After a consulting discussion, I setup Obsdian to take better notes.

Carrying on from what I had started in Notion, I set up daily entries which allow me to record my thoughts and actions during the day.

This allows me to objectively analyse my impact over time, as well as create a source of knowledge when recording my learnings or opinions.

Problem

Looking back at a period of time, it can sometimes be difficult to rationalise what you have achieved. Not only that but sometimes you stumble across a new Gem or learn a new approach to a problem, then over time you forget about these things.

I want to be able to look back or search my past actions to see what I have done and what I have learned.

Solution

Markdown based notes that are searchable, publishable and linkable. Obsdian MD ticks all the boxed for me

Benefits

  1. Quick and easy to write
  2. Allows for recording even the simplest of tasks
  3. Provides a nice visual of your day: big list of things you’ve done or thought about
  4. Provides a higher level overview: can quickly see how/when you have contributed
  5. Shorts are a great place to store little nuggets of information

Here’s what I’ve set up

  • Task verbs - such as contributed.md and participated.md
    • Initially these helped quickly link documents together but ultimately proved less useful than (hash)tagging1
  • Templates
    • dailies.md
      • Provides a standard set up for each day.
      • Obsidian provides a “Open Today’s daily note” button that creates the file such as _archive/2021/2021-04/2021-04-06.
      • I added a hotkey to allow me to press cmd + t to insert a template into a file.
    • Shorts folder
      • This store little bits of information with meta data that will hopefully allow me to automatically post to my Jekyll website
    • Short templates “TIL”, “Strong Opinion” and “Gem Discovery”
      • These allow me to quickly create a short post.
      • This idea started off in my Notion notepad where I have already recorded quite a few “shorts”
      • The templates include a bit of metadata similar to that found on Jekyll markdown files
      • I hope to automated posting these to my personal website2
  • Auto git backups
    • I have created a Github repo and using a git plugin this vault is pushed up to Github
    • This is where I see magic Github Actions coming into play to auto publish to my site.
  • Graph view
    • I have set a filter on graph view to avoid showing the templates folder
      • -path:_templates
    • I have added tags to the graph view which help show what’s happened and where.
    • I have also added a “shorts” group which allows me to set a different colour for the nodes representing a short

Bonus

I have not synced up my “Shorts” folder in my notes with my personal website. All shorts are now posted to https://dcyoung.dev/shorts

  1. Hash tags work much better than having these files ↩

  2. Now fully integrated ↩