PTPL 015: Don’t Let ‘Productivity’ Steal the Dream That Matters Most

Also, some digital vs. paper talk, a Johnny Decimal helper app, and a time saving Obsidian plugin

Aug 29, 2022

Welcome to the 15th in a series of posts documenting my plain text, paper-less, Obsidian-flavoured journey. Each post is a 5-minute or less summary of what I’ve read, learned, and implemented since the last edition.

Today I’ll be talking about —

Remembering why we want to be productive
Evidence that while digital is king for note-taking, pen and paper aren’t dead yet
An online app to help you create your Johnny Decimal system
The case for ditching folders and tags
Find and replace plugins in Obsidian

Productivity Inspiration

Why be productive? So you can spend time where it’s most important

Sometimes the best productivity inspiration comes from remembering why we want to be productive in the first place. Devin is a talented new Medium writer whose piece on family life kicked me right in the feels. Ain’t no point being crazy productive, folks, if what we value most is allowed to slip through the cracks.

Reminds me of a story I published in June on figuring out your Why.

Are pen and paper dead? Not by a long shot

Matt Giaro makes a good point about pen and paper vs. digital notes.

When it comes to retrieving information inside your handwritten notes, the problem is that you have to go through them one by one. And read everything. There’s no command F function to simply type in a keyword and retrieve the related notes. If you want to retrieve your notes fast, take digital notes.
— Matt Giaro

When it comes to knowledge management, I couldn’t agree more. For fleeting notes, scrappy to do lists, and things I simply want to record old-school style, paper is a valid option. As you know, I’m all for using less paper, but not getting rid of it altogether. I like to invite people to approach paper mindfully; with intention.

Taking effective notes is a process. And the first step is to make them digital.
— Matt Giaro

I was glad to hear that despite his strong views on the topic, Matt still uses pen and paper to brainstorm.

Productivity Tips

Here’s a Johnny Decimal creator that can help you sort your stuff. Thanks to Dan Smock for this tip.
I thought I was done with stories on Alfred, but it seems my brain can’t let it go. Irtiza Hafiz presents a convincing case for giving it another go.
Lost your Apple Pencil? This week I read an article about an app that can locate any nearby Bluetooth device. Thanks, Adi Kakarla, for the cool hide and seek idea!
What do you think of ditching folders and tags, and relying on search instead? I’m not ready to give them up, but it works for Oscar Lagrosen. Read about it here. Here’s my story on the same topic.
I briefly discussed the Notenik app in PTPL #13. Here’s a discussion on how it handles images.

Adventures in Obsidian

My demo vault is up and running!

In case you missed this article on how I get my daily and weekly notes to show up on each other’s page, here’s a link to download a sample vault of my Obsidian planner. It shows how daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly pages work well together, without Dataview.

There could be errors in there, so I’ll update the vault when any come to my attention. Thanks in advance for checking to see if you have the latest version before reporting an error.

How to Automatically Combine Daily and Weekly Notes in Obsidian, Without Dataview
Download my demo vault to see how it worksmedium.com

Collaboration in Obsidian?

Ensley Tan wrote an interesting piece on how to use Obsidian as a (small) group. He mentions the need for clearly defined roles and a common taxonomy.

Find and replace plugins

Wouldn’t you know it, as soon as I finished formatting the Old Testament for Obsidian users, I thought of a change that would make reading and navigating a lot easier. The task: change the word Chapter to the name of the actual book it lives in. There are 929 chapters in the Old Testament, and the word Chapter appears in the navigation at both the top and bottom of each page. That’s 1,868 instances to assign one of 39 possible books to.

Thanks to the Regex Find and Replace plugin, I got this done very quickly. It’s one of two find and replace plugins that I’ve found, and was the best choice for this task because a) it’s quick (you don’t have to select the text beforehand), and b) it gives feedback of how many changes were made (any more or less than 2 per page, and there’d be an error).

The second plugin in this category, Find and Replace in Selection, is ideal for another task I need to perform with each chapter of the Markdown version of the Bible I’m working with: replacing every instance of -- with an em dash. As the dividers on the page look like this ---, I need to be able to select only the section of the page I want the plugin to change.

If only I'd used *** instead of --- for horizontal rules, right? Not to worry, as it's an easy enough workaround.