My ever changing notetaking system
“Everything starts from a dot.”
“Everything starts from a dot.”
At the beginning of my experiment I intended to write regular updates on what I was getting up to, however I haven’t really done that.
If I had been doing that, here are a few things I retrospectively imagine I would have written about:
I have plenty of rambles and reflections on all of these things in my notes but I haven’t quite nailed down the habit of publishing any of it…
For continuity of my experiment I felt I should mention that I have migrated from Joplin to Obsidian.
In fact, I migrated about 2 months ago now. So, as far as my journey into building a notetaking system is concerned, I’ve been using Obsidian for almost as long as I used Joplin (which was about 3 months).
I haven’t felt like writing a comparison of these apps, as I did when I moved from OneNote to Joplin. But I do want to point out the 2 main reasons I made the switch to Obsidian.
I made a RandomNote for Joplin button for macOS. You can find the bash, python and AppleScript concoction here.
Apologies to non-macOS Joplin users, I have not made any other verions of this.
But if you like sticking things together, the bash and python elements could be of use to you…
I discovered the concept of “RandomNote” via Tiago Forte’s PARA series. To describe it at surface level: he created a button that opens a random note from his Evernote notes.
The purpose of such a button is to aid in serendipitous rediscovery of your old notes. That’s not going much deeper, to be honest. To see what inspired me into action I encourage you to read Tiago’s post about it. He has a way with words which I do not.
The rest of this post is an extension of the “API / Automation Friendly” criteria from my OneNote vs Joplin blog post.
As explained in my previous blog post, I have started an experiment on my notetaking methods.
Before I had the idea for that experiment I dived into using Microsoft OneNote, because I was so excited to try out P.A.R.A.
I did that because I’ve used OneNote in the past, so it was familiar. But, within a couple of days of falling further down the P.A.R.A. and Zettelkasten rabbit-hole, I changed my mind.
I found Joplin.
Recently I decided to do something about my notes and notetaking methods.
Up until a few weeks ago, my notes were an increasingly unwieldy pile of .txt
files. I was using Slack as a blackhole means of getting the odd link from my phone to my laptop.
It wasn’t great. Notes were seldom revisited. The majority of things put into Slack remained there…