After three months with Agenda, which is still a very good app, I’m back with Obsidian for all the types of notes that I take.

I sang the praises of not having to maintain my setup and instead use apps in the most default way possible recently: Let others deal with the maintenance of the features and use the provided way of doing things, instead of figuring everything out on my own.

This sounds good, however, I discovered I had to use a lot of energy to keep things that are important to me going.

• Taking durable notes about my work almost didn’t happen anymore
• Writing up what had happened during the week by distilling down my daily notes became too much of a chore
• Taking notes on read materials, let alone reading challenging materials, just didn’t happen as much

In hindsight, I also noticed that my posts about what apps to use and how to use them were a symptom of the necessity of constantly having to reframe my approach to be okay with not switching back to Obsidian.

To switch from one app for journaling to another for more serious note taking proofed to be too big of a context switch as well. I didn’t “live” in my notes as much as I like to do.

Another big reason for being fine with paying the price of maintaining things myself is the recent development of Obsidian: it now supports multiple windows, something that Agenda lacks and something that makes distilling a bunch of notes into a new one pretty hard.

Finally, I think that working on plugins for Obsidian is a way to lessen the load of maintenance and - since I’m a developer - a way to actually gain some expertise. So in my case, it is not a terrible investment of time and effort.