PTPL 027: How I Escaped the Dark Playground of Procrastination
Also: pkm.social on Mastodon, a MASSIVE Obsidian tutorial, and navigating long-form notes in iA Writer
Today I’ll be talking about —
Where the cool geeks hang these days: pkm.social on Mastodon
How to flood the dark playground of procrastination with glorious light
A cool 2023 calendar poster for year-planning
Navigating long-form notes in iA Writer
Productivity Inspiration
The pkm.social Mastodon instance is now open
I never felt at home on Twitter. Mastodon is an entirely different animal (🐦 literally 🐘, haha) and feels comfortable and inspiring and entertaining and educating all at once — and that’s after only a week! I’m learning from people who love this stuff as much as I do, and rubbing shoulders with the peeps who make top-of-class Obsidian plugins and newsletters and tutorials.
What I love the most is that (cover your ears, Medium) the people there are writing because the geek is spilling out of them, not because they’re crafting their words for high engagement, to bring home the moolah.
You can find me here on Mastodon: https://pkm.social/@ellane
How much time do you spend in the Dark Playground?
Death_au, the illustrious mind behind 10 Obsidian plugins, has a goldmine of a website via Obsidian Publish. It’s here that I first discovered the Dark Playground: a place that procrastinators know very well, whether they realise it or not. These concepts are from Tim Urban.
Dark woods = what you should be doing
Dark playground = the things you do instead of what you should be doing
Instant Gratification Monkey = the voice that invites you to visit the dark playground
Happy playground = the fun things you do after you’ve done what you should be doing
This week, I applied these productivity concepts I discovered there to a real life situation. My 5-year-old granddaughter was playing before tidying her room. I changed the Dark Woods to the Forest Garden (she’s been helping her mum in the veggie patch recently), so as not to have a ‘good’ dark place and a ‘bad’ dark place for her young brain to process. She totally got it!
Bedroom tidied, play resumed. Awesome. Now I need to take a good look at the amount of time I, as an adult, spend in the dark playground, looking impressively productive while ignoring the things that could be transformational.
Something that’s helping exponentially is the Mindful Productivity Masterclass from Ness Labs. I’m about to start week 3 of this 4-week course, and highly recommend it. $49 for the year gives you access to the Ness Labs community, and every past Masterclass. Participating live has been great, as Anne-Laure gives each person helpful feedback along the way. Next I’ll be going through the Collector to Creator Masterclass she held earlier this year.
I recommend signing up to Anne-Laure’s free Maker Mind Newsletter if you haven’t already.
Productivity Tips
2023 Focused Calendar Poster from NeuYear.net
I love the look of this dry-erase wall calendar. It’s 25″ x 36″ and comes in portrait with landscape on the flip side. I’m using it as inspiration for the family calendar I create for our home each year. (No affiliate links.)
MASSIVE Obsidian tutorial now free on YouTube
Dabi has made his epic 2-hour Obsidian tutorial free on YouTube. I’ve only watched enough to see that he starts right from the beginning before heading to the advanced stuff, and to hear that, like me, he doesn’t have an accent.
One commenter on YouTube referenced this quote —
“I shouldn’t care about absolutes. I should only care about gradients. This is something I learned from hard times as a junior doctor: it’s never absolutely where you are at the moment that matters, but how you’re changing that gradient.”
— Which makes me think the video will be worth a watch for the PKM and productivity wisdom, as much as the how-to bits.
Adventures in Plain Text
Name change reflects my purpose
I’ve changed the name of this section from Adventures in Obsidian to Adventures in Plain Text, because it’s become clear to me that my mission isn’t to promote any one app over another. My purpose in this space is to help you manage your personal knowledge in ways that are fun, future-proof, sustainable, and lead to places you wouldn’t have found without your wonderland of linked thoughts.
Navigating long-form notes in iA Writer
Martin Sketchley and @leeleedee (on Mastodon) inspired me this week to spend more time in my notes outside of Obsidian. Martin is a fellow plain text advocate who mostly uses iA Writer, and leeleedee keeps all her day-to-day notes in one journal file.
As I play around with the one-journal-file idea (article is in the works on this), it’s becoming plain that Obsidian is better equipped than iA Writer to deal with long-form notes. Until the folding and dynamic outline features come to Mac, I’ll be using iA Writer’s auto-generated table of contents to quickly access specific sections.