The dog has kept me pretty active the last few days… 🐶😅

Setup

 

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.

 

Dreaming of the day when we can just download our whole microblog (posts, designs, etc.) so we can interact with it locally and upload it through Git or something like that.

DailyDogo

(I didn’t post DailyDogo pics the last two days, for some reason. Streak fixed!)

Setup

I recently tried Sorted, a "hyper-scheduler", which is just a fancy task manager that will automatically schedule my tasks around the events for the current day, giving me a clear picture of what, based on my own estimates, I will be able to do.

As great as this sounds, software development is notorious for being hard to estimate, which means that it didn't make much sense to schedule my whole day in this way.

I was interested in an app like this, because it seemed to be a digital cousin of the time blocking practice that Cal Newport employs to get more focused work done, which I also tried for a while but lead to a similar result: I am lucky enough to actually do important work. What I'm struggling with is too much scaffolding.

Now, I also know about the willpower/structure problem: Relying on willpower to do something is bound to fail in the long run, whereas putting structures in place that foster me to do the right thing, if I want it or not, is the sustainable choice.

But: Even structures like task managers can be or become a source of ego depletion, which is exactly the opposite of what they are supposed to be.

And so I strive for a kind of intuitive and mostly maintenance-free productivity setup: Give me a structured writing surface like Agenda (Agenda is a very nice garbage bin for notes that don't really matter), remind me to do things when it is absolutely necessary by using Due. Otherwise either rely on the project management tools at work (tickets and kanban board) or use Reminders to make sure that things that need to be done but are not work in progress and/or are not work related won't be forgotten.