Several of my goal breaks were oriented towards sorting out my tools and processes:
- My note taking had become splintered between OneNote, Apple Notes and many text files. I need a single source and it needs to be something that isn’t difficult to integrate with other systems.
- Tasks were mostly in Apple Tasks now, but that’s because my projects are entirely personal. I didn’t want to use iCloud for work tasks when I move to a new role. Ideally my notes would have tasks integrated and my choice there will solve this problem.
- I had been a GTD guy, but it just wasn’t working for me anymore, so methodology needed a revisit.
- AI assistants are a real thing now. I didn’t use them when I was at Elastic, they weren’t mature enough for me to rely on yet. ChatGPT and Ollama have become a regular part of my workflow both conversationally and via code.
Obsidian Notes
I kind of fell into Obsidian Notes by accident. I’m writing this post after signing up for the sync service and making it my regular tool on all devices. I’m not kidding when I say that Obsidian Notes has made me take my vitamins more reliably.
I started when I decided I wanted to get an AI assistant working on my personal notes. As I mentioned, I had notes in quite a few places and it became apparent that the first roadblock would be API access and API limits if I use a cloud provided note tool. I already take a lot of my notes in Sublime Text as plain text files. I already use markdown-like syntax for lists and such. When I started searching for a tool that could work on plain text files, Obsidian Notes rose to the top quickly.
Obsidian is available on all of the platforms I use, stores notes in .md format and even when using the cloud sync services, keeps plain text copies of my notes locally so I can use them to add context to an AI agent.
Plugins
It’s worth mentioning that I did not end up using Obsidian Notes stock. There are quite a few core plugins that I use, and I have found a handful of community plugins I make great use of also.
- Community
- Dataview Allows me to create query based views. I use this on my dashboard to aggregate tasks from certain folders only.
- Homepage keeps that dashboard pinned on the right side so I can always see my tasks.
- QuickAdd isn’t something I use a lot yet, but I expect I’ll use it regularly when I am back to capturing meeting notes when not using a transcriber
- Smart Second Brain is my interface to Ollama via Obsidian Notes. I will say that it has not become part of my regular process yet, but it’s something I am experimenting with.
- Tasks just scans markdown for task syntax and manages the tasks with a little structure.
- Core
- Daily Notes is my best friend. I have built the muscle memory to create one each morning. I have a template defined to add things I need to do daily like vitamins. I find that now when I need to jot something, it goes to my daily note right away or it’s the reason I create a new daily note. I have never journaled before, but I find myself adding interesting or important events to my notes.
- Sync keeps my notes on my iPhone and iPads, as well as syncs the plugins and configuration between devices. It’s not very expensive and adds the glue I need to Obsidian Notes.
- Templates is something I have just scratched the surface of. I think that QuickAdd will become much more important to me when I get more experienced with templates.
PARA Methodology
GTD has been part of my processes for a long time, but sometimes you just need a fresh perspective. After looking at how I work and what is popular these days, I decided PARA was a great fit. My Obsidian Vault needed a simple structure. The only tweak I made to Project, Area, Resources and Archive was adding a Daily Notes folder that I aggressively archive when tasks are complete.
This plays very nice with my Tasks implementation. I make sure my queries do not look at the Archive or Resources folder. That way my templates and old tasks do not show up in my Dataview queries. Basically, archiving a daily note when all tasks are complete removes any tasks in that note from my task list.
ChatGPT & Claude
I’ve almost quit using Claude completely. For awhile, I just got better and more reliable results from Claude for coding tasks. I still used ChatGPT for most other tasks, but kept going back to Claude. That hasn’t been the case for a few months. From writing code and yaml to organizing and reformatting data, ChatGPT has become pretty instrumental. Writing queries for a database language you aren’t familiar with? ChatGPT. Writing regex or docker-compose files? Chat GPT does it great.
Ollama & Open WebUI
Ollama and the various models I use are not as indispensable to my daily life as the commercial models are yet. That being said, they are really good and when you need to make a lot of small requests quickly, it can be perfect.
