notetaking

“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:

• introducing a Task Management element to accompany the P of PARA
• migrating to Obsidian and introducing Markor and using it’s QuickNote feature
  • (leading on to “My QuickNote Problem” aka my latest manifestation of Collector’s Fallacy)
• trying out Daily Notes and habit tracking
• thinking more deliberately about the type of note I’m taking
• experimenting with how I use tags
• starting to create MOCs

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.

TL;DR #

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…

What’s RandomNote? #

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…