PTPL 014: On Digital Self-Regulation, and Making Obsidian More Bear-Like
Also: how to securely share Obsidian notes online, and generate previous/next links without Templater
Welcome to the 14th in a series of posts documenting my plain text, paper-less, Obsidian-flavoured journey.
Past Episodes live in my PTPL List. Other things I’ve written about Obsidian live here.
Today I’ll be talking about —
Digital self-regulation
How to quickly, securely share an Obsidian note online
Adding previous/next day links to my daily/weekly note templates
A planned demo Obsidian vault that will show my how daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly pages play nicely together
Productivity Tips and Inspiration
Don’t Minimize Difficulty
Eleanor Konik’s essay on being sensitive to other people finding things hard that you find easy (and vice versa), has some important food for thought. If you’re not a supporter yet, consider joining, so you can read the article in full. Lots of very helpful things there behind the paywall.
Digital Self-Regulation (You Know You Should!)
Digital self-regulation is not something I’m terribly good at, so this article caught my attention. Lauren Reiff sees inside my head when she talks about the endless scrolling habit born of a desire to know more about a topic of interest.
She then stabs me in the hypocrite bone, by saying —
That we severely deplete our ability to benefit from this abundance if we do not first set strict parameters is lost on us in these crucial moments.
Twisting the knife, she asks —
What’s the point of lunging after all that FOMO-laced content if we aren’t actually able to translate it into tangible opportunity, learned information, or genuine inspiration?
The solution? “[E]xperiment with resistance, intentionality, and personal discipline.”
Nursing my conscience, I can see that I really am making good progress in my second brain, turning the things I learn into learned information and genuine inspiration. Long ways to go, but ain’t that life.
Cool Find — Quick Share
I learned of the QuickShare plugin from this week’s Obsidian Roundup. It’s a great way to share a note directly from your vault, as long as you don’t mind a 30-day expiry on the link. This is going to make it so much easier to show people what I’m talking about when answering queries in the comment section of my more technical articles!
If it’s still not in the official Community Plugins list, you’ll need to install it via Obsidian BRAT.
Adventures in Obsidian
Started using checklist icons
Finished formatting the Old Testament for Obsidian, giving each verse a header and block reference. Started on the New Testament — a much shorter book!
Auto-generated previous and next day links
I’ve finally learned how to generate previous/next days and weeks in my weekly and daily logs! Really should have read the Periodic Notes plugin ReadMe more carefully; I honestly thought it wasn’t possible without Templater.
For example: to add 5 days to a particular date, write {{date+5d:YYYY-MM-DD}. You can add or subtract weeks (w), months (m), and years (y). I don't need the extra functionality the Templater plugin provides for automatically generated dates, so this is perfect for me.
Making Obsidian more Bear-like
If you’ve come to Obsidian from Bear, you may be interested in this thread that gives instructions for how to make the switch, and how to make Obsidian look more Bear-like. While I haven’t used Bear for a number of years now, I did make the following changes after reading that Reddit thread:
Shifted the tags pane to the lower left sidebar
Shifted the backlinks and outgoing links panes below the tags pane on the left sidebar
Used the Hider plugin to hide the app ribbon, and set up the
Command + /hotkey to toggle it on/offUsed the Hider plugin to hide the app frame
Help is on the way!
This week, I’ve spent some time helping folks troubleshoot their daily and weekly note templates. These are people trying to get the code from my weekly log story to work in their Obsidian vaults, when copy-paste doesn’t bring the expected results.
Looking at the issues they were facing reminded me there’s a level of understanding needed of the how's and why's, and that this can be intimidating to a new user.
Because of this, I’ve started thinking about putting together a sample vault with accompanying explanations, that I can point people to when things don’t work as expected. I’ve discovered there’s a pleasant satisfaction in helping real people identify and fix problems, ultimately leading to them going from being frustrated, to making genuine productivity gains.
I’m not a coder or even a particularly clever person; just someone who’s spent many hyperfocused hours reading, searching, experimenting, and iterating. Some things bamboozled me for months before finding a solution, so it’s pretty cool to be able to help people who are now where I was not so long ago.