re talking about Obsidian in that conversation, but these principles apply to any note taking tool that allows the interlinking of notes.
Cool Find — Notenik
Notenik is a free, open source and highly capable way of working with plain text files. It’s definitely an app, but I like that its creator, Herb Bowie, refers to it as a tool. That tells you a lot about the thinking behind it.
Here are my initial thoughts after an hour of exploring Notenik:
- It’s beautifully Mac-native
- Fields = YAML front matter equivalent, but much easier to work with
- It allows transclusion of notes, but not blocks. Users are encouraged to create smaller notes instead, and reference those. This is a good approach, but it isn’t one I could dive into without a lot of reformatting.
- Next I’ll be playing with the inbuilt task management feature.
Download Notenik here, and check out the forum. Thanks to PKM ONE for this story introducing me to Notenik.
Adventures in Obsidian
- The Notenik app (see previous section) is shaping the way I use Obsidian. It’s helping me to see where I’ve drifted away from a true plain text mindset, encouraging me to create atomic notes in some places where I might have relied on block quotes.
- I didn’t add day stamps to the Notes section of my weekly log last week — this section was just a linear list of whatever came into my head, as it happened, and the template held up beautifully! That’s how I designed it: to be as granular as needed, while also welcoming stream of consciousness input.
- Here’s a very interesting Twitter thread from TfTHacker on the pros and cons of task management within your PKM. As a mostly sole practitioner, I’m a great candidate for combining the two.
- I’ve written about Life Summaries and why you should keep one, in two places this week. The first is a practical guide to integrating a life summary into your Obsidian daily or weekly notes, while the second is a more general discussion of the principles behind the practice (link coming soon).
Not a Medium member? Get unlimited access for $5 a month, or $50 a year. Here’s my referral link: you pay the same, but I get a small (much appreciated) commission.
