PTPL 033: My Obsidian Planning Workflow Now Includes Paper

Plus, initial thoughts on a new Markdown app, and how 3 Good Things can rewire your brain

PTPL 33 graphic by author

Welcome to the first Plain Text, Paper-Less Productivity Digest of 2023! In case you missed it, here’s a link to an article (with quotes) about my favourite 2022 Obsidian and plain text related articles.

Today I’ll be talking about —

• How recording 3 Good Things can make you healthier and happier

• Two people who think about Markdown and folders the same way I do

• An invitation to pick one thing and do it differently

• The Tangent Markdown app

• Why I’m injecting more paper into my planning workflow

Productivity Inspiration

3 Good Things

Martin Sketchley wrote about gratitude journaling near the end of last year, right on the cusp of me starting my second 5-year diary (this one). Each day I pen five to seven lines of text in a rectangle that’s one fifth of an A5 page, making sure to include good things I’ve seen, heard, or felt.

I believe there’s a (probably) provable link between an intentional gratitude habit, and an increased sense of personal wellbeing that leads to greater productivity, and better physical and even financial health.

By investing just five minutes per day you can rewire your brain for a healthier and happier you.

— The 3 Good Things website

I don’t remember where I first heard about the “3 good things” exercise, but from what I can see it’s become a quiet but powerful movement over the years. These fellows have even created a mini community (using Airtable) where you can add your 3GT online, and see those other people have posted. I wrote mine on their site and included a photo to try it out — works great.

Paper, plain text, journaling app, whatever — I’m convinced that actively searching for what’s positive in your day can have an enormous cumulative benefit.

More people are choosing to keep their plain text, plain!

It warms the cockles of my heart to hear people speak of their desire to keep their Markdown free from cruft that only works in one app. BastiaanRudolf values pure, clean Markdown. He moved from Notion to Obsidian last year, as the latter ticked these important boxes:

It needs to be future proof. I don’t want to switch apps again after 2 years.

It needs to have an offline mode (to tackle the personal frustration of Notion holding off of a proper offline mode for numerous years)

It needs to be platform agnostic.

As I spend more time on pkm.social (Mastodon), I’m seeing more people with strong opinions on this and other like topics. Like this one, from Omar Khafagy: “Give me folder hierarchies, or give me death,” he writes. Now that’s my kind of hyperbole!

Productivity Tip

Pick Something; Do It Differently

It’s the beginning of a new year, so my productivity tip for you this week is an invitation to consider doing something you’ve always done, differently.

Whether it’s changing the hand you use to hold your toothbrush or choosing to swap paper for digital (or vice versa) for one of the lists you keep, the act of different can spark new thought patterns and lead to important insights.

Adventures in Plain Text

The Tangent Markdown app

Tangent is a cross-platform Markdown notes app by Taylor Hadden. It has a nice UI, with a helpful cards view for perusing the contents of a (local) folder. It’s designed around the premise of capture first, create interconnected evergreen notes later.

Links are accessed by Command/Control clicking on them. It has backlinks, but no transclusion/file embedding yet — it’s on the roadmap.

Taylor responded quickly and cheerfully on Mastodon when I asked for an addition to the daily note tokens — what a nice fellow!

Injecting a little paper, because I can

In the spirit of doing something differently (see the Productivity Tip, above), I’ve designed and printed a monthly planning page for the first quarter of 2023. It’s been at least 3 years since the last time I’ve used paper for any real planning, so this is a real — and a welcome — disruption to the regular programming!

Here’s the monthly planning page I’ve actually printed on PAPER, as seen shortly after birth, in Affinity Publisher

I think Eva Lotta Lamm’s Sketchnoting course has prompted this, just a little bit. While I’m happy to do most sketchnotes on my iPad, there’s something very very nice about drawing with a real pen, on real paper. Which pen? Which paper? These.

Another thing I can do on paper that I can’t do (easily) on a computer/mobile device, is to write in code. Read more here, if you’re interested in how and why I do this.

It’s early days. I’m looking forward to diving in, observing what happens, and reporting back each week on the Great Paper Experiment.

But what about plain text?

This is what I love about my planning system: it’s abandon-proof! I’m still using daily notes — when I feel like it. When it’s natural to do so.

My master list of tasks is still up and running. It works very well with the Must, Should, Could items I wrote about here.

Plus Minus Next weekly reviews (digital) are something I intend to prioritise this year. They’re important to me, but I don’t always remember to record the information that makes it easier to get them done. Solution: schedule them in my digital calendar! When there’s a box to tick, I usually get it done.