System

Note Taking

My criteria for note taking

  • Fast idea capture
  • Flexible organization system that requires low maintenance or thought about where content should live
  • Good search
  • Plaintext

My current setup

I use Obsidian because everything is Markdown. It has a plugin ecosystem, but I find many of these difficult to work with and time consuming to configure. I use Omnisearch for searching notes. I use an iOS shortcut to call the lumberjack plugin to quickly create new notes to capture an idea to be dealt with later. I use the PARA method to organize my content, with an additional of an Inbox. My top level folders are

00 Inbox
10 Projects
20 Areas
30 Resources
40 Archive

I mostly like this because it minimizes the time I spend organizing and has a builtin structure for cleanup. I am reasonably happy with this setup, but I find I don’t benefit much from the time I spend improving it. It seems to be good enough for now.

Workflows

  • Capture an idea on mobile, quickly using a shortcut app icon
  • Create notes on Desktop with Obsidian
  • Search notes on Desktop, mapped to hyper+space
  • Edit blog drafts on mobile, synced via my Desktop using unison from a local git repo

Current complaints

  • The Obsidian mobile app is slow to load
  • Omnisearch occasionally seems to miss some matching files — maybe an issue with its index
  • Sometimes, I fall behind moving things out of Inbox, but I prefer this to dealing with the overhead of classifying something when I just want to write an idea

Desired improvements

  • Solve the complaints
  • A better blog post creation and editing processes for mobile, that doesn’t require sync between the git repo and Obsidian vault

This is a living document in my digital garden. It may grow, change, or branch into new ideas over time.